Sacrificed To The Triplet Alpha Kings

Chapter 176: Nicholas Felt It

The moment the door closed behind her, Lilith collapsed onto the bed.

Not gracefully. Not with any kind of control or dignity. She fell forward onto the mattress like her legs had simply decided they were no longer capable of supporting her weight, her entire body still vibrating with the aftermath of the kiss, her skin still burning with the sensation of his touch.

She lay there for a moment, gasping for air, her heart hammering so hard against her ribs she thought it might break through. Her face was on fire, not just her cheeks, but her entire face, burning with embarrassment and confusion and something else, something she didn’t have a name for.

Her body was doing things she couldn’t control. Arching slightly, her hips pressing down into the mattress in a way that made her want to die of shame. Her lips were still sensitive, still tasting him, still feeling the imprint of his mouth on hers. She reached up and touched her own lips with trembling fingers, surprised to find them swollen from the intensity of it.

A small sound escaped her, something between a laugh and a cry, muffled by the bedding. She grabbed the nearest pillow and pressed it against her face, her body still arching, still responding to phantom sensations, still caught in the grip of something she didn’t understand and couldn’t control.

She could still feel him. The way he’d crouched before her, bringing himself to her level. The intensity in his dark eyes, burning with something primal and desperate and absolutely claiming. The way his hand had cupped her face, holding her in place while his mouth devoured hers like she was the only thing in the world that mattered.

The way he’d confessed that he could barely control himself, that his wolf wanted to claim her, mark her, bind her in ways that should have terrified her.

But it hadn’t terrified her. Not entirely.

Part of her had wanted him to not stop. Part of her had wanted him to continue, consequences be damned, restraint abandoned, everything that came next welcomed with open arms.

That realization made her press the pillow harder against her face, muffled sounds of embarrassment escaping into the down stuffing.

Eventually, she didn’t know how long later, She managed to pull herself together enough to sit up. She was still trembling, still burning, still unable to fully process what had happened. She moved to the window and looked out at the gardens below, at the grounds slowly being swallowed by evening darkness, and tried to breathe normally.

The taste of him was still on her lips. The scent of him was still on her skin. The feeling of his hands, his mouth, his desperate need, it was all still there, impossible to forget, impossible to ignore.

She wrapped her arms around herself and sat on the window seat, watching the light fade, replaying the kiss over and over, unable to stop herself from wanting to run back to that library and let him finish what he started.

She was so lost in the memory of it that she didn’t notice the moment evening shifted into true night, didn’t notice the staff moving through the corridors below, didn’t notice anything except the endless loop of his mouth on hers and the terrible, thrilling realization that she wanted him to do it again.

***

The moment Sebastian kissed her, Nicholas felt it.

Not through sight, not through sound, but through the fraternal bond that connected all three brothers on a level deeper than words. Through Sebastian, he felt the spike of desperation, the flash of contact, the sensation of his brother losing control for the first time since they brought Lilith back to the estate.

The connection sent a jolt through Nicholas’s system like electricity, a surge of Sebastian’s emotions flooding through him, raw and unfiltered. His need. His hunger. His barely-maintained restraint finally shattering against the reality of her presence.

Nicholas was on his feet before he’d fully registered the sensation, his body moving with the kind of automatic precision that came from years of leadership, from knowing what needed to be done in every moment of crisis.

He moved across his office to the locked cabinet where he kept the family’s most sensitive historical documents. His hand was steady as he pulled the key from his pocket, steady as he unlocked the cabinet, steady as he withdrew the worn file on the curse, the one he’d been building for years, adding to it piece by piece as he uncovered fragments of information scattered throughout their archives.

The file was thick, weighted with the accumulated knowledge of generations. He carried it to his desk and spread the documents across the polished surface with deliberate care:

The 1923 reference, carefully documented in their family records, describing a Blackwood Alpha who’d managed to hold the curse at bay far longer than any of his predecessors. Historical accounts of the curse’s progression through generations, each one noting how it seemed to grow teeth, to sharpen its claws, to tighten its grip with each alpha that carried it. Records of previous alphas who’d attempted to manage it through discipline, through herbal suppressants, through sheer force of will, all of them noting eventual failure, eventual loss of control. Notes in the margins about suppressants that had proven ineffective, rituals that hadn’t worked, theories that had been disproven.

And his own research. Years of it. Written in careful, precise handwriting in the margins of the official documents. Questions. Theories. Observations that had led nowhere and everywhere simultaneously.

Nicholas read through the documentation again, studying the deliberate removal of the witch’s name and coven affiliation in the 1923 reference. Someone had gone to great lengths to redact that information. Someone had decided that whoever had helped their ancestor needed to remain hidden, needed to remain protected.

He thought about the curse, the generational feral nature that had plagued his family for over a century. Each generation getting worse. Each alpha losing more ground to their wolves. Their grandfather had lost three years to it before he died, locked away, letting his wolf consume him entirely. Their father had managed it with iron discipline and herbal suppressants and sheer force of will, but even he had shown signs of deterioration as he aged.

And then the triplets.

The curse had manifested in them at seventeen, the same age it manifested in every Blackwood male. But this generation, it was different. It was aggressive. It was accelerating. By the time they turned twenty-five, they were already showing signs that their father had taken years to develop.

The full moon was becoming unbearable. The restraint was becoming impossible.

And then she’d arrived.

Nicholas sat back in his chair, staring at the documents spread before him, and allowed himself to really think about Lilith. Wolfless. No power. No status. She should have been completely invisible to their instincts, should have registered as nothing more than a wolfless servant, easily forgotten and easily moved past. a payment they were meant to enjoy and then release after the arrangement.

Instead, she was the only thing that seemed to quiet the curse.