Page 60 of Penny for Your Saints

As if reading my mind, Frank chuffs a laugh and slams down an entire metal mug of well water before hurriedly pumping himself another, and returning to his seat beside me on the bench.

“Really though, you were right—I’m fucking beat,” he admits—the ragged exhaustion creeping in at the edges of his stone rasp voice.

“A sigma and an omega in double heat are not for the faint of heart, that is certain.” I cluck my tongue, passing Frank a cigarette and a lighter as he drains the mug a final time before offering it to me as a temporary ash receptacle.

“Amen, brother. If I had thought Q was a handful during heat—Louise Penny made sure it was all hands on deck.” He shakes his head, flicking the spark wheel back on his lighter with a dry laugh.

There’s a moment of silence as we sit beside one another, smoking in the near darkness, watching Caz, Quentin, and Louise sleeping in the nest Tin-tin made, and suddenly I am reminded of ‘Unidentified Marker 42’ and the discoveries of this morning—a lifetime ago, it seems.

Their soft breathing, the smell of our intermingled scents along with the baked, animal smell of sex running throughout; the way the dim golden glow of the twinkle lights illuminates the leagues of bare skin of Louise and Q’s still joined bodies—the low glimmer of Caz’s close-cropped blond buzz cut on the pillow beside them—their chests slowly rising and falling with the gentle breath of sleep.

Fated mates.

I let the words sink in. Even though I said them to Caz in the laboratory—it seemed so academic. So far removed from the reality of us—the Saints and our Lucifer. Such star-crossedlovers seemed the purview of storybooks, celebrities, or royal bloodlines—not the likes of us.

Faced with the reality of it—the way our bodies seemed to just know, I’m struck hard and fast by the consuming sensory memory of Louise’s cunt locking Quentin inside her against my knot—how it really does start to stoke my guttering libido, my cock bobbing up to half mast.

It seems too big a truth to share right now, and for reasons I can’t quite untangle—the idea of telling Frank without telling Quentin, too, feels… wrong.

He sits beside me—expression completely impenetrable; those dark steel blues of his almost black in the low light as he eyes the three of them hungrily, like a wolf considering which animal to pick off from the pack for his dinner.

If I’m right, and I’m nearly certain that I am—then our predicament will become obvious to all in time. Even now, it seems embarrassingly obvious to me; everything has been flashing signs and screaming sirens from our very first exchange of blows in the Diamond Center.

How the rest of the pack will receive the news remains to be seen.

Iwake to a pang of aching tightness between my legs. Even though I can tell that there’s hunger for food, a palpable thirst after so much physical exertion into the wee hours of the morning—none of it seems to compare to the insatiable appetite for physical touch—to lock, to be knotted.

I manage to sit up in the nest Quentin constructed yesterday, even though my abdominal and lower back muscles have been pushed to their limit with over use in the last 24 hours. I can tell from the muffled sounds coming from the far end of the hunting lodge that Seb and Caz must already be helping Quentin get the second day of his heat started in the dubious looking wooden tub outside.

Then I smell the coffee, the cigarette smoke wafting through the parted bed sheet curtain of the nest, and poke my head out to see Frank, his body moving slowly and deliberately as he makes his way through Sen Seru, one of my personal favorite katas; his impeccable form, gilded with the golden light of the sunrise through the windows in a pair of Caz’s gray sweatpants—muscular chest and back traced with a litany of pale pink and lavender scars.

Even if I wasn’t in heat, I would find him desirable—right now? I’m ready to devour him, body and soul.

I slither from the bedclothes. At some point in the night, I must have shimmied into one of Sébastien’s t-shirts; the worn cotton barely covering my ass—so I’m not entirely nude when I emerge from the nest, just mostly.

Frank, it seems, is so deep in the meditative flow of the kata that he is executing he doesn’t even notice me as I float into the edges of his peripheral vision.

I don’t know what possessed me. Maybe it has to do with the fact that I never got a chance to “exchange blows” with Frank before we began the uneasy truce that connects us now. Maybe it’s the delirium of the heat that sets me in motion; desperate to turn this alpha’s attention back to me and my need for his knot.

The Kata, or sequence of steps and actions that flow together to create almost a dance of defensive and combative moves—has a corresponding bunkai, or ‘disassembly’ of corresponding moves used to illustrate the practical application of the techniques exemplified by the kata. Anyone who knows one will surely know the other—like a duet, two sides of the same coin.

Like a snake, I coil in on myself, tracking Frank’s progress, aware that he is about to step into a horse stance to demonstrate a double overhanded block. I grab a wooden rolling pin from the counter in lieu of one of the short wooden hand-staffs I would use at my local dojo, and launch into action—bringing the wooden staff down from overhead, just as I would if we had started the sequence together from the very beginning.

On pure instinct, he moves like water—his hands turning me and my fake weapon away with a single circular block, one hand using my entire body weight and momentum to move me easily to one side, like a boulder breaking the current in a stream.

I can tell from the way his brows lift, his lips parting slightly—that he hadn’t even seen I was awake until I was about to strike from above with the rolling pin. Though we’ve never spoken about our mutual love of martial arts, or anything else for that matter—this series of actions creates a deeper exchange than we ever could have had in words about the subject.

I’m done playing to the script of the bunkai, though. Deep inside me there is a hunger, and what I crave—only Frank can give me.

I follow the arc of my body until it appears I’m about to dive into the floor, before rebounding on Frank with a blistering back fan kick he barely has enough time to catch; his crossed wrists pinning my ankle a few inches away from his face.

“Frisky,” he growls, his eyes lazily falling from my captive kick to the exposed apex of my thighs; slick already running down the inside of my thighs as I grin ravenously back at him.

He pushes my foot away, and I have to be quick about getting my balance back, because Frank is on me, a punch coming hard and fast at my gut.

I mirror his earlier circular block, my hand turning lazily in the air like a wet, limpid washcloth—my hand closing around his wrist like an iron manacle as I pull his arm down—guiding him past me as I pinwheel in the opposite direction as if we were swing dance partners.

I’ve only just spun back around, expecting to see Frank stumbling through—completing the motion of a stumble, but he only dips unsteadily toward the floor for a second before righting himself—spinning back around with his own powerful crescent kick; this time bound directly for my face.

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