All I can do is cup my finger underneath her chin and bring her eyes up to meet mine. Bring my lips down to taste hers.
“Aurora,” I murmur. “Let us take care of you.”
She’s shaking, but her lips part and her eyes flicker with intense need. “You want to… take care of me?”
Ryder comes up beside me, taking her face between his hands. “Look at me, Aurora.”
Aurora lets him look at her. I can see the rivulets of mascara along her cheeks as tiny battle scars. She isn’t trying to hide. Hasn’t tried to hide from the moment she walked through our door, and that, as much as anything, is what devastates me.
That she trusts us to see her at her worst.
Ryder wipes Aurora’s cheeks with his thumbs, gentle as smoke, and slowly bends to kiss her. His mouth moves over hers,and her hips tip up to meet my hand. I can hear Zane behind me, holding himself back at the edge of the world and loving every desperate fucking second.
Aurora’s breaths hitch and tremble, nearly voiceless, and when I slip my palm up under her skirt, her thighs quiver and clamp around my hand. The fabric is almost weightless; the inside of her thigh, silky and fevered, is not.
Ryder breaks the kiss and watches while I drag two fingers up the seam of her panties. She’s so wet I can barely believe the damp comes from a single woman.
I run my fingertips in tiny pulsing ovals, feather light, teasing her lips apart, daring the heat to bloom. She gasps and arches, trying to bury her sobs in my shoulder, but there’s no hiding with three of us surrounding her.
I kiss the side of her face and her jaw, her pulse yowling in the fragile skin below her ear.
“Fuck, you’re so hot like this,” Zane rumbles, voice coming apart on the rough edge of want.
He moves behind us, palm sliding over her shoulder and squeezing her nape before he nibbles Aurora’s ear, feather grazing it at first but then nipping hard enough to make her yelp.
She’s thrumming now, all synapses and tension, keening softly as I slip my fingers under the edge of her panties, fabric tight against her skin.
Aurora’s legs jerk, and her hips snap up, needy and seamless as a fever dream. I ease the panties aside and find her already there, already ready, hot as a sunstorm.
“Do you want us?” I murmur. “Is this what you need right now?”
I can feel her body trembling, can feel the desperateyesin the way her whole existence is straining toward sensation, and I want to hear her say it.
She clamps her teeth around her bottom lip. “Yes. I need you. All of you.”
She’s begging with her body before her mouth finishes the sentence.
She opens her legs wider, lets me wedge myself between them and push her knees apart.
I slide my hand up her thigh and hook two fingers deep inside her. The air comes out of her lungs in a sharp, flayed sound, more a sob than a moan, and I want to knock the world down to keep her inside this perfect moment.
Nothing but sensation, nothing but the taste of skin and the animal heat where our bodies meet.
This is what she needs. This is what we all need, after days of hollowing out the insides just to keep standing upright.
Ryder pulls her sweater down to her elbows, pinning her arms, leaving her collarbones jagged and exposed as the rails of a train track.
Zane pushes down on her shoulder, pinioning her on the rug, with me going with her. He’s already unbuttoned his jeans and drags out his cock, thick and terrifyingly hard, jerking it once, twice, prepping a weapon.
Aurora arches up toward him, sweat pearling along her brow, and hisses loud as a wildcat as I twist my fingers in and up, finding the exact patch of nerves that makes her go electric.
Zane shifts his grip, cock pressed to Aurora’s lips, and she takes him greedily, as if hungry for punishment.
Her jaw flexes, lines of strain along her throat as Zane fists a hand in her hair and guides her onto him. I’m hypnotized by the twitch of her lips, the shine of spit, the way her eyes never leave mine even as she gags and coughs around Zane’s cock.
She’s so fucking beautiful, lips stretched, skin flushed, trembling on the ragged border of both pleasure and pain.
I want to dive in and drown.
