Everything in me screams.
Not out loud. Not exactly. There is sound but it's not language. It's the sick-animal cry a throat makes when something sacred goes under boot.
I say the word please so many times it loses shape.
No one pulls them back.
Jasper's hand slides down my arm and wraps around my wrist. The pressure is steady. Grounding. It saysI see youwithout violating Ragon's command. It's not enough. It's everything.
"Watch," Ragon says.
He drags his wrist along the edge of my pillow, slow and deliberate, laying down smoke and pine like a border line.
He wipes his jaw along my blanket. Marie mirrors him, rubbing her wrist, her neck, slow, careful little swipes that lay vanilla into cotton thread by thread. She doesn't go near the place where my cheek presses at night—she goes directly there. Over and over, like she's soothing a skittish animal with candy.
Ragon kneels and puts a knee on the place where I curl, right in the sweet-spot hollow of the nest, his weight sinking into the heart of it. He drags his palm slow over the spot where my shoulder lives and leaves it there a second too long.
I am noise again.
I hear it like it's coming from the hallway.
Jasper's fingers ghost tighter at my wrist. Eli's breath is ragged by my ear. His scent shifts toward apology so frantic it makes me dizzy.
"Get it done," Jasper says, clipped. "If you're going to do it, do it."
Ragon inhales like he's tasting my fear and forcing it into a column.
Marie leans down and presses her cheek into my pillow.
Her eyes stay open.
They stay on me.
I go very still.
Not because it helps.
Because something inside me decides the only way to survive this moment is to turn into furniture.
Ragon strips with brutal efficiency—belt, buttons, zipper, each sound a little cut in the air. "Eyes open."
I squeeze mine shut.
"Open," he repeats, softer, heavier.
I keep them closed anyway. It's the last line I have left.
Not looking doesn't save me from anything.
Drake's voice, tight and wrecked: "Marie. I— I can't—"
"Just my mouth, sweetheart," Marie coos, sugar-sweet, like she's comforting him. "That's all. Just take my mouth."
The sound of fabric shifting. A zipper. Drake's ragged exhale.
Then the wet, obscene sound of it—Marie's breath going sharp and needy, Drake's choked noise that might be a sob, the rhythm of her head moving.
I can hear him trying. I can hear the desperate, bitten-off sounds he makes, the way his breathing goes harsh and fast like he's trying to force his body to respond.
