Me:Teach me how to please you better. What makes you feel safe and ruined at the same time.
I pause.
Me:I’ll do all of it. Anything. Just say the word.
My breathing is uneven now, the sheets twisted around my legs as my brain short-circuits on the image of her reading my messages in bed, maybe touching herself because of me.
She types. Stops. Types again.
Then a voice note pings. My pulse spikes. I fumble the phone, finally pressing play.
Her voice—God, her voice. “You want to be my good boy that bad, huh? You want to be the one who listens? The one who begs pretty? The one I get to wreck in every way I want?”
I swallow hard, my hips twitching. “Then next time I see you, Carter, we’re doing it my way. You’re going to take everything I give you, and you’re going to say thank you. Can you do that?”
I drop the phone onto the bed like it’s scalding hot, chest heaving, blood pounding in my ears. I don’t know if I should laugh or beg right now.
Me:Yes, ma’am.
The typing bubbles appear again.
Haven:Good boy.
I throw an arm over my face, groaning into the dark, my cock aching from just her words, the threat of what she’s planning.My sweet, savage girl. My gamer vixen from hell. And I am so, so down bad.
I send one last message before I let myself drift, phone clutched against my chest.
Me:I can’t wait to come home to you every day.
38
Haven
Afew weeks later…
I push open the door and step into the chaos I’ve been craving since the second they left.
The door shuts behind me with a soft click, sealing me inside the place that smells like mine. The scent of sleep-wrecked mornings, laundry that will never make it out of the basket, of twins I’m pretty sure I’d follow straight into the abyss.
Somewhere upstairs I can hear Carter’s voice, a counterpoint to the rougher one that follows.
I barely make it two steps before I feel him.
Tate rounds the corner first. One hand wrapped around an energy drink shake, the other curled lazily around that red neon mask like he didn’t expect anything today except a quiet stream and maybe a fistfight with his router.
But then he sees me and his shoulders stiffen. The mask slips from his fingers and his eyes go wide
“Pretty girl.”
Before I can move, Carter barrels into view behind him, his socks sliding on the hardwood. His eyes land on me and widen so fast it’s almost comical, then he sprints.
He hits me like a wave, his arms around my waist and his mouth at my temple, my cheek, my jaw, everywhere. Lifting me off the ground. “You’re here,” he whispers. “You’re really—fucking—you’re here.”
I laugh into his neck, my arms wrapping around him and burying my face in the scent of him. God, I missed them, missed this, missed him. “I said I would be.”
“I thought I was dreaming,” he mumbles. “I’ve been checking my phone like an idiot for hours. Thought maybe I’d made all of it up.”
Tate steps in behind me, his hand curling possessively around my hip. “You tell him yet?”
