I could hear my own whimpers echoing in the small room, mingling with the sounds of Rowan's exertion. He flipped me over, pulling my hips high, his hands gripping my thighs as he pounded into my ass from behind. I buried my face in the pillow to muffle my screams, the sensation of him filling me so completely that I couldn't remember my own name.
"Look at me," he commanded, his voice a low growl. I turned my head, catching his gaze in the mirror above the dresser. He was watching us, his eyes dark with a hunger that felt bottomless. He reached around and wrapped his hand around my cock, stroking it with a punishing rhythm while he continued to thrust. The friction was too much, a white-hot spark that ignited my entire body.
I came with a cry that felt like it started in my toes, my ass clenching rhythmically around his cock in tight, pulsing waves. A few seconds later, Rowan followed, his body stiffening as he drove in deep and came inside me, filling me with his heat. He collapsed on top of me, his heart thundering against my spine, his breath hot against the back of my neck.
For a long time, neither of us moved. The apartment smelled like sex and the quiet presence of Julian in the next room. I felt Rowan's arm slide across my chest, his hand coming to rest over my heart. For the first time since Dominic died, the voice in my head that sounded like him was finally quiet.
I lay there, drifting, listening to Julian. He had started humming again, a low, melodic tune that drifted through the open door like a lullaby. The peacefulness of the moment lasted for exactly ten minutes.
nineteen
OLEANDER
I woke up before dawn. The apartment was cold, the kind of cold that settles in your bones, but the weight of Rowan beside me kept the worst of it at bay. He was breathing in that heavy, rhythmic way he had, the one that sounded like the town itself was exhaling through him. I didn't move. The silence in this town was always listening.
The piano note from last night was still ringing in some back corner of my mind. A single strike on an instrument no one had touched, played by a room that should have been empty. I'd watched the key press down with my own eyes. The bench had been vacant. Julian had been standing in the doorway with his hands held out like a man proving he wasn't armed. And Rowanhad pulled me closer with one arm while his other hand reached for something on the nightstand that I realized, with a cold lurch, was a knife.
None of us had slept well after that.
I shifted slightly and Rowan was awake instantly. No slow transition. His eyes snapped open, sharp and grey in the gloom, and his hand moved to my waist. His grip was firm, almost bruising, as if he needed to verify that I was still solid.
"You're thinking again," he said.
"Hard not to," I whispered. "The air feels heavy today. Like something's coming."
Rowan sat up, the blankets falling away. He looked toward the window where the fog was pressing against the glass. "It's getting personal," he said, his words clipped. "The piano. The shadows. It's testing the locks, Oleander. It wants to see if we'll break before it even has to touch us."
The guilt tightened in my chest. This was my legacy. Dominic hadn't just left me an apartment. He'd left me a haunting that was now bleeding into the only three people who made me feel like I wasn't already a ghost.
"I should go back to my place," I said. "If it's targeting me, I shouldn't be here. I'm putting you and Julian at risk."
Rowan turned back to me and the look in his eyes stopped me. He reached forward, his hands cupping my face, his thumbs pressing into my cheekbones with a possessiveness that should have terrified me. Instead, it was the only thing keeping me from floating away.
"Don't you ever say that again," he said. "You think you're the only one with ghosts? You think this town waited for you to start its games? We're in this because we chose to be. Because I chose you. You don't get to run back to that dead man just because the walls are whispering."
He was breathing hard, the heat radiating off him in waves. I reached up and covered his hands with mine.
"You're shaking," I said.
He pulled his hands away and clenched them against the mattress. He wasn't just shaken by the piano. He was looking at his own hands the way he sometimes did, like he expected them to be stained with something he couldn't wash off.
"The last time it felt like this," he said, his voice dropping so low I had to lean in. "The electricity. The way the air tastes. The last time..."
He trailed off. His jaw tightened and he looked away, toward the door, toward something I couldn't see.
I didn't push. I knew what it felt like to carry a secret that was too heavy to put down but too dangerous to hold.
"You don't have to tell me," I said. "Not yet."
"Not yet," he repeated, and the way he said it told me the story was coming. Just not today.
We sat there in the quiet for a while, Rowan's hand finding mine on the mattress, his thumb running back and forth across my knuckles in a slow, absent rhythm. The apartment was still. The piano in the living room was silent, but the silence felt provisional, like it could end at any moment.
Soft footsteps from the hallway made us both tense. Then Julian appeared in the bedroom doorway, holding two mugs of coffee. He looked like he hadn't slept at all. His eyes were drawn, the skin beneath them darker than usual, and his shoulders carried a rigidity that didn't belong on a man standing in his own home.
He looked at us in the bed, at Rowan's hand over mine, and something moved across his face that I couldn't quite read. He stood there for a long moment, the steam curling up from the mugs, and I could see him making a decision.
"It played again," Julian said. "At four. One note. The same one."
