I groaned. “Oh, yes, please.”

“Did it today, with Nikolai. Ten out of ten,” he gasped. “Highly recommend.”

“Shit,” I breathed.

“I told you that you didn’t know what you were missing, Dmitri.”

“Oh, fuck, you were right, you were so right.”

“So, will you give me this ass to fuck whenever I want it?”

I panted, hesitating, but then I said it. “It’s yours for the asking, alpha.”

He moaned, slammed into me hard, and came. And then started to jerk my cock in his hand until I spurted.

30

aurelie

FREEDOM.

IT WAS strange that I found it there, in that nest, in the middle of the most intense heat I’d ever experienced in my life.

It shouldn’t have seemed like freedom. I was tied down to four men, now, bitten and bonded to them, quite entirely possessed in a way that people without designations never could quite experience.

And besides all that, I was subjugated to my own body. My heat had dominion over me. I must feed my insatiable sexual desires.

But they—my mates—were subjugated to it, too. We were all tied together here, all working in concert together as a unit to soothe the ragged fervor that had overtaken us.

I was in heat for nearly a week.

Everyone ended up chafed.

Every surface in the nest ended up spattered with slick and come.

We emerged, days and days later, sore and sleepy.

But we were us.

And that was freedom.

We had some moments, here and there, through the interminable haze of the heat, periods of time when we could speak or rest before waves of desire took us all by the throat again.

Moments where we all just lay in each other’s arms (and legs—a tangle of limbs and beating hearts as if we’d all merged into one many-headed creature). Where Dmitri told us that he used to want to be a magician and travel the world doing illusions for audiences.

“But you’ve never even shown me so much as a card trick,” yawned Nikolai.

“I don’t know any card tricks,” Dmitri laughed. His face was buried in Johannes’s armpit at this point, a little muffled.

Corentin was knotted into my pussy, lying diagonally against me, his cheek on Nikolai’s stomach. “He just wanted to do it so that people would clap for him.”

Dmitri laughed helplessly. “Maybe?”

I reached over to touch his face, to toy with his curls. “You know we all think the world of you, don’t you, Dmitri?”

“I wanted to be free,” he said with a little laugh. “Everything was decided for me—who I was going to marry, what I was going to do for a profession, all these responsibilities, and none of it was even my choice, and it was the most rebellious thing I could think to do. I told my mother and she was appalled.”

“You know, I always wanted to marry you,” I said primly.