CLAIMED BY MY ALPHA STEPBROTHER AND STEPFATHER: MC EROTICA

CHAPTER 36 - TERRITORIAL MATH

KNOX’S POV

I smell the blood before she comes out of the bathroom.

One drop. Less than a drop. But I smell it, and underneath the blood I smell Mara – her fury and her desperation and her half-bond agony coating Ivy’s skin like a second layer of perfume that makes my vision go gold so fast the bartender takes a step backward.

Ivy comes out of the bathroom looking like she just fought a war. Her hands are shaking and there’s a single red line on her throat where a claw broke skin, and her eyes find mine across the bar with an expression that’s equal parts terrified and defiant, and the defiance is what tips me over because this girl just stood in a locked room with a shifted she-wolf and walked out vertical.

I cross the bar in four strides and my hand goes to the back of her neck and I steer her past the main room and down the back hallway to the storage room that the pack uses for private business, and private business is exactly what I’m about to conduct.

Every wolf in this bar smelled Mara’s aggression and Ivy’s blood, and the territorial math that’s happening in thirty supernatural brains right now needs to be corrected immediately and there is only one way I know how to correct it.

I push her into the room and kick the door shut and lift her onto a stack of crates and my mouth is on the scratch on her throat before she’s finished sitting down, and I lick the blood clean because my wolf needs to taste it, needs to confirm that the wound is superficial, needs to replace the scent of Mara’s aggression with the scent of my mouth and my ownership.

“Knox, she said–”

“I don’t care what she said.” My hands are shoving her skirt up and my voice is coming out wrong – rougher, the wolf bleeding through my vocal cords in a way I’m not bothering to control because control isn’t what this moment requires. “She touched you. She put her claws on your throat in MY territory, and every wolf in that bar is going to know by the time we walk out of this room that touching you is the last mistake anyone makes.”

I pull her underwear down and off and shove it in my back pocket because she doesn’t need it anymore, and my belt is unbuckled and my jeans are open and I push inside her in one stroke that makes the crates scrape against the concrete floor and her hands fly to my shoulders and her nails dig in hard enough that the pain registers through the shift that’s pressing against the inside of my skin.

I’m partially shifted and I don’t care. My eyes are gold and my grip on her hips is stronger than human hands should manage and my canines are elongated enough that I have to be careful when I press my mouth against her neck because the line between a kiss and a bite is thinner than usual and the wolf doesn’t understand the difference right now.

I f**k her hard enough that the crates slide across the floor with every thrust and the sound of it carries through the thin walls and into the bar where thirty wolves are sitting with their drinks pretending they can’t hear exactly what’s happening in this room, and I WANT them to hear it.

I want every set of enhanced ears in this building to register the sound of Ivy gasping my name while I drive into her deep enough that her whole body jolts, because sound is a claim in the wolf world the same way scent is a claim, and by the time I’m done there won’t be a wolf in this bar who doesn’t know that the human girl with the scratch on her throat belongs to a Voss who will dismantle anyone who touches her.

She matches me. That’s the part that wrecks me. She wraps her legs around my waist and pulls me deeper and her fingers twist in my hair and she says my name with this breathless ferocity that sounds like she’s claiming ME right back, and the wolf in my chest recognizes the energy and responds with a growl that vibrates through the crates and into the concrete floor and probably through the foundation of the building itself.

She likes this. I can smell it in the shift of her arousal – there’s something new in the scent profile, something that spikes every time the crate slides loud enough for the bar to hear, every time my growl carries through the walls, every time I thrust deep enough that the sound she makes is too loud to pretend is anything other than what it is. She likes being the one I’m claiming against a room full of wolves. She likes being the reason a she-wolf’s claws came out. She likes being chosen loudly and publicly and violently, and the discovery of this kink in real time is making my wolf howl so hard inside my chest that I can feel the vibration in my teeth.

“They can hear us,” she breathes against my neck, and I can’t tell if it’s a warning or an encouragement.

“Good.” I pull her closer and thrust so deep that her back arches against the wall and a moan comes out of her that carries clear through the door and into the hallway. “Let them.”

She cums with her head thrown back and her thighs clamped around me so tight that I couldn’t pull out if I wanted to, and the clench of her around me combined with the scent of her orgasm flooding the small room triggers my own release so hard that I slam my hand against the wall beside her head and the plaster cracks under my palm and I c*m inside her with a snarl against her throat that rattles the bottles on the shelves.

I stay inside her for a full minute after, my forehead against her shoulder, breathing in the combined scent of us that’s now soaked into her skin and her clothes and the air of the room and will carry into the bar like a declaration when we walk out. My scent on her thighs from earlier was a billboard. This is a broadcast.

I pull out and fix her skirt and zip my jeans and she slides off the crates on unsteady legs and I hold her waist until she’s stable, and I lick the scratch on her throat one more time – my saliva will help it close – and I open the door.

We walk back into the bar.

Every wolf in the room turns. Not subtly – full head turns, the coordinated movement of thirty predators registering a scent change in their environment.

Ivy is radiating a cloud of combined pheromones that could probably be detected from the parking lot, and my hand on the small of her back is the exclamation point on a message that nobody in this room is going to misread.

Mara is gone. Her scent trail leads to the back exit and out into the night, and the absence of her feels like a held breath rather than a resolution.

But someone new is sitting in the corner booth. An older man with silver hair and a posture that makes the leather seat look like a throne, holding a glass of whiskey with the stillness of someone who doesn’t need to move to command a room.

Every wolf between his booth and the door is angled toward him the way compass needles angle toward north, and his eyes are fixed on Ivy with an expression that makes my blood go cold in a way that Mara’s claws never could.

Viktor.