I jumped on Instagram, and sure enough, there she was—a personification of all those sun-drenched, eat pray love, white girl summers that the app seemed cluttered with.
“This Chloe Griffith-Jones?” I asked, showing them my screen, and Max nodded, giving it only the most cursory look.
“Yes, but—” Tobias was trying, I’d give him that.
“So this isn’t your first rodeo. Back when you met her, your pack thought she was your mate, just like you thought I was. Is this a process you go through? I’m kinda fuzzy on the whole fated mates. The way they show it on TV is that you have only one and they’re it for you.”
“That is the way it is.” Lucien’s voice was sharp, cutting through the dense atmosphere, before he came closer. I flinched back when he came within arm’s reach, so that was where he stayed. “Haven’t you ever wanted something so fucking badly that you’ve talked yourself into a situation, creating something from nothing?” His voice dropped in tone, becoming a hoarse whisper. “Interpreting the way they look at you as meaning something more than just someone taking you in, their touch as that as someone who longs for yours?”
I blinked and stared at him.
“We weren’t raised in an alpha run town, surrounded by just enough omegas to go around. We didn’t grow up knowing everything about them and the omegas knowing everything about us, with those connections being forged over years and years until it just hits you one day that this person is your mate. Chloe was an omega, and she smelled so fucking good, we construed that as a sign, not realising all omegas smell that way, but none of their scents compare to you.”
He reached for me, but I stepped back, unwilling to let him weave his magic by tracing arcane words on my skin that would have me ignoring the reality of their history and just falling onto their dicks again and again. His hand fell away then, going limp by his side.
“Chloe gave us a very thorough education of how it can be, how alphas and omegas can work together.” I swallowed, my throat bone dry at hearing the words, but I didn’t want to, even if I had demanded an explanation. “That physical pull, that magnetism…”
“You might have gotten that.” Max’s voice was so harsh, so bitter, that I found myself seeking the source, because it couldn’t possibly be him. “Chloe was all sweetness and light, just like those photos, if she liked you, but if she didn’t…”
“Max—” Beau started to say, but his brother shook his head sharply.
“I had a front row seat to watching my brothers fall for a woman they were sure was our mate, all three of them rhapsodising endlessly over her beauty, her accomplishments. It were as if she hung the sun and the moon—”
“Max, enough.” Tobias’ eyes slid to me. “There’s truth, and there’s hurting our—”
“Don’t,” I said with a sharp shake of my head.
“There’s telling Sage what happened, and then there’s bludgeoning her over the head with our baggage,” he said finally.
I bet he wasn’t expecting me to pull away from Lucien and skirt the three of them before I moved to Max. He watched me with a kind of hurt wariness that tugged at me, making my feet bring me to his side. I reached down and took his hand, not sure if I should, feeling that rush of pleasure that came every time we touched, but more.
His eyes went wide, his breath whistling in and out of his nose, and his glasses amplified them, making the shine there obvious.
“I couldn’t work out how it was all going wrong. She leaned into them every time she pulled away from me. She seemed to bloom under their touch and shrink back from mine. I started cataloguing it, keeping this sick tally in my head of all the looks she gave my brothers and not me, all the smiles and the responses and the sighs… I didn’t want to, but something, it curdled in my guts, twisting like a knife as it slowly stabbed deeper.”
“Max…”
He drew me closer, nestling me into his body, and my arms went around him because while I’d stormed in here, demanding truth, I now knew that it was going to hurt like fuck coming out.
“My wolf woke me up one morning. He knew the others were gone from the house, but that Chloe was sleeping. I walked up the stairs, but it was him that took every step. We had told each other than this was it, that Chloe was the only one for us, but he didn’t believe it and was intent on making me aware of something crucial.”
His arms tightened around me, his hands rubbing up and down my back.
“I slipped inside her room—not such a terrible thing, if I were her true mate. I crawled onto the bed, feeling my wolf inside me moving stiff-legged and wary. She turned when she felt me, her smile lazy and sweet, her eyes bleary with sleep, but when they cleared…”
My grip on Max’s torso tightened, my fingers digging into his back, as if that were enough to protect him from what was coming.
“She turned and as soon as she saw it was me, the smile dropped and the light went out of her eyes. She scrambled back in the bed, holding the quilt around her like it was a shield she needed to keep me away. Her eyes flashed, her scent turned to the stink of sour milk and ashes, then she demanded to know what the hell I was doing.”
I peered past Max’s shoulder, glaring at the other three brothers, but each one looked stricken in a way that seemed familiar to them.
“Chloe laid down the law then—she’d tolerate my presence for my brother’s sake, but that’s all it would ever be between us. If circumstances required it, like when she was in heat, she’d…mate with me.” My eyes darted up, catching sight of the muscles in his jaw tensing. “But there’d be no more than that, and to expect her to do anything else would be abusive.”
“Max.”
I wanted, needed to stop this. Any ritual bloodletting I’d wanted walking in here, it’d been more than satisfied. This felt sadistic and masochistic now.
“But as she was laying down the law, Lucien returned.”