The bedroom door opens and Dominic walks in carrying two cups of coffee. He's dressed for work already, his shirt buttoned to the collar, his sleeves not yet rolled. His feet are in socks that cover the bandages Amos applied last night. He takes in the scene, me with my hand up Amos' shirt pressed against his bond mark, Amos flushed to his ears, both of us looking guilty, and his eyebrow rises one precise millimeter.
"I've been gone for twelve minutes."
"He found the mark." Amos doesn't move my hand.
"Took him long enough." Dominic sets the coffees on the nightstand and sits on the edge of the bed beside me. His hand finds the back of my neck and squeezes, and the pressure sends a wave of calm through my nervous system that is frankly unfair. "How much did Amos tell you?"
"Six years. Montreal. Over your nipple." I keep my face in the pillow because looking at him while I say 'nipple' about his bonding mark feels like something that might get me killed. "He said you'd be mad that he told me the location."
"I'm not mad." Dominic's thumb traces the knob of my spine. "I'm going to make him pay for it later, which is different."
"You keep saying that word. Everything is different with you two, nothing is what it looks like, and I'm running out of categories." I press my palms against my eye sockets. "I woke up this morning and I couldn't figure out where I fit. If you'realready bonded, already complete, then I'm the extra. I've been the extra before and it broke me."
"You're not an extra." Dominic's hand moves from my neck to my jaw, turning my face toward him. "You're not a toy. You're not the recreational accessory to a relationship that was already complete."
"Then what am I?"
"You're the piece we didn't know was missing." Amos says it from my other side. "Dominic and I are bonded. We've been bonded for six years and I would die for him and he would burn the world for me and none of that changes because you're here. What changes is that now there's someone else in the equation who makes both of us better. You make Dominic gentle in ways I've never managed. You make me brave enough to say things like this out loud. And we give you something your mother never let you have."
My eyes sting. I blink against the pillow and swallow hard because crying before coffee feels like a line I'm not ready to cross two mornings in a row.
"Drink your coffee." Dominic hands me a cup and the shift from emotional devastation to caffeine delivery is so aggressively Dominic that it makes me snort. "And get dressed. You're working from my office today."
"Your office."
"My office." He stands and adjusts his cuffs. "Father is going to be in a mood after last night and I'm not leaving you on the executive floor where he can get to you. Your laptop and files are already on the table by the window."
"You moved my stuff while I was sleeping?"
He snorts and shakes his head. "Amos messaged one of the new staff to move you. I supervised remotely." He heads for the door. "You have twenty minutes."
My brain keeps circling one stupid, dangerous thought: they actually want me. Not my usefulness, not my compliance, not whatever my mother trained me to offer. Just me.
"Stop thinking and drink your coffee," Amos says from beside me, and I comply.
Dominic's office becomes my workspace by nine fifteen. The small table by the window already holds my laptop and the Southeast division files, arranged in the exact order I left them yesterday. My chair has been swapped for a larger one with a cushion, and someone has draped a throw blanket across the back that smells like Dominic's closet.
I sit down and stare at the blanket for a full thirty seconds.
"That was already there," Dominic says from behind his desk without looking up from his monitor.
"That blanket was not already there. That blanket is from your bedroom closet and it smells like you and you put it on this chair on purpose."
"The office is cold. It's a practical solution to a temperature problem."
"You're feeding the nest again."
"I'm addressing a climate control issue." His pen taps against his desk. "Open your laptop, Mattaniah."
I open my laptop. The throw blanket ends up around my shoulders within ten minutes because the office is actually cold, and the warmth of it settles around my shoulders while I work. My focus sharpens instead of scattering.
By noon my nest has migrated. Amos' scarf appears on the back of my chair at ten thirty, delivered by Amos himself with the excuse that he was overheating. Dominic's cardigan materializes on the arm of my chair at eleven, tossed there whenhe took a phone call and rolled his sleeves up. A pillow from their bedroom appears on the window seat beside my table after Amos drops off lunch, positioned so casually I almost miss it.
"You two are doing this on purpose," I say over my sandwich.
"Doing what?" Amos asks, his expression so innocent it confirms everything.
"Seeding my workspace with your clothes." I gesture at the growing collection. "You're building me a satellite nest."
