Sacrificed To The Triplet Alpha Kings

She reached for the hem of her shirt to pull it off, but then she stopped, looked at him and then turned away from him.

Not because she was ashamed. That ship had sailed a long time ago.....she had been thoroughly, completely, repeatedly not-ashamed in front of all three of them during the heat and she was not going to pretend otherwise. Her body was not the issue.

This just felt different.

The heat had been the heat. The debt payment had been the debt payment and her body making decisions her brain hadn’t signed off on.

This was a pool in the dark and a man sitting on a rock behind her who had brought her somewhere nobody else had ever been.

This was a choice, So she turned away and pulled her shirt over her head.

The night air hit her skin immediately. Cold and clean and smelling of water and forest. She reached back and unclasped her bra. Set it on the rock beside her shirt. Her hands went to the waist of her jeans.

She knew he was watching.

She knew him didn’t look away.

She didn’t expect him to.

This was Nicholas Blackwood. He didn’t pretend. He didn’t perform politeness, If he was watching her it was because he wanted to watch her and he saw no reason to lie about it.

She pushed her jeans down. Stepped out of them. Her underwear came off last.

She folded everything into a small pile on the rock.

Then she turned around.

Lifted her chin., like she was saying ”Yes. And?”

Nicholas was exactly where she’d left him, he was still sitting on the flat rock, with his forearms resting on his knees, his silver eyes staring at her.

The expression on his face was the one she was starting to learn. The one that lived underneath the Alpha mask when the mask slipped slightly. Not soft exactly. But not the cold face he showed the rest of the world either.

She turned back to the water before he could say anything.

The edge of the pool was smooth rock worn flat by years of water. She curled her toes over it. Looked down at the dark surface. The moonlight sitting on top of it like paint.

She jumped into the water and the cold hit her like a wall of ice.

Every nerve ending in her body fired at once. The water closed over her head....black and brutally cold, she kicked hard and broke the surface gasping.

From the bank behind her she heard a sound.

She turned in the water and she pushed the soaking hair out of her face.

Nicholas was still sitting on the rock.

”Cold?” he asked.

”Absolutely not,” she replied.

A smiled appeared on Nicholas’s face that shows that he knew she was lying.

”Get in,” Lilith said.

Nicholas looked at the water.

”Unless you’re not brave enough,” she said.

The silver eyes came back to her face and she held them.

She was aware this was possibly the most foolish thing she had ever done in a long list of foolish things. Goading Nicholas Blackwood at the edge of a pool in the middle of his territory in the dark.

But she held his gaze anyway.

Nicholas stood up and reached for the back of his shirt and pulled it over his head and dropped it on the rock.

Then his hands went to his belt and he pulled it free.

His boots came off next, then his jeans. He moved without rushing because some quiet part of him....the part that lived just alongside Kael....was aware of exactly what he looked like in moonlight and did not mind her seeing it.

Every scar. Every line on him that three years of training through a curse had built. his silver eyes found hers in the dark water, then he got into the water.

Not the way she had done it, he Just walked to the edge and dropped in smoothly and surfaced without a sound.

The cold was nothing to him, he’d been running in winter rivers since he was fifteen. This was nothing.

She was staring at him.

”Still cold?” he asked

Lilith recovered her dignity and swam away from him.

Convincing herself that putting distance between herself and Nicholas Blackwood dripping wet in a moonlit pool was an excellent and sensible choice.

She struck out toward the middle of the pool with proper strokes....she’d learned in the Shadowmere river,

She had always loved water.

It was the one place she had never felt wrong. Wolfless and marked-down and less-than...none of that existed in water. In water you were just a body that could move or couldn’t.

She flipped onto her back and started floating.

***

She heard him in the water behind her.

Not splashing. He barely made noise. Just a quiet movement and then the sense of him nearby.

She kept floating.

”You can swim,” he said.

”I told you I could.”

”You grew up inland.”

”There’s a river in Shadowmere,” she said. ”My father used to take me.”

The word father hung in the air between them.

Nicholas went quiet.

”How old were you,” he said. ”When he started taking you.”

”Four, maybe.” She kept her eyes on the stars. ”He said I took to it like I’d done it before. Like I already knew how.”

She paused and turn to look at him, and then turn back to look at the watefall.

”He used to say that about a lot of things,” she said. ”That I already knew. Like I was remembering instead of learning.”

Nicholas didn’t say anything, and the waterfall filled the silence.

”He sounds like he was a good father,” he said finally.

”He was the best person I knew,” she said.

She turned over in the water. Treaded water. Found him a few metres away, watching her.

”Don’t,” she said.

”Don’t what.”

”Look at me like that.”

”Like what.”

She shook her head. Turned toward the waterfall and swam for it.

She felt the pressure in the air change as she got close. The mist got thicker. The sound changed from something she could hear to something she could feel in her chest, in her teeth, in the base of her skull.