My chest squeezed. He remembered. Of course he remembered. He’d been carrying those memories for weeks while I stumbled around catching fragments I couldn’t stitch together.
“Well, you are.” I smiled and reached out to poke his cheek.
His hand caught mine. Same motion as the memory. Fingers wrapping around my wrist, warm, solid, holding me in place.We stayed there, his hand around mine, my finger still pressed against his cheekbone, and everything else fell away.
The cold from the rain disappeared. His thumb found my pulse point and pressed against it, and the contact sent heat racing up my arm. My thighs pressed together on instinct, a reaction so immediate and involuntary that I prayed he didn’t notice. Based on the way his nostrils flared, he absolutely noticed.
My breathing shortened. His body radiated warmth even through the gap between us, and I became aware of how close we were on this couch, how his knee pressed against mine, how the firelight turned the scar on his jaw into a line of gold.
His scent wrapped around me and my body responded before my brain could intervene. Skin flushed. A low, persistent ache building between my hips that had no business existing at this hour of the morning.
“Your heart is loud,” he murmured. His thumb traced a slow circle on my wrist, following the rhythm of my pulse, and every rotation sent a new wave of heat spreading down through my chest and pooling in my stomach.
“Whose fault is that?”
His mouth twitched. Solomon’s fingers tightened around my wrist, and my pulse hammered against his thumb, giving me away completely. Those pale eyes tracked the flush climbing my neck, dropped to where the cardigan gaped at my collarbone, lingered there long enough that my nipples tightened under the fabric, and came back to my face. My skin prickled everywhere his gaze touched.
I wanted to close the distance. To find out if his mouth felt the same as the dream, if the kiss we shared in a candlelit apartment during a storm I couldn’t remember tasted the way my body insisted it would. I wanted to climb into his lap and press myself against all that warmth until every inch of cold disappeared.
My free hand curled into the couch cushion to keep from reaching for him.
A crash exploded from the kitchen.
We flinched apart. A plume of flour drifted into the hallway.
“Sorry!” Percy’s voice rang out. “Everything’s fine!”
I guess Percy wasn’t lying about them being brothers, even if not by blood. Solomon exhaled through his nose and pinched the bridge of it with two fingers, jaw tight, eyes closed. The exact expression of an older brother who’d spent centuries cleaning up after the same person and had accepted, with bone-deep weariness, that the next two centuries would be no different.
“Go check on him.” I tucked my legs tighter beneath me and grinned. “He can only make pancakes at best, but he believes he’s a chef. I don’t want my latest shelter burning down.”
Solomon chuckled.
The sound hit my chest before my ears processed it. Low, warm, rumbling through his frame. A real laugh from a man who communicated in sentence fragments and meaningful silences.
I filed it away alongside the blush and the stumble and the way he’d pressed my journal pages flat between books. Every piece ofSolomon that broke through the walls went straight into the part of my brain labeled “reasons I’m in trouble.”
He stood and headed toward the kitchen, and I watched him go with a smile I couldn’t scrub off my face.
I was growing closer to him and it was nice to get to know him all over again.
I could want him. I was convincing myself a little more each day. And the terrifying part wasn’t the wanting. It was how natural it felt to want all three of them at once, how the guilt I expected to feel kept not showing up, replaced by a certainty I couldn’t explain.
Which pulled my thoughts toward the third corner of this impossible situation.
Lucian.
He’s missing all morning despite it being their day off. Percy was destroying the kitchen. Solomon was supervising the destruction. But Lucian had been absent since I came downstairs, and no one had mentioned him.
Unconsciously, I uncurled from the couch and went looking.
The hallway sat empty. His office door was closed. I knocked but there’s no answer. I checked the upstairs landing, the bathroom. Nothing.
Then I noticed the door to the study at the end of the hall standing ajar. The room was small, barely more than a reading nook tucked against the back of the cabin, with tall windowsthat overlooked the tree line. One of those windows was pushed open, letting rain-soaked air flood the space.
Lucian stood at the window with his back to me, one hand braced against the frame. A raven perched on the sill beside him, glossy feathers ruffled against the cold, its dark eyes tracking me with unsettling intelligence.
A crumpled piece of paper sat in his other hand.
