Eventually, the world starts to seep back in. The table is uncomfortable, my thighs are sticky with slick and cum, and the edge of the bench is leaving a dent in my ass. I try to shift, but the knot isn't anywhere near done, so instead, I let Oakley do the heavy lifting.
He scoops me up, knot and all, the movement awkward but somehow sweet, and stumbles a few steps to a pile of hay before he collapses onto a comfortable cushion that he had to have placed there for when they need to rest.
He chuckles weakly, the sound rumbling through his chest.
"Oops."
I leaned back, giving him a look—half incredulous, half amused—while he grinned and kissed me softly. "No regrets, Chief." He winks.
"We're gonna be stuck like this for a hot minute," he whispers, his hand rubbing soothing circles on my back.
I laughed weakly, exhaustion creeping in—the good kind, after release.
"Good, because I think I need a nap."
He chuckles, agreeing, and kisses the top of my forehead.
“Me, too.”
CHAPTER 24
What You Deserved
~HAZEL~
“Wait—this is all mine?”
I’m standing in the doorway of a room that my brain is refusing to accept as a bedroom.
Not because it doesn’t look like a bedroom. It does. It has a bed—a queen-size, dark wood frame, the kind of substantial, crafted piece that someone selected rather than assembled from a flat-pack box. The mattress is dressed in layers of navy and cream bedding that look like they were chosen by a person who understands that sleep involves more than a pillow and a surface. There are actual pillows—four of them, stacked in the intentional arrangement of someone who has opinions about pillow configuration and considers two insufficient.
A nightstand sits on each side of the bed.Twonightstands. As if the room anticipates that the person sleeping in it might have enough belongings to occupy surfaces on both sides, which is an assumption about my life that is currently more aspirational than accurate.
A dresser along the far wall. Tall. Six drawers. The same dark wood as the bed frame, the hardware a brushed bronze that catches the afternoon light from the window—the large, curtained window that looks out onto the Montana landscape with a view that includes paddock fencing and golden October grass and the distant silhouette of the mountain range and approximately zero of the things I’m accustomed to seeing from windows, which are: brick walls, fire escapes, and the dumpster behind the building next door.
An armchair in the corner. Upholstered in a soft, slate-grey fabric. Beside it: a reading lamp with a warm-toned bulb and a small side table that is the exact right height and size and positioning for someone to set down a coffee cup and a book.
A bookshelf.
Empty. But there. Built into the wall beside the armchair with the permanent, architectural intention of a feature that was included in the room’s design rather than added as an afterthought.
The floors are hardwood. The walls are a warm, muted sage that reminds me of Dr. Winters’ clinic, the kind of color that exists to make a space feel like a space and not an institution. A woven rug sits beneath the bed—cream and charcoal, large enough to step onto when your feet hit the floor in the morning, soft enough that the step would feel intentional.
And the room is big.
Not big in the way that hotel suites are big—the cavernous, echoey, more-space-than-anyone-needs excess that makes you feel smaller by contrast. Big in the way that matters. Spacious enough to move. To breathe. To exist in a room without the walls feeling like they’re in the conversation.
This is all mine?
This room, with its four pillows and its reading chair and its bookshelf that is waiting for books and its window that shows mountains instead of dumpsters, is mine?
I’ve never?—
Alaric is in the doorway behind me.
I can feel him without turning—the burnt vanilla of his scent arriving with his proximity, the warm cardamom undertones steady and present, carrying the particular calm that his chemistry produces when he’s in a space he considers safe. The house is his environment. His energy here is different from the station or the hospital—more settled, more expansive, the scent signature of a man whose guard can be lowered because the perimeter is secured.
He tilts his head.
