The part of me that would have sneered and reminded her I would never share what was mine died alongside her on the battlefield.
Not long ago, I stood outside and watched her at Gabe’s door as he moaned her name within. Every breathy noise that left her lips had shredded me from the inside out. I told myself then that I didn’t care. That I was above it. That I didn’t want her that way.
I was a liar.
I remembered her face that night, the way she flinched when she realized I’d seen her, trembling but unable to walk away. The fury that burned in my chest then had nothing to do with anger at her—it was envy. A hollow, gnawing thing that made me want to destroy something just to stop feeling small and unworthy of her.
And now, she was looking at me like she wanted me just as badly as she wanted him that night.
I took one step into the room, and her eyes lit with something that felt like relief. Gabe turned, meeting my gaze, and for asecond there was no tension—just a flicker of understanding. We’d both bled for her and nearly lost her. We both knew what she meant to us.
And maybe sharing her wasn’t losing her. Maybe it was the only way to keep her. Perhaps it would take all of us loving her as fiercely as we did to ensure she never crossed death’s doorstep again.
The crimson stain of her blood spilling out from her neck was still burned into the back of my mind, a memory that surfaced in flashes. I hadn’t hesitated or thought twice in the moment. The second her father touched her, I was already moving. Before he could feel any sense of victory, I ensured his head was separating from his body, and my blade dripped with justice I didn’t regret for a second.
“I’m sure, Steele,” she mumbled before a breathy moan followed a thrust of Gabe’s hips. “I need you too.”
Warmth spread through my chest as my cock hardened with her admission.
Stars, I needed her. I needed her love. I needed her feisty attitude. I needed the sharp quips that made me fall in love with her to begin with.
Watching her life slip through Gabe’s hands pulled the breath from my lungs like I was the one bleeding out, and it crystallized one brutal truth I could no longer ignore—walking away from Kieran would never be an option. Not when she already carved herself so deep into my chest, there was no version of the future that didn’t have her in it.
I was fucking done pretending like there was even any other choice. I tried. Stars, Itriedto keep myself separate. I told myself that what she gave to the others, she’d never give to me. That I didn’t want to share. That if I couldn’t have all of her, I didn’t want anything at all.
But watching her here, alive and whole and moaning beneath Gabe’s hands, her body still shaking from the force of her last orgasm, it shattered the last of those lies I’d fed myself.
I didn’t want to walk away. Not when she was already so deeply buried in my chest that the thought of one of the men she cared for touching her didn’t bring jealousy anymore, but hunger. A hunger to be part of it.
Because I knew now—with devastating, perfect clarity—that loving her wasn’t about owning every piece of her. It was about being trusted withanypiece.
My shirt peeled off my body in one slow movement, the fabric clinging to my muscles briefly as I stepped closer to the bed and tossed it to the ground. The heavy thud of my boots hitting the floor was the only sound that joined the rhythm of their bodies moving and Kieran’s stuttered moans. Her eyes didn’t leave mine, wide and dark with emotion so raw it hollowed something in my chest.
And fuck me, I would take it. I would take whatever she offered and still crave more, because she had become the oxygen in my lungs and the blood in my veins. I’d rather burn alive in the fire of what she gave than spend another second on the outside, untouched.
By the time I pushed my jeans over my hips and let them fall, Gabe had shifted her, his hands guiding her until she was splayed atop him, legs spread, back arched with her perfect ass lifted in invitation. Stars help me, the way her body looked like that, glistening with a light sheen of sweat and flushed with satisfaction, undid whatever control I had left.
My hands found her hips first, palms dragging slowly across the curve of her ass. Her body arched into my touch like she’d been waiting for it, craving it, and the heat of her skin beneath my palms made it damn near impossible to remember that I was supposed to take this slow. But I wasn’t here to rush, not aftereverything we’d been through. Not when this moment was laced with so much more than lust.
I lowered my mouth to her shoulder, my lips brushing over the curve where skin met muscle. She smelled like sweat and sex and stars—all of it uniquelyher, grounding me in a way nothing else ever had. My breath stuttered against her skin as I kissed a trail along the slope of her shoulder, my hands still gripping her hips, thumbs brushing soft circles into her flushed skin as Gabe continued to thrust into her.
She made a soft, barely-there whimper as her head fall back against me, and it went straight to my fucking soul.
“I hope you know what you’ve done to me,” I murmured into her shoulder, letting the confession curl in the air between us. “Because you’ve ruined me, Kieran.”
My lips hovered near the nape of her neck as I pressed one more gentle kiss against her pulse point, then whispered, “You’re stuck with me forever now, Princess. Are you ready for that?”
Her whole body stilled, the kind of quiet stillness that happens when something real sinks all the way in. I felt it in the way her back rose with a shivering breath, in the way her fingers twitched against Gabe’s chest, in the tiny tremor that rolled underneath my hands.
She let out a breathy, exhausted laugh as she wiggled back closer against my chest, her body lax and warm against mine. “You say that like I haven’t been waiting for you to catch up.”
Gabe’s hand reached up to lightly clap against my forearm, drawing my attention to his. With a quiet nod that passed between us, of accepting this is where we were always meant to be–with her–the moment grounded me even further, the intimacy of it startling but not unwelcome.
This was what we were now. Not a fractured group of possessive, broken men. But hers…All of us.
Somehow there was enough space in her heart for every one of us. She really was everything I didn’t even know I needed.
She was it for me. There was no turning back now.
