CLAIMED BY MY ALPHA STEPBROTHER AND STEPFATHER: MC EROTICA

CHAPTER 39 - PROMISES

The mark on my neck glows faintly in the bathroom mirror when I tilt my head, and in certain light it pulses in rhythm with the double heartbeat in my chest – Knox’s heartbeat, louder, more present since last night, a permanent broadcast signal that I can’t turn off and don’t want to.

Knox wants the mark visible. He said it this morning with his mouth against my throat and his hand between my legs and the casual authority of a man issuing a dress code: “No turtlenecks today.”

I cover it for my mom because there are limits to my self-destruction that even I haven’t crossed yet, but on campus the collar of my shirt sits low enough that anyone looking can see the silvered scar tissue and the faint golden shimmer underneath, and people are looking.

Whispers follow me across the quad like a weather system. Two girls in my morning lecture stare at my neck and then at each other and then at their phones, and I can feel the gossip propagating in real time.

At The Grind House, Theo sits at his table and his eyes land on the mark and stay there for so long that his iced Americano sweats a ring onto his textbook, and the expression on his face cycles through something I can’t fully read before settling on a hardness that wasn’t there a week ago.

My phone buzzes with an unknown number.

I warned you. I felt it happen. Whatever you let him do to your neck last night, I hope it was worth it. Because I’m done asking nicely.

My thumb hovers over the screen and I can feel the fury in the text like heat coming off pavement, and the double heartbeat in my chest thumps once in a way that tells me Knox’s wolf just registered a threat through the bond even though he’s across campus.

Mara.

I delete the text and serve Theo his refill and pretend my hands aren’t shaking.

***

Dominic’s class. He walks in with his briefcase and his glasses and his rolled sleeves and he scans the room the way he always does and his eyes land on my neck and he goes still.

Three seconds.

He looks at the mark for three full seconds, which doesn’t sound long until you’re the one being looked at by a man whose composure hasn’t cracked once in your presence and whose eyes are doing something complicated behind his glasses that involves the kind of math that doesn’t get taught in lecture halls.

He teaches the remaining fifty minutes without looking at me once. Not a glance, not a scan, not a single moment of the eye contact that I’ve become addicted to in a way that rivals the wolf-bond addiction, and the deliberate avoidance is so loud that it feels like being shouted at through silence.

After class, a note on my desk. Dominic’s handwriting.

My office. Now.

***

He’s behind his desk when I walk in and the door is open and he stands when he sees me and walks past me and the door closes and the lock clicks and every molecule of air in the room rearranges itself around the sound.

“Show me.”

I pull my collar aside and the mark is there – Knox’s mark, silvered, faintly glowing, sitting on the pulse point of my neck like a signature written in a language that Dominic can apparently read.

His jaw tightens and his eyes change in a way that isn’t the gold flash I’ve been catching for weeks but something deeper, a shift in the quality of his gaze that tells me his wolf just surfaced enough to evaluate what it’s looking at.

He stares at the mark for ten seconds.

His hands are behind his back, and his posture is rigid and I can see the effort of his restraint in the tendons of his neck and the white of his knuckles where his fingers are locked together behind his spine.

“Sit on my desk.”

I sit.

The wood is cool through my skirt and he rolls his chair forward until he’s positioned between my knees, and his hands come up to my thighs – both of them, his palms flat against the outside of my legs, and he presses them apart slowly with a deliberation that makes my breath catch because the gesture isn’t rough or sudden, it’s MEASURED.

The way everything Dominic does is measured, and the patience of his hands spreading my legs while he sits in his professor’s chair looking up at me through his reading glasses is doing something to my arousal that Knox’s urgency has never done.

He pushes my skirt up to my waist and his eyes drop to my inner thigh – the left one, the one that’s unmarked, the territory that Knox hasn’t claimed because Knox claims necks and shoulders and visible real estate and doesn’t think about the places that only someone looking closely would find.

Dominic thinks about those places. Dominic lives in those places.

He leans forward and presses his mouth to my inner thigh and the contact makes my whole body jolt on the desk because this is the first time his lips have been on my skin and the temperature of them is wrong the same way Knox’s temperature is wrong – running hotter than a human mouth should, and the realization that his wolf is THAT close to the surface right now makes my p***y clench so hard that I feel the wetness soak through my underwear.

He kisses the inside of my thigh in a slow, open-mouthed drag that leaves a wet trail on my skin, and his tongue follows the path of his lips, tasting the skin where his mark will eventually go, and each kiss moves higher and his breath is hot against the crease where my thigh meets my center and his hands are still pressing my legs apart with that clinical, unhurried precision.

His thumb grazes across my c**t through the soaked cotton of my underwear – once, a single pass that lands with the accuracy of someone who has been thinking about exactly where to touch me for weeks – and the contact is so unexpected after weeks of restraint that my hips buck off the desk and a sound tears out of me that I couldn’t contain if my life depended on it.

He does it again. One slow drag of his thumb across the swollen bundle of nerves through the wet fabric, pressing hard enough that I can feel the ridged pad of his thumbprint against me through the cotton, and his mouth is still on my inner thigh and his teeth graze the skin there – not a bite, a PROMISE of a bite – and the combination of his thumb on my c**t and his teeth ghosting across the spot he’s claiming hits me so hard that I c*m without warning.

It rips through me in a wave that makes my hands slam against the desk surface and my thighs clamp around his head and my back arch so sharply that my shoulder blades lift off the wood.

He didn’t even move my underwear aside, didn’t put his fingers inside me, didn’t do anything except press his thumb against me twice and put his mouth on my thigh, and I came like he’d been building me up for an hour instead of thirty seconds.

He pulls back.

His lips are wet from my thigh and his thumb is glistening and he looks at the result of what he just did with the expression of a man who has confirmed a hypothesis he’s been developing for a long time. He pulls a handkerchief from his breast pocket. Wipes his mouth. Folds the handkerchief precisely along its original creases. Returns it to his pocket.

“Thursday. 8 PM. Wear a skirt.”

I slide off the desk on legs that are actively negotiating their resignation, and the chair I was sitting on before has a dark spot on the leather that I don’t have the bandwidth to be embarrassed about because my brain is still rebooting from the fact that Dominic Voss just made me c*m on his desk with two swipes of his thumb and a kiss on my thigh and then put his handkerchief away like he’d just finished afternoon tea.

I walk to the door and my hand is on the lock when his voice stops me.

“The mark on your neck.”

I turn. He’s sitting behind his desk with his pen in hand and his glasses back on and his composure fully reinstated like the last three minutes happened in a parallel dimension.

“My son is careless with his claims.” He writes something on the paper in front of him without looking up. “When I mark you, no one will see it but me.”

When. Not if. When.

I unlock the door and walk out into the hallway on legs made of something less reliable than bone, and the note is still in my hand and the red ink says Thursday and Dominic said WHEN, and across campus the double heartbeat in my chest thumps once like Knox’s wolf just registered something it doesn’t like.