His hand catches mine.
Fast. Not rough—controlled, the reflex of someone trained for it, fingers closing around my wrist in one motion. His eyes open halfway: the grey-green, sleep-hazed, confused for exactly two seconds before they find my face and?—
I know the moment he places me.
"This is a form of kidnapping," I say.
The smirk arrives before he's fully awake. One corner of his mouth, unhurried, the same quarter-rotation I remember from a courtyard with roses on the columns. His eyes drop briefly—taking in the oversized pajamas, the hair that has done whatever it wanted overnight, the expression of a woman who has just realized exactly where she is and is choosing offense as her opening position.
"Climbing into a shared bed," he says, voice low and rough from sleep, "is arguably assault."
"Since when?—"
"Since you crossed from your bed to mine at approximately three in the morning."
"I was asleep!"
A little too loud.
From the far side of the bed, one of Finn's eyes opens. He stares at the ceiling for a moment with the expression of a man reassembling the sequence of events that led to this morning. Then he looks over.
"When did our lucky charm get in our bed?"
"Lucky charm," I repeat. "I'm carrying the plague at this point. I'm the opposite of luck."
Finn laughs—the full, unguarded version, delighted with the morning despite everything. From my left, Rowan makes a sound that is not a laugh but contains the same information. He doesn't open his eyes.
"Do you sleepwalk?" he asks, the question delivered into the pillow with the flat inquiry of a man who has accepted the morning and is simply gathering data.
I think about it. "As a kid. Only when I was sleeping really deeply."
"That's an answer," Rowan says, and goes back to sleep.
Finn stretches—the full-body, theatrical stretch of someone reclaiming their physical presence in a space after hours ofinactivity—and announces: "I am going back to sleep. Eight hours is not enough for my body, my spirit, or my emotional wellbeing. Good morning and goodbye."
He closes his eyes.
I look at the man whose wrist is still loosely circling mine—he hasn't let go, and I haven't moved, and we are occupying approximately six inches of shared air in a hotel bed while two of his packmates sleep on either side of us with the specific indifference of people who have accepted this situation as the morning's established fact.
"Declan," he says.
And there it is—the name I didn't have at the train station, on a platform at midnight with a coin I'd just lost and a masked Alpha getting smaller through the glass. The name that goes with the cedarwood-and-whiskey scent and the grey-green eyes and the hand that caught a fist before it reached my face in the ballroom, except I didn't know that last part until now.
All three of them.
He releases my wrist. Then he elbows Finn.
Not lightly.
Finn goes off the edge of the bed with a sound that is half-curse and half-genuine grievance. A beat of silence from the floor, during which I press my lips together very hard, and then: "What the actual—Declan. I said I was sleeping. I specifically said?—"
"You were awake."
"I was barely awake!"
"Same thing."
Finn's face appears at the side of the mattress—chin resting on the edge, blue eyes projecting a sulk that is approximately seventy percent performance and thirty percent genuine. He looks at me. Then at Declan. Then back at me with the expression of a man doing math.
