Her Three Alphas
He leaned down and pressed his forehead against mine, the specific gesture, the one they all three did, the need to remain in contact after the primary contact, and I reached up and held his face in my hands and we stood at the meadow's edge in the late afternoon gold.
"Soren," I said, against his jaw.
"Yes," he said.
"I love you," I said. Flat and real and without decoration, the way he said things that mattered to him, the way I had learned from him without meaning to.
He exhaled, slow and full, and his arms came around me and held. "I know," he said, and in the two words was everything he was, precise and warm and deep and completely, entirely certain. And then, quietly, against my hair: