Finn goes.
I stand at the window with the coin in my hand and the storm running itself out against the glass and the particular stillness of a decision that's already been made finding its final shape.
Let's see what these collectors have in store for us...but for now, I'd like for us to play our lucky shot.
CHAPTER 19
Assault And Kidnapping
~MILA~
I have never been this warm in my entire life.
Not the uncomfortable, tangled-in-too-many-blankets kind of warm. The specific, bone-deep warmth of a body that has finally been given adequate conditions to rest and has fully committed to the opportunity. Something is rising and falling slowly beneath my left ear—a chest, I register distantly—and underneath it, a heartbeat. Steady. Unhurried. So consistent that I've been unconsciously timing my own breathing to it.
The scents.
That's what's keeping me half-under even as my brain starts pulling toward awareness. The room smells like a combination that has no business being this effective—cedarwood and leather and Irish whiskey layered with the bourbon-and-orange warmth from somewhere to my left, and underneath both, that black pepper and dark chocolate base that I now recognize as Rowan's. Three distinct signatures woven together into something that should be overwhelming and instead registers as—settled. Likethe air in a room that has been occupied by people who belong in it.
My apartment is flooded.
That arrives with the particular cruelty of returning consciousness—the thing your brain was managing for you while you slept hitting you the moment you're too awake to redirect it. Flooded apartment. Dead phone. Dead car fifteen minutes from nowhere. Collectors who made their position very clear. I force my eyes open.
Darkness, mostly, from blackout curtains doing their job. Thin lines of daylight at the edges—afternoon light from the angle of it, which means I've been asleep for?—
I'm lying on someone.
That thought completes itself slowly, with the building quality of information arriving in order: the chest under my ear is real and present and belongs to a person. The arm somewhere loosely across my back is real. The bed I'm in is real. The bed is also?—
I sit up.
Very slowly.
On my left: Rowan, on his side, dark hair against the pillow, breathing in the even silence of deep sleep. The black pepper and ink of his scent warm and present from proximity.
Across the bed, on his back with one arm flung to the side in the unself-conscious sprawl of a man completely at home in whatever space he occupies: Finn. Eyes closed. Actually snoring, just slightly, the soft, rhythmic kind that means he is in absolutely no way waking up any time soon.
Which leaves the person I was sleeping on.
I look.
He's on his back in the middle of the bed, and he is?—
Okay.
Whatever the blackout curtains are allowing through is doing him an entirely unfair number of favors. The light catches the definition of a torso that has been built through the kind of sustained, deliberate effort that doesn't come from a gym membership but from years of actual physical work. Six-pack is technically the right word for what I'm looking at and also deeply insufficient. The V-lines that disappear into the waistband of his trunks are the kind of architectural detail that should require a permit. I follow the line of his collarbone upward. The jaw, even relaxed in sleep, has that sharp, clean edge I've been aware of since a balcony at midnight.
The hair falling slightly across his forehead.
No.
I lean closer.
The cedarwood and leather and Irish whiskey is concentrated here, close and undeniable, the scent I've been cataloguing and replaying for twenty-four hours landing with the finality of something confirmed rather than imagined. The dark auburn hair with the silver at the temples. The particular quality of stillness in his face—even asleep, this man looks like someone who makes deliberate decisions about everything, including how he occupies a bed.
My hand moves before my brain has finished processing.
My fingers brush the hair at his temple—barely, the lightest possible contact, the kind that shouldn't register?—
