Page 82 of Knight Life In Vegas

Myalpha.

Wait…

I clawed my way back to the surface, mind desperately grabbing for toeholds to process tonight.

Nest.

Yes, the nest was sublime.

Bite.

The bite felt so good. My teeth didn’t ache anymore.

But a bite meant something…

I ran through the snippets my brain had retained.

Bond?

I didn’t know what that felt like. I had never been bonded before. But Beau had. He would know.

I traced the mark I left on his hand, setting off head-to-toe shivers in him. I had marked him. That meant he was mine.

I struggled to piece thoughts together in the wake of the pleasure high. Was the bond bad?

It didn’tfeelbad.

Maybe it was supposed to?

Thinking was entirely too hard, so I simply closed my eyes and tried not to. Drifting on a sea of satisfaction, I floated lazily, reality and coherency returning bit by bit.

My eyes snapped open.

Shit.

Bondwasbad.

God dammit. I’d been trying so hard for distance, making sure that we could go our separate ways, and I’d ruined it all by following one feral instinct.

Panic choked me. He was going to hate me for this. I wouldn’t blame him one bit. I was already starting to hate myself for it.

“We have to tell him.” Charlotte paced back and forth, her nervous energy washing over me.

“Ican’ttell him,” I insisted. My own anxiety was probably strong enough to knock her over, and we were caught in a vicious cycle of panicking each other. The moment I’d returned to coherency, Iknew. Charlotte had poured into me, filling up all the broken cracks in my foundation, healing bits of my soulthat had been shattered for decades. I hadn’t expected the peace would go that deep, but I had certainly been prepared for the terror I knew would follow.

Fuck.

Now that I had her, I had the potential toloseher.

“I didn’t even want to tell him I was living with you, and now I have to go and tell him we bonded?”

Bryce was going to be so disappointed. God, why did this feel like the equivalent of going to my parents and telling them I’d bonded Emily at eighteen and she was pregnant on top of that?

“We can’t justnottell him. Bryce deserves to know. Everyone is going to find out the second they see us. What am I supposed to tell my kids?”

I growled, burying my face in my hands. Reality had punched us both in the face this morning when Ollie had cannonballed into the nest to wake us up. Thankfully we were buried deep and Charlotte told him he could watch cartoons so he had scampered away quickly without realizing our state of undress. I had multiple missed calls from Autumn asking where I was and why I’d missed a meeting with Alve Sato.

We were so fucked.

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