Entangled with the Alpha Brothers.

A POSSIBLE FOUR-SUM.

~SOIR~

(Want is a wolf. The more you starve it, the louder it gets.)

I smelled it before I reached the hallway.

Her faint scent now stronger than ever. The scent I have been pointedly, aggressively, successfully ignoring for weeks, and Coir’s, layered over each other. It was unmistakably warm and close…too close.

I stopped outside his office door.

Again, I shouldn’t be stopping. Lately I’ve been going against my own personnel. I had better things to do than stand in a hallway at nine-thirty at night with my jaw locked and my wolf pulling at the leash like something feral.

Then I heard her say his name.

“Coir.”

The way she said it…breathless, a little undone, soft around the vowel. My body moved like I was pushed by an invisible force. The obvious arousal of my groin pressing hard against my pants made me hate the situation more.

Amanda…why treat Coir so differently? Nobody had ever said my name like that. I have taken and left and taken again and nobody ever said my name like it was the only name in the world.

I pushed the door open.

I regretted it immediately.

They were at his desk. She was in front of him, foreheads touching, one of his hands caressing her face with a gentleness that looked almost illegal on his large frame.

His second hand was somewhere under her dress. Seeing it made me harder. I bit my lower lip in frustration.

They both looked up. Coir’s expression moved through about four things before it settled on something that was mostly: yes, and what about it.

Amanda’s expression moved through guilt, then something that hardened into resolve. She didn’t move away from him.

That was what got me. She didn’t move.

“Soir,” Coir said carefully.

I didn’t say anything. I looked at her. I let myself look at her properly for the first time, the way I’d been refusing to since I met her, and what I saw made something at the base of my ribs crack open.

She looked…God, she looked like herself. Suddenly she was a beautiful flower I was drawn towards. The burgundy of what she was wearing set off the warmth of her complexion.

She looked like she’d been laughing recently, like someone who had been finally, carefully cherished.

Coir had done that. Just as he said he would. My brother had done what I refused to do.

The jealousy hit me like something physical, low and hot, and absolutely without dignity.

“I—” I started.

Tgen Noir appeared in the doorway behind me.

I didn’t look at him. I didn’t need to. I could feel him in the doorframe, big and very still, and I knew without turning around that he was doing exactly what I was doing…wanting her…

Amanda looked between us and got confused. Yt was evident in her face.

“You should both go,” Coir said. Quiet and final.

I didn’t move.

Noir didn’t move.

“Coir,” I said, and my voice came out a register lower than I intended. “Don’t.”

“Dont what, Soir?” He let Amanda stand, stood and made her sit. He had a few inches on me and he used every one of them. “Don’t be there for her when you wouldn’t? Don’t mark her when none of you wouldn’t? Don’t kiss her? Mate with her and seal the bond? Don’t choose her when you made yt very clear she wasn’t worth choosing?”

Each word landed with surgical precision.

Amanda had gone very still. Her eyes were watery now but Coir hadn’t noticed yet. She was watching me with those dark eyes. Now there was pain…she was thinking.

“Coir,” Noir finally spoke and stood beside me, his eyes shifting to Amanda. Unlike me, he moved to her immediately he saw her tears. “Amanda.”

She stood with speed and almost fell, like Noir was a kind of untouchable disease.

Coir moved towards her but she moved even farther. The three of us stood confused. Her tears fell, chest rising and falling with tension.

“You did all these…because they wouldn’t?” Her eyes fell on Coir. “You pitied me?”

“Amanda, that’s not—”

“No!” She interrupted Coir. “I want to go home.”

When she tried to walk out, Noir grabbed her hand, pulled her back to the desk and slammed his lips against hers before she could speak a word.

He was nothing like Coir and that aggressive and desperate want ignited like an erupting volcano in Coir and I.

Coir must have forgotten, but we share a brotherhood. If one person gets intimate, the other two get drawn to it.

Amanda fought under Noir’s dominance but her hands were pinned to the table. Once she was calm, Noir tore his lips from hers, gasping.

“You have no idea what you’ve done, little bird,” he said to her. “There is no escaping this.”

Amanda looked at Coir who had gone completely silent, and I. She bit her lips, the bond getting the better of her. My heart hammered, my body craved to be buried inside her and when she let out a little moan after seeing our hardness against our pants, I tossed my head back and lost it.