Phoenix
I don’t puton clothes to cross the living room. I like the feel of the warm air against my naked skin.
The house hums with night—vanilla in the vents, marsh air pressed heavy and humid against the glass. Four men track me like a storm system they’ve been mapping for months.
Storm in the corner, unreadable in his attention.
Atticus in an armchair with a tablet he isn’t reading because his eyes are following the sway of my hips.
Maverick, sprawled on the sofa like trouble disguised as comfort while he adjusts the bulge in his pants.
Conrad on the floor, back to the wall, the air around him tight as wire while he stares at my every move.
Zeus lifts his head, thumps his tail once—permission granted—and drops his head back down to the ground with a contented grunt. He’s the only male who could not care less about my nudity.
Stifling a giggle, I make them watch me walk. Slow and measured steps. Spine tall. No apology on my lips. Heat blooms along my skin where their eyes land—collarbone, belly, the curve of my hip. Passing Conrad last is a choice; his gaze hits the hardest, heavy and proprietary, and the pressure changes in the room, like the weather.
I gave them my rules earlier. Tamsin helped me tell them hard things—the truth that while I had not been raped, I had still been assaulted—and explain that I needed them the same way as I always had, but I also needed some control.
For a while, until the sound of a chain no longer clanked in my memory, I would hold the key. I would set the pace.
They were good with that.
I clear the threshold to my bathroom and take in the amenities with a critical eye, pretending my pulse isn’t already in my throat. The shower is massive—glass, tile, chrome—definitely big enough for a party. Big enough for every terrible, beautiful thought I’ve had since they brought me here and sat on their hands because I wasn’t ready.
I’m ready now.
Leaving the bathroom door open as an invitation, I twist the dials for the different showerheads—left, right, handheld, rainfall. Water answers with a low growl through the pipes before it spills out in hard, punishing streams. Steam drifts over the threshold and strokes my shins while I adjust the lever higher, nudging the heat right to the edge of too much.
Then I step in.
The first blast of water slams into my shoulders and knocks the static out of my head. It pours down my back, turns the hush from the bedroom into a steady heartbeat I can stand in. I plant my feet shoulder-width apart on slick tile, brace my palms on the wall, and tilt my face up until the spray pelts a hot line across my mouth.
I let it run there, washing away the last ghosts of cold metal and stale air.
My hands move over my body—shoulders, collarbone, breasts, the dip of my waist, the curve of my hips—like I’m re-learning the map with my own fingers. Every place I touch sparks, nerves waking up and reporting for duty.
I slide one hand lower. Not for show. For me. For them. For everything I thought I’d lost on that ship, everything I clawed back with broken nails and stubbornness and the four men standing just out of sight.
“I don’t do it as good as you do,” I say—clear, not loud. This house carries confessions like incense. “But a girl’ll make do if she has to.”
Silence holds for a beat.
Then Maverick’s wrecked laugh cracks the air. Conrad lets out a soft, filthy curse like he just saw something sacred and wrong at the same time. Atticus—always the last to crack—growls low in his chest, rough enough that it curls hot down my spine.
“I’ll be damned if she uses her fingers to make herself come when I’m right here aching for her,” Atticus snarls, and that’s what breaks the dam.
Footsteps. A shift in the air behind me. Four shapes stack in the doorway, big and solid and mine, the hall light behind them, steam curling around wrists and throats and self-control.
No one crosses the lip.
My rules. My pace.
“Rules first,” I say, still facing the wall, water pounding over my shoulders. “Slow. I set the pace, and we go from there.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Atticus answers, voice rasped down to something feral and focused.
“Color,” Storm asks, because he refuses to touch what I don’t give.
