“I can feel both of you.” I can barely get the words out.
“I know.” Kieran’s voice breaks. Actually breaks. “I can feel him. I can feel the heat of him.”
“Move.” I don’t recognize my own voice. “Both of you. Please. I need?—”
They move.
Both of them deep inside me move together. Slow enough not to hurt me.
“Orion.” I lift my head, and find him at the foot of the bed. “Get over here.”
“Thought you’d never ask, Thorn.”
He climbs up. Kneels in front of me. His cock is already wet at the tip and the smell of him is pine sap and woodsmoke and the honey from this afternoon’s tree, and I’m salivating before he says a word.
“Open.”
I open.
The taste of him floods my tongue. Pine resin, the salt of his skin,mestill there from the forest, all of it layered in his mouth before mine. My hand wraps around what I can’t fit and his fist tangles in my hair, not pulling, just holding, anchoring me to him.
The ridges of his cock ripple across my tongue. The salt that drips from the tip, I drink down greedily.
The bonds at my wrists are doing something I don’t have a word for. They don’t burn but they’re talking.
I feel Kieran’s fierce possession through his. The ownership of a man who has never been allowed to keep anything.
Finnian’s aching tenderness. The one who has spent his entire life building libraries and just realized he wanted ahome.
Orion’s savage joy. Two centuries of guarding empty groves and wanting nothing more than to love.
Theyloveme.
I’ve known for weeks. I’ve felt it through the bonds. I’ve seen it in the way they look at me, touch me, hold me when the nightmares wake me at three.
But no one’s said it.
Neither have I.
The old wound flickers.
“Stop pretending it’s merely wounded, Specialist Morgan.”
Graves’ voice. Cold. Precise. Twenty-five years of it lodged behind my sternum.
“You’re exactly what I’ve been waiting twenty-five years to deploy. They don’t love you. You’re a weapon. You’re convenient. You’re the bond.”
My throat closes around Orion. Just for a second. A half-second. The thorns under my skin go wild and I taste copper at the back of my tongue and I am, for one terrible heartbeat, convinced I’m unlovable again.
Orion pulls out of my mouth.
“Where’d you go?”
I try to smile but I can’t. My eyes are wet and we both know it.
“Nowhere and everywhere,” I evade.
He hums, knowing the diversion for what it is, and he cups my jaw. His thumb finds a wet drop at the corner of my mouth and brushes it away, his pupils now vertical again. Sees right through my bullshit.
