Page 136 of Bonds of Hate

I’d forgotten how much an unresolved heat could feel like dying.

There aren’t really words to describe the emptiness, the howling abyss inside that you’re desperate to have filled.

I’d exhausted myself with my own hands, grinding against pillows and blankets, but nothing I can do on my own will ease the ache.

The lights above my head are too bright as I lay sprawled on my back, burning into my retinas every time I open eyes that refuse to stay closed.

Why won’t my eyes stay closed?

Maya.

My eyes snap open again as I realize it isn’t the first time my name has been whispered through the air.

Maya.

I roll painfully on my side with a groan to face the hulking form across the room, my vision blurry with unshed tears.

“Maya,” he says again, that single word like a caress. “Come to me, sweet girl. It’s time.”

Alpha. Alpha is calling me.

His scent draws me in. An alluring mess of contradictions. Like safety and danger. Homecoming and a desperate flight into the unknown. A wave of cramping bows my body, my hips making a squelching sound as they grind into slick-drenched blankets underneath me.

I blink through the spots in my vision and his image looms larger.

“That’s right, sweetheart. Keep going.”

I look down at the linoleum under my hands and knees, confused. Then I turn back to see my disheveled nest several feet behind me, the distance I’ve crawled without even being aware of it.

His satisfied purr vibrates across my senses. “Good girl. Come to your Alpha.”

I know I don’t have an Alpha, but that seems like an unimportant fact as my mind reels.

Arms wrap around me, gathering me closer more gently than I deserve. Hands rove over me, patternless and methodical, stoking the flames of my desperation higher rather than alleviating it.

Logan’s scent wafts gently over me as I’m enveloped in the furnace-level heat of him. This close, the scent now seems incomplete, bereft of some critical element. His wet hair hangs long to brush against my cheeks, freshly washed skin tasting faintly of salt on my tongue when I give a tentative lick at his lower lip.

He showered. Preparing himself for me by washing away the scent of his real Omega.

Silently weeping, I let my head fall forward against his shoulder. “You’re not my Alpha.”

“I could have been. I should have been.” He growls against the fragile skin of my throat, then nips hard enough to draw a gasp from me. “You smell like mine. You’ve always smelled like mine, even after everything got all fucked up. I was always meant to be your Alpha.”

Even in the haze of heat, I know I don’t want to hear this. That sense of unfairness, the deep well of hurt I’ve been refusing to acknowledge, gives me a flash of mental clarity.

I growl. “I don’t have an Alpha.”

With a snarl, he grips my jaw to force my head painfully back until our gazes meet. He glares down at me and, without preamble, shoves four fingers of his other hand straight into my pussy.

I’m still virgin tight, but the pain of his intrusion is a fleeting thing. With a groan, I buck against his hand, exultant to finally be filled.

“You can say that again when your cunt is clenched around my cock. It might be a more believable sentiment then, but I doubt it.” He punctuates each word with a thrust of his hand, too quick to provide more than superficial pleasure. “I don’t care how impossible it is. I don’t care if it’s selfish or if it hurts. We have always been endgame.”

I won’t be able to come this way, and he knows it. Need spirals higher, suffocating, until I could drown it. I’ve been pushed too far past the point of shame, of self-recrimination. He told me I would beg, and he was right.

My fingers tear at him, nails clawing at any patch of skin I can reach. “Logan, please!”

He flips us with nauseating speed and my spine slams down hard against the thick blanket. The force of it drives all the air from my lungs, but full-blown heat has almost entirely dulled my ability to feel pain.

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