Page 230 of Fated or Knot

My heat was pretty much none of those things. It was not, as some would put it, a magical time. After suppressing it for four years, it was truly brutal and all-encompassing. Omegas were built to experience their most fertile and vulnerable time for two days, twice a year. So, that was eight total heats that caught up to me, and my body was definitely keeping count.

Day one was the most painless. The heat haze settled over me and I was either constantly fucking one of my mates or sitting on one of their knots. I needed them, they knew it, and they met me kiss for kiss, passion for passion, and thrust for thrust.

Day two—and I marked the days by the needs of my nesting habits—started with me kicking my mates out of the nest and inspecting the bedding. Even with the soak mats, we’d soileda couple layers with slick and come, and I tossed those into a corner and re-built the nest for the day of breeding ahead.

I came out of the nest to invite my mates back in, to find them prepared for me. Marius wrestled me into the rain room, though I stopped struggling when I realized he wanted to cleanse my body. Fal groomed my hair and inspected my skin, which he smeared with cool cream in places. I wasn’t a fan of this. But I still rubbed against his, prepared to forgive him if he mated me again.

He’d growled with interest, but steered me from the bathroom, saying, “You have to eat first.”

I most certainly didnot. It wasn’t logical, but I didn’t want to chew anything. Marius had passed out in the pack bed outside my nest, and wouldn’t be roused even when I tried to tug on the kelpie bond. So, I had no way of telling Tormund I didn’t want what he was trying to offer, except to refuse it. He had cubes of meat and cheese, crackers, and other easy to eat items.

No food. Only fuck.

Fal ended up knotting me so I’d be stuck and forced to at least to eatsomething.

Throughout all this, Kauz had the water and offered me sips any time he could. He kept his head best out of all of us and made sure I didn’t shrivel up from ignoring all my needs except for the burning one in my core. At some point, he acquired fruit juice instead, and I think the sugar kept me going.

By the end of day two, when I was supposed to fade out of heat and back into my own wits, I’d instead exhausted Fal and Kauz. They went to sleep while Tormund alone remained in rut and kept me occupied through one exquisitely hot night between us. I howled and screamed each time he took his monstrous form. With my coaxing and enthusiasm, that was more than once, and he was too far into his rut to be hesitant about it.

Day three…I fixed up the nest again and left Tormund resting in a cocoon of clean fabric. Marius finally woke up, to find me sitting at the bottom of the rain room, under a steady fall of freezing cold water. I still hadn’t slept. The heat haze had lifted enough for me to think,as fun as this has been, it’s time for it to be over. Then the pain truly set in.

I found out firsthand that the two-day time for heats was the natural limit for omegas to mute their pain in a heat haze, and for all but the deepest of alpha ruts to play themselves out. The easy part was over, now it was time for suffering.

Marius sat down in the shower too and held me while I cried. The pain in my belly was just getting worse. I was still burning from the inside out and ithurt. Instead of being chilled off by the cold shower, I was soggy and miserable.

Not much fucking happened on day three. Truly the low point of the whole experience. My mates woke swiftly when I started having gut-twisting heat cramps. They didn’t ease or stop, either, no matter if I was knotted, snuggling up to a purring alpha, or just curled into a ball weeping in someone’s arms.

We exhausted almost all the options that could’ve soothed me, just for there to be no relief in sight. I whimpered with guilt when my mates ended up crying with me at one point or another. All four of them. We spent the day cuddling, kissing, and enduring the ravages of my body together.

Kauz had me in his lap, his undamaged wing around me, when it was his turn to hold me. It was just surreal to see tears in his eyes. They made the pinpricks of light in them gleam all the brighter. “This is not your fault,” he murmured, his calm voice layered with fatigue. He wiped my face clean with the soft, damp cloth he had pressed to my forehead. “We can all feel your pain and that there’s nothing we can do to ease it. It’s the definition of torture.”

I whined, before my breath hitched as my insides twisted again. I held my middle, listening to the chorus of cursing and snarling echoing back from my other mates where they’d settled around my nest.

If only I could get my connection to the pack bond under control. If I closed it off, they wouldn’t feel what I was feeling. But I’d floated the idea to Marius over our kelpie bond and received a hard no and an “it’s out of the question.” If I suffered, we would suffer together.

“Won’t you let me put you to sleep for a bit?” Kauz coaxed. I’d refused this offer multiple times before, since I hadn’t felt tired. I still wasn’t. But now it was a way out of misery, not just for me, but for the rest of the pack as well.

The only words I’d managed to utter since going into the heat haze were still “I need you” so I just nodded at him.

He sent me into unconsciousness and gave me dreams of the Serian winter. I laid myself down in a snowbank and melted a Lark-shaped hole in it.

Even a brutal Unseelie winter can’t cool me down? Unfair.

Day four…I woke up pink and sweltering, tucked in a light blanket atop my nest. My mates snoozed around me, probably catching some rest while they could. The bedding was still somewhat clean, considering how little sex we’d managed to have yesterday with the agony splitting my middle.

The pain was now under control, something I decided after a few minutes of wakefulness. Time to sit on a knot. I climbed atop Tormund, which woke him, and tilted my head with an inviting trill when he squinted at me.

He gasped and exclaimed, “You’re feeling better, li’l bird?” This, of course, woke up everyone else.

Fal pulled me off the gentle giant to cage me between them. He layered kisses over my neck and ears while Tormund stroked my curves.

“Maybe we should pace ourselves today?” Kauz suggested.

We didn’t pace ourselves. I took Tormund’s knot and we saturated the soak mats again. It was some time later that the males decided that I needed care. Shower, grooming, water, then…sigh. Food. Marius had the plate today.

“You know how I feel about this,”I complained.

He rolled his eyes and pushed a morsel toward my mouth.“Don’t fight. Eat.”

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