Atticus huffs a laugh; it sounds like relief.
Storm pushes off the column and crosses the room with unhurried purpose. He stops in front of me and reaches for the knot at my shoulder. One tug, and my swimsuit strap slips. He draws a small blade from wherever he hides them when the metal detectors are feeling friendly. The sound of the edge kissing fabric is quiet and obscene at once.
“Storm,” Atticus warns—no heat, just the reminder that I am not porcelain unless I say so.
Storm’s eyes stay on mine. He doesn’t move the blade until I nod. Then he cuts the second strap and the center tie, clean and careful, each snip a question I answer by not stopping him. The suit sighs apart and pools at my waist.
“On your knees,” he says, voice low.
A shiver takes a slow walk down my spine. I lift my chin because rebellion is a reflex and because I want to hear it. “For who?”
He smiles without showing his teeth, the way he does when he’s about to be merciless and kind in the same sentence. “For all of us, Angel.”
Heat slides through me, heavy and certain. My pulse is a drum in my throat. Out of the corner of my eye, Conrad moves like he’s about to lift me; Atticus’s hands flex on the chair arms; Maverick swears softly and kicks the coffee table out of the way with his heel.
I shift forward on the sofa, the torn fabric whispering against my skin, and let my knees touch the thick rug.
“Good girl,” Conrad says, voice rough enough to scrape, and my body answers before my brain can catch it.
“Kitten,” Atticus murmurs. “Tell us what you want.”
I lift my gaze to the four of them, heart in my mouth, and open it to tell them what I want.
Epilogue
PHOENIX
Zeus is the first traitor.
I’m stretched across Conrad’s bed with the morning leaking around the curtains when a warm, ridiculous tongue drags over my ankle. I squeak. Atticus lifts his head from my pussy like a man whose calculus has been interrupted.
“Absolutely not,” he tells Zeus, scandalized. “You are ruining my breakfast.”
Zeus wags, deeply unbothered, and goes in for a second swipe. I start to laugh—the breathless kind that shakes the mattress—and Atticus scrubs a hand over his face like he can’t believe he has to negotiate with fate and a mutt.
Maverick strolls in without knocking, hair damp, towel slung low on his hips and a grin sharp enough to cut ribbon. “If you’re surrendering,” he says to Atticus, “I’ll relieve you. Can’t have our girl left unfinished.”
“Out,” Atticus says primly, but he’s already sliding up to kiss me quiet, laughter dissolving under the kind of attention that makes time forget its job. Maverick’s towel hits the floor. He plants aknee on the mattress and skims his knuckles down my cheek, all soft show-off. “Tell me if you want me to stop, Firebird.”
I don’t.
They take their time, that’s the worst and best of it—Maverick with his easy, sun-warmed sweetness and Atticus with that focus that feels like being studied and worshiped at the same time. I’m held between them, breath catching, every part of me answered, my name a litany neither one of them seems willing to stop saying.
When I start to come apart, they don’t let me go. They carry me there and back again until I’m boneless and laughing against the pillowcase, fingers tangled in sheets I don’t remember pulling loose.
Atticus is all quiet devastation; he doesn’t ask for space so much as create it, and my body answers him like it always has. He holds my chin. Makes me meet his eyes. Takes, but only what I give. When I shiver, he murmursgood girllike it’s a private language between us and no one else.
I’m in the center of the world.
“Move,” Storm says from the doorway, voice low as a blade being unsheathed.
Maverick kisses my knee like a benediction and yields his spot, even with his heavy cock still standing at attention.
Atticus kisses my wrist and yields his, too—no sulking, no argument, just that shared look that meanswe know what she needs.
Storm climbs on the bed, his knee brushing mine. He doesn’t touch more than that.
“Color?” he asks, voice low enough that it feels like it’s inside my chest instead of my ears.
