“She wasn’t hurt,” Gage insisted. “Did she bleed? Did I break a bone? No. She liked it! She wanted more!”
“Until you decided she should be humiliated,” Harry cut in. “Until you decided your pleasure was the only one that mattered!”
Gage snorted. “When did you grow a spine, Harry?”
“When she started trusting us enough to fall asleep between us,” Harry said. “Maybe try not to make her regret that.”
Dax lifted a hand. “Enough!”
They all fell quiet, breathing hard.
“We are not going to stand here and pretend there isn’t darkness in what we’re doing,” he said. “We made a bargain that sits on the edge of a cliff. If we push it, she falls. If we respect it, maybe we all get what we need.”
He stepped closer to Gage until they were chest to chest.
“You crossed the line today,” he said quietly. “I won’t have it happen again. Not in my house.”
Gage held his gaze, something like guilt flickering under the anger. “And if it does?” he asked. “What then, Dax? You going to throw me out? March me down to town and tell the people I was too rough with the woman we all use?”
“If you keep treating her like this,” Dax said, voice low, “you throw yourself out because she’ll leave. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow. But she will. And where will that leave us? Back where we started. Six men in cold beds. No one laughing in the kitchen. No one making this place feel like a home.”
The word hung there. Home. Harry’s jaw worked. Drew looked away, throat bobbing. Even Silas’s lazy posture tightened.
Gage’s gaze slid past Dax to the cottage, to where he left her. Something in him shifted, only a fraction. “I’m not apologizing,” he said finally, though the words rang less sure. “I did what we agreed.”
“We agreed she’s not just payment,” Harry said quietly. “She’s… ours. And we’re hers. That means we don’t walk away like that.”
Silence fell again.
Gage scrubbed a hand over his face, dragging down his beard. “I need to think,” he said.
“Good,” Dax said. “Do it away from her for a while.”
Without another word, Gage turned and stalked into the trees, his broad back soon swallowed by the shadows.
Harry let out a breath he seemed to have been holding for minutes.
Drew had a worried look on his face that seemed to ask if Gage would be ok.
Dax looked at the dark line of the forest. “He always comes back,” he said. He turned toward the cottage. “Come on,” he said. “We have to make sure she knows this isn’t what we want for her. Not like this.”
Inside, Snow White sat near where they had left her, cleaned up and clutching a cup of water. Bennett sat at her side, pale and silent, as if rooted there by shock. When the others entered, she looked up, scanning their faces as if searching for judgment. None came.
Harry moved to her first, dropping to his knees by the bed. “I’m sorry,” he said, not for anything he’d done, but for everything she’d just gone through. “We should have been here.”
“It’s not your fault,” she said dully. “I agreed. I'm sorry if you think I'm a disgrace.”
“No! You agreed to be ours,” Harry said, coming to sit at the foot of the bed. “Not to be left abandoned like that. He took it too far.”
Her throat tightened. “We had a safe word. I could have asked him to stop. He would have listened to me. But I liked what he was doing. I wanted it. I asked him to keep going.”
Silas flopped down onto the other side of her, his arm curling automatically around her shoulder. “We’re idiots,” he sighed. “But even we know there’s a difference between rough play and crossing the line.”
Snow White let out a watery laugh at that, despite herself. She rubbed her wrists where the ropes left their mark.
Dax stood at the end of the bed, arms crossed, brow furrowed. “You’ll want to leave,” he said bluntly. “We’ll pack you food, point you toward the right road.”
Her chest squeezed. “I don’t want to leave,” she said at once. The truth of it startled her. “I’m not angry with him. I said I wanted it. But now that it’s over, and you all know what happened, I feel embarrassed—like I lost control of my mind for a moment."
