Chapter Thirty-Two Lynter

The omega looked decidedly worse for wear when she returned from the market with Bastian and Cantor. The laces of her overdress were knotted and one seemed to be broken. Her hair was tangled and had a twig caught in it. Worst of all, her wrists were rough and red, the skin grazed as if she'd been tied by rope. My eyes lingered on those marks. What the hell had happened?

Somehow, even with all signs pointing to a violent encounter, she also seemed to be glowing with a joy I had not seen on her before. Her cheeks were flushed a rosy pink and her eyes were bright… right up until she spotted me and my brother in the training yard. I watched as her eyes widened and her hands came up to attempt to smooth down her hair, which was, frankly, a lost cause. Her cheeks darkened even further and she attempted to flee, rushing to get past the yard and into the fort proper, without so much as a greeting.

The mixture of their scents hit me as she passed. My eyebrows shot up in question and Bastian smirked. Cantor ignored me, but he was radiating as much contentment as the omega had been before she'd noticed an audience. He held her hand, and walked with her, preventing her from making a clean escape. Even as she tried to turn off toward her own room, my gangly packmate ushered her in the other direction, presumably to the infirmary.

Carlile clapped his hand on my shoulder and snickered as he watched them go.

"Fighting or fucking?" he asked.

I smacked him in the back of the head before Bastian could answer. My little brother had always been a bit unruly, but he'd only gotten worse since the omega had arrived. Maybe I needed to carve out some more time for him to spend with her. As far as I knew, he'd only had contact with her while we were training yesterday, but he needed his chance to bond as well, if she was a scent match to us.

"A bit of both," Bastian said smoothly, and then smirked at me again as jealousy pinged along our bond. I had felt echoes of pleasure from Cantor while they were out, so I knew something had happened, but we all tried to keep the bond closed most of the time. It was just easier that way.

Bastian was particularly good at shielding himself, so I wasn't sure whether he had actually done anything with the omega, at least until now.

However Cantor was decidedly not good at shielding himself, and his frantic excitement had come through loud and clear.

The question was, was I jealous of Rosemary with Bastian, or of Bastian with Rosemary?

"It had better not have been you who tied her wrists," I said, the barest hint of a growl I couldn't quite smother in my voice. I didn't complete the thought in front of Carlile but Bastian winked at me, understanding my unspoken words.

When it came to restraining someone for pleasure, I had taught him better than that .

Bastian explained what had happened, adding that at least one of the bandits had died, and he thought the leader was badly wounded, although he and his man had fled while Bastian and Cantor dealt with the heat spike.

Rosemary had told them that none of the bandits had seemed to have the ability to heal, which was a fairly high level magical skill. So it was possible, with their leader wounded, and most of their number now missing or dead, that they would finally give her up.

Somehow I suspected it wouldn't be that easy.

Bastian had returned the horses they'd borrowed in town, then asked them to collect the body and track the remaining bandits. I doubted they would be so easily caught, when we had spent so long chasing them ourselves. It felt like a loose thread, one I itched to pull on myself, but it could take days to find them. Days I needed to spend with Rosemary.

We just had to be more vigilant with Rosemary until she was bonded.

"Never mind all that, tell us about the omega," Carlile demanded, after Bastian and I had spent several candles planning out increased security measures. "She had a heat spike, right? So you had to… help her out?"

He bounced his eyebrows and seemed about to make a lewd hand gesture so I smacked him over the head again.

"Ow, Lyn. God's knot, I was just asking."

"I got consent from her first," Bastian said, his voice suddenly hard. I glanced at him in surprise. Carlile was crude because he was young, but he was harmless. I'd never heard Bastian take that tone with him before.

Unfortunately, Carlile didn't seem to notice.

"Yeah, right, I'm sure she was real consenting while she begged for your…"

A deep, harsh noise erupted from Bastian's throat, like the roar of a jungle cat. Carlile froze, his eyes wide with shock.

I couldn't blame him. I had heard a lot of noises from Bastian, but I had never heard a growl like that. That was the growl of an alpha guarding his omega.

Jealousy and arousal suddenly slammed into me, so hard I barely managed to keep the emotions from the bond, let alone from my face.

"I got her consent , alpha," Bastian snapped, his amber eyes glued to Carlile. He clenched his fists, every muscle rigid, as if he were restraining himself only by great effort. "And so will you before you so much as touch a hair on her head."

Carlile swallowed nervously, and I mentally urged him to back down. He was used to Bastian being genial, charming, and gentle… He had never witnessed what the man could do if he was backed into a corner. I could almost see the thoughts turning over in the boy's head, his wounded pride at being scolded by someone he didn't believe was his better.

My brother was still a child in many ways. A spoiled princeling, like I had once been. Growing up in the palace led to a sheltered existence, which I knew better than anyone.

Thankfully, Carlile decided to swallow his pride.

"I'm sorry, Bastian," he said, carefully. "I didn't mean to insult her or to imply that she didn't… uh, want to… uh…"

Bastian took a deep breath and visibly forced himself to relax. "She is… a guest here," he said. "We must treat her respectfully."

Carlile nodded and backed away from both of us. "I will, of course I will," he said. "Uh… I really should go see about… you know…" He gestured vaguely at the main door and started to stride away.

"Carlile!" I called out and he paused.

"Yes?"

I nodded at his hand and he looked at his practice sword as if he'd forgotten he was carrying it, then hastily returned it to the stacks, before rushing away.

"That was…" I trailed off, and glanced at my alpha. Bastian met my gaze with a defiant look in his eye.

"I know he's your brother, and you want to protect him but…"

I rolled my shoulders back and shook my head. "He was entirely out of line."

"If he'd said that in front of Cantor…"

I snorted. "Really? Cantor ?"

Bastian didn't crack a smile. "Cantor would have drawn blood if he'd heard that."

I tried to picture that gentle, clumsy giant attacking someone outside of battle and couldn't. It was difficult enough getting him to train against other fighters. If not for his natural strength and size, I'd never let him fight against enemy opponents. In fact, I rarely did.

"It's been a few days since we've had a bout," I told Bastian.

He smirked again, finally letting go of the last of his tension. "I just spent the last few candles fighting bandits and tending my omega. Surely that's enough exercise for the day."

Even as he protested, he was walking towards the sword stacks.

"Oh, so you can make jokes about it?" I said it lightly, but the strange feelings burning in my gut intensified. My omega. He hadn't hesitated to say it.

He rolled his amber eyes at me. "I'm making fun of myself for being out of shape. Rosemary is perfect."

Now I really wanted to fight him.

"So you're all used up for today," I said. "Nothing left for me?"

Bastian picked up his favorite sword and swung it a few times. He was a large man, fond of his food, but there was so much strength and grace in him. I watched the powerful arc of his arm as he swung and hoped with all my heart that we would find a way through this.

His beautiful eyes, so startlingly light compared with his skin, locked on mine across the yard.

"All of me is yours," he said, quietly, then cracked a grin, his white teeth flashing. "We'll all have to learn how to share. It's surprisingly… fun."

We stepped towards each other, swords high, then touched the blades before falling into our familiar poses.

Fun , he says.

"Will she be able to train today?"

Bastian barked out a laugh, then flung himself at me. He was always telling me he wasn't a soldier, and yet he was my only real match among the pack. Davos could be close to it, if he had more time to train, and Cantor had the raw power, but Bastian had natural skill. Unfortunately, without the drive to hone it. I knew full well he'd never set foot on the training yard without my encouragement.

"Even before everything that happened today, I doubt it," he said, as he drove me back. "You ruined her yesterday. She was hobbling around the market."

" I ruined her?" I retorted, then bit my tongue, still not sure how far I could go, teasing this new version of Bastian. I slid around his strike and returned it, my dull blade glancing off the leathers he hated so much. That close, I could see the sweat beading his forehead, and his crisp, familiar scent embraced me like a lover.

Huh. For all his evasive talk, I didn't think he'd actually found any kind of release with the omega.

Maybe I could help with that.

Letting him closer than I ever would in a real fight, I grabbed his hip and tangled us together in a truly foolish move, his back to my front.

I was slightly shorter than him, but not so much that I couldn't whisper in his ear.

"Care to ruin anything else today, alpha?"

Bastian chuckled and lowered his blade. He glanced about the yard to make sure we were alone, then twisted around to press his mouth to mine in a hard kiss.

"At your service, my prince," he said, and purred.

***

Two candles later, freshly fucked and showered, I strutted down to dinner. Our playtime hadn't completely settled the annoying emotions that still burned in my gut, but it calmed them enough for me to recognize that the largest part of them was hope. If Rosemary liked us… if she was willing to be with more than one of us at a time…

I didn't feel ashamed about my encounters with Bastian… packs came together in many different ways, and there was no law against two male alphas being together. However, it was frowned on, mostly, I suspected, because the king wanted us to be miserable. It sounded petty, but it was part of his strategy to keep the populace compliant. No omegas without his permission. No loving relationships between pack members. In fact, Bastian suspected his next step would be to start discouraging packs altogether. There was too much power in a unit like that. Too much pooling of resources.

I tried to stay aloof from most people in the fort as a general rule. Davos liked to play the part of a genial commander, everyone's friend, and I had to balance that as his second-in-command. I suspected most people wouldn't care if my relationship with Bastian became widely known, but Davos would. I didn't want him to know, because then he might forbid it.

I believed in rules. Once I had followed them blindly, but I'd learned the hard way that lawmakers were not infallible. So now I believed in following good rules.

After all, if we followed the law blindly, our sweet, stubborn little omega would already be on her way to the capital, to be locked up in The Nest forever, or dangled as a prize for a pack to earn. Preferably a pack which didn't much like her scent, since that was how my father operated. He gave with one hand and took with the other. He knew the omegas couldn't be kept entirely to himself, because then the packs would revolt, but he had no intention of allowing scent matches to thrive in his country. He'd rather train a thousand betas as cannon fodder than allow one scent-matched pack inside his borders.

He operated entirely from fear, and Raksim suffered for it.

Bastian had always been a light, shining in the murk that constantly seemed to surround me. The rules could go hang, if it meant I got to keep him. And if Rosemary would have us both, maybe there was a chance. She had seemed open to the idea of same sex couples when we talked about it. If she was fine with it and she bonded us, perhaps Davos would come around…

However, we still needed to convince her to bond. There was no way I would allow any of my packmates to bond her against her will. Bastian and Cantor were doing their part, but Davos and Sinclair might still ruin it all. Davos had been noticeably irritable since recognizing his scent match. And the way Sinclair looked at her during meals concerned me. He seemed almost angry with her.

The last time someone had made him angry, that person had disappeared.

So I would watch him. I wanted to keep our Rosemary around for a very long time.

A picture of her, soft and small and curvy, and wedged between me and Bastian while we repeated our liason from earlier came unbidden to my mind. Luckily, the dining table hid the bulge that grew in my pants at the thought.

He had been drenched in her gorgeous sugary floral scent and it had made me half-feral as I'd torn off his clothes and ordered him to the bed.

Bastian liked to talk. He was never so happy as when he was directing me, while I took my pleasure. However, he also liked it when I took control away from him. Not so much talking then, but his groans were just as sweet as his words.

I willed myself to think of something else. With so many alphas at the table, along with our omega, my scent probably wouldn't raise any eyebrows, but I didn't want to risk it. I realized I was staring at Bastian and turned away, only to find my eyes snapping to Rosemary, who was watching me.

Her dress was now laced properly and her wrists were shiny with some kind of healing cream. Her hair had been brushed and arranged in an intricate braid, with several small curls falling loose to brush the smooth skin of her neck. It took me too long to raise my eyes to meet hers.

Her lips twitched in a smile as she deliberately glanced between me and Bastian… and then she winked at me.

To my horror, I felt my cheeks flush. Had she heard us? Scented us? Or maybe she just noticed me staring at him like a slack-jawed puppy.

My initial panic died down as I realized she was signaling… approval?

Something inside me crowed as her smile widened and her eyes crinkled at my blush. My omega approved of us. Even after being with him today herself, she seemed happy for me to be with him too.

I had to fight down my purr.

For some reason, our dinner that night was the best I'd ever tasted, and yet I found it almost impossible to choke down.