CLAIMED BY MY ALPHA STEPBROTHER AND STEPFATHER: MC EROTICA

CHAPTER 34 - MARA

I’m still thinking about the red ink when Knox puts a helmet in my hands and tells me we’re going somewhere, and the contrast between the two Voss men is giving me emotional whiplash because three hours ago Dominic reached into my writing and touched something I didn’t know was exposed and now his son is straddling a motorcycle in the parking lot of The Grind House looking at me like I’m something he plans to devour before the night is over.

He takes me to a bar I’ve never seen before, on the outskirts of the city where the streetlights thin out and the buildings get rougher and the clientele look like they’d use a bottle as a weapon before they’d drink from it.

The sign above the door says “The Iron” in letters that are missing their neon, and the parking lot is full of motorcycles, and the moment we walk inside something in the atmosphere changes in a way I can feel against my skin but can’t name.

The people inside aren’t just people.

I know this the way I know Knox isn’t just a person – something about the way they move, the way they track each other across the room, the way their heads turn in unison when Knox walks through the door. Deference. The crowd parts for him like water around a stone, and the ones who make eye contact dip their heads slightly in a gesture that reads as automatic, instinctual, the kind of acknowledgment that isn’t learned but programmed.

Then their eyes find me, and the deference becomes confusion. I can feel it – the collective assessment of thirty sets of inhuman eyes landing on the human girl standing behind Knox Voss, the girl who shouldn’t be here, the girl who doesn’t belong in a room that smells like leather and whiskey and something wild underneath that I’m starting to recognize as wolf.

Knox doesn’t give them time to stare. He grabs my wrist and pulls me through the crowd toward the back hallway, past the bathrooms, and into the women’s restroom, which is a single room with a cracked mirror above a stained sink and a lock on the door that he clicks shut behind us.

He spins me around and pushes me against the sink and the porcelain edge digs into my lower back and his hands are already under my skirt, and through the mirror behind me I can see the back of his head and the width of his shoulders and my own face over his shoulder.

“Every wolf in this bar is going to smell me on you,” he says, and his voice has dropped into that subsonic register that I feel in my pelvic floor, and his fingers push my underwear to the side and find me wet because I’ve been wet since the motorcycle vibration and his hand on my thigh during the ride and the anticipation of whatever he was bringing me here for. “Good.”

He drops to his knees on the dirty bathroom tile – Knox Voss does not care about dirty floors, Knox Voss would kneel in a landfill if it meant putting his mouth on me – and his tongue is on my c**t before I’ve finished processing the change in altitude.

He works me fast and focused, none of the teasing patience of his usual sessions, because this isn’t about pleasure right now, this is about PREPARATION, and the urgency of his mouth makes me grip the edge of the sink behind me and watch in the mirror as my own face contorts while his head moves between my thighs.

Without warning, he pushes two fingers inside me and curls them forward into that spot while his tongue flicks against my c**t in rapid strokes, and I c*m in under two minutes because the setting and the urgency and the wolves on the other side of the door are doing something to my arousal that I don’t fully understand but that my body understands perfectly.

He works me through it until I’m shaking, and then he stands and unbuckles his belt and strokes himself while I’m still panting against the sink, and he cums on my inner thigh – not inside me, ON me. Deliberately coating the skin high up where it’s hidden by my skirt but where, based on the way he’s looking at the result, any wolf who gets close enough would detect it like a neon sign.

“That’s where they check,” he says, and the casualness with which he says it – like he’s explaining a parking regulation and not the scent-marking protocols of a supernatural species – is so absurd that I almost laugh except that he’s tucking himself back in and wiping his hand on his jeans and unlocking the bathroom door and pulling me back into the bar before I’ve finished processing ANY of what just happened.

Every wolf head in the room turns when we walk out.

I can feel their attention shift from confusion to recognition, and the recognition isn’t about my face – it’s about the scent I’m carrying on the inside of my thigh.

Knox’s scent is stamped onto territory that every wolf in this room can apparently read like a billboard, and the deference that was already present in their body language intensifies into something more deliberate, more cautious, like the human girl just got reclassified from “out of place” to “claimed.”

Knox leads me to a booth in the back and his arm goes around my shoulders and his thigh presses against mine and then a woman separates herself from the crowd and walks toward us with a stride that makes every other person in the bar look stationary by comparison.

She’s beautiful in the way that dangerous things are beautiful. Dark hair, sharp features, a body that moves with the kind of fluid precision that I’ve only seen in Knox when his wolf is close to the surface.

She walks directly to our booth and puts her hand flat on Knox’s chest and says something in a language I don’t recognize, and Knox removes her hand from his chest with the kind of measured force that tells me this isn’t the first time he’s had to remove this particular hand from this particular spot.

“Mara.” His voice is flat.

She looks at me for the first time, and the assessment in her gaze is so thorough that I feel like I’ve been disassembled and catalogued in under a second. Her nostrils flare – she’s smelling me, smelling HIM on me, smelling the claim he just painted on my thigh in a bathroom that smells like bleach and bad decisions.

“She smells like you,” Mara says, and her voice is beautiful the way the rest of her is beautiful, which is to say dangerously.

“She should,” Knox says.

Mara’s eyes stay on me for a beat too long, and something in them shifts from assessment to calculation, and then she turns and walks back into the crowd without another word.

Knox’s arm tightens around my shoulders and his heartbeat – the one I carry in my chest – thumps harder, which tells me that whatever Mara represents, it’s enough to make his wolf pay attention.

I excuse myself to the bathroom ten minutes later because the bar is overwhelming and I need sixty seconds of air that doesn’t smell like wolves, and I push open the restroom door and Mara is standing inside like she was waiting.

She locks the door behind me.

Her eyes are gold. Full gold, the same burning shade that Knox’s get when his wolf is at the surface, and she’s close enough that I can feel the heat coming off her body the way I feel it coming off Knox, and her mouth curves into something that isn’t a smile.

“I could kill you before anyone in that bar heard you scream.”