"Stay."
"I'm not a dog." But she stops pulling.
"No." I drag my mouth down her throat, slow enough to make her arch into me. "You're mine. Different thing entirely."
I spend the first hour learning her. Not fucking her—mapping her. The way her breath fractures when I drag my thumb across the inside of her wrist where the belt has left its red line. The specific sound she makes when my mouth finds the soft skin below her ribs versus higher up. The way her hips chasemy hand like she can't help it, chasing friction I keep deliberately withholding, her body making promises her voice hasn't caught up to yet.
Three times, I bring her to the edge. Three times I pull back.
The first time, she takes it with a sharp exhale and a glare that could strip paint.
The second time, she swears at me in two languages.
The third time?—
A sound outside stops everything.
My hand goes to the nightstand before the sound finishes registering. The Glock is in my palm before Wren processes that I've moved. She freezes beneath me, the frantic need draining out of her body in a single second, replaced by something cold and absolute.
I hold up two fingers. Stay.
She doesn't breathe.
I move to the window, pressing flat against the wall, and angle a look through the gap in the curtain. The clearing. The tree line. Nothing—no movement, no shapes. Just the black architecture of pine against a moonlit sky. I scan for thirty seconds. A minute. The motion sensor on the exterior hasn't triggered. I check the feed on my phone. Nothing moves.
A branch drop. Wind-stripped. The kind of sound the forest makes all night when no one's listening.
I do a complete circuit anyway: front window, back window, both doors.
Clear.
When I come back to the bedroom, Wren is sitting upright against the headboard, wrists still bound, the sheet pulled to her chest. Her eyes track me the way a soldier tracks a threat. Not panic—assessment.
"What was it?"
"Branch drop." I set the Glock back on the nightstand. "Wind. Nothing."
A beat of silence. Her exhale is slow and controlled, the fear processed and filed.
"How do you do that?" Her voice is steady. "Go from—" she gestures between us "—to that, and back."
"Same way you do." I reach up and release the belt from the headboard, leaving it looped around her wrists. "Threat assessment is a switch. You learn to flip it."
"That's not comforting."
"No." I press her back against the pillows, my weight settling over her, and run my mouth along her jaw. "But we're clear. And now I know you don't freeze."
"And that matters to you."
"More than you know."
The mood has shifted. What was heat is now something rawer—the specific electricity of two people who are fully aware they're alive and might not stay that way. She wraps her legs around me before I ask, pulling me in. The sound she makes when I enter her tears through the cabin like something that can't be taken back.
I work her slowly. Deliberately. Every stroke measured, every sound from her catalogued and used. She's still trying to think, still trying to hold herself together, and I dismantle it piece by piece until she's begging in a voice scraped raw, her whole body shaking, pulling against the belt, fighting the edge I keep dragging her toward and pulling her back from.
"Please." The word tears out of her. "Please, Kade, please?—"
I release the belt.
