Chapter 25
Twenty-Five
Wren
I open the door.
It takes everything I’ve got. My legs barely work.
My hand won’t hold steady on the latch. And the second it swings in and their scent hits me full and unfiltered, three of them at once, no glass, no wall between us, my knees just quit.
Cal catches me before I hit the floor, one arm hard around my back, and the relief of being touched by one of them after five hours of nothing is so enormous I make a sound I’ll be embarrassed about for the rest of my life.
It’s not a dignified sound. It’s the sound a woman makes when she’s spent an entire day proving she doesn’t need something, gets it anyway, and finds out in the most humiliating way possible that she was wrong about herself the whole time.
I don’t care. My dignity left the building around hour three.
What’s left is just relief too big to hold, and it comes out of me as a sob against Cal’s chest while three sets of hands settle carefully on my burning skin.
“Whoa. Okay. I’ve got you.” Cal’s voice is a wreck, hanging onto his control by the fingernails, and I can feel it, the fine tremor running through him, all three of them strung right to the edge of their own restraint. “We’ve got you, sugar.”
“We’re not doing one thing you don’t ask for.
” That’s Eli, low and level, planted in my doorway like a man prepared to be a wall against the whole damn world if that’s what I need.
He doesn’t reach for me. None of them do, except Cal, and he’s only keeping me off the floor.
“Hear me first. Before anything else happens.”
I hang there in Cal’s arm, shaking, feverish, wanting so hard it aches in my teeth, and I make myself listen, because Eli’s using the voice you don’t talk over.
“We came to offer, not to take.” His eyes hold mine, dark and certain and so careful it hurts.
“There’s a bag here. Water, food, everything you’d need to see this through on your own, if that’s what you want.
We set it inside the door, we go, and you never hear a word about it after.
That’s one answer. The other is we stay.
All three of us, whatever you need, however long it takes.
Both of those are good answers, birdie. Neither one costs you a single thing.
” He pulls a breath. “But you have to say it out loud. This door only opens from your side.”
And that’s the thing that undoes me.
Not the wanting. God knows there’s enough of that to drown a person.
It’s the restraint. Three alphas at the ragged edge of a rut, close enough to touch, every one of them holding dead still and waiting on a word from a woman who can’t stand up on her own, because my yes matters more to them than their own bodies screaming for it.
Nobody has ever handed me a choice shaped like this.
Free and clean, no hook buried in it, no debt, no small print at the bottom.
Just, what do you want, Wren, and we’ll live with whatever you say.
I’ve been offered a lot of things by a lot of people, and every one came with a price tag I couldn’t read until the bill showed up.
This is the first offer in my life with nothing at all written on the back of it.
Three men who want me so bad they’re shaking with it.
And they’d still turn on their heels and walk back across the street this second if I asked, and never once let me feel it cost them.
That is not a thing a woman says no to. It might be the only thing I have ever been certain I wanted.
Their pack-scent fills my little kitchen, cedar and coffee and smoke all braided into one. And a thing that’s been rattling loose in me my whole life goes quiet, settles into place. A thing that, for one second, finally feels like it fits.
I’ve spent my whole life so careful. Wanting small. Keeping the door shut so nobody could ever leave it. It’s gotten me a nice quiet life, a locked-up heart, and one afternoon of pure hell alone in a nest I built out of the exact three men now standing on my step asking permission to stay.
I’m done being careful. I decided it somewhere in the fifth hour. My mouth’s just now catching up to the rest of me.
“Stay,” I say.
My voice cracks clean down the middle, but the word comes out whole. “Please. All of you. I don’t want the bag. I want you to stay. God, I want you to stay so bad I can’t see straight.”
For one heartbeat, not one of them moves, like they have to be sure they heard it.
“You’re certain.” Eli says it low. Not a question hunting for a no. A man making absolutely, unshakably sure.
“I have never been more certain of one damn thing in my life.” I get a fistful of Cal’s shirt in my shaking hand. “So stop being noble at me and get in here, all three of you, right now.”
Something lets go in all three of them at once.
Eli steps over the threshold and shuts the door behind them.
I hear the lock turn, and the small sound of it goes through me like a vow.
Cal gathers me up properly then, both arms, lifting me clean off my useless feet.
I bury my face in his throat and just breathe him in, and for the first time in five hours the fever eases back a fraction.
And Rhett, quiet this whole time, the man who narrates the entire world, comes close, takes my face in both hands, rests his forehead to mine, and says, wrecked, barely more than a breath, “Hi, trouble.”
“You came.” I can hardly get it out. “You actually came.”
“Was always coming.” His thumbs move slowly over my cheekbones. “Just took us a minute to quit being idiots about it. I’m sorry it cost you an afternoon.”
“Carry me upstairs, and I’ll think about forgiving you.”
Cal laughs, ragged and thrilled, and does exactly that.
He carries me like I weigh nothing, one arm under my knees, one at my back, and I loop my arms around his neck and let him.
Which is its own small miracle. A week ago I’d have insisted on walking.
Even wrecked, even feverish, I’d have gritted my teeth and made my own useless legs do the job rather than be a burden to a single soul.
I don’t do that now. I let a man carry me up my own stairs because he wants to, and because I’m learning, one month and one afternoon too late, that letting someone hold you up is not the same thing as falling.
They take me up to the nest, all three, and the sight of it stops them cold in the bedroom doorway.
My shrine. A whole week of scented tea towels, pilfered flannel, Eli’s work gloves, every soft thing I own hauled into a pile and built into a den out of nothing but the smell of them, laid out bare in the lamplight where all three can see exactly what my body’s been up to while my mouth kept saying no.
I brace for the teasing. For Rhett especially to make it a joke and let me off the hook.
He doesn’t. Not one of them does. Cal’s breath goes unsteady. Eli goes very still, and when he looks at me, there’s a raw, undone thing in his careful face I’ve never seen there. And Rhett, soft, like he’s scared of breaking it, says, “You built us a nest.”
“Shut up.”
“You built us a whole nest, trouble.” There’s not a scrap of teasing in it. The exact opposite. “Your body picked us weeks ago. You just hadn’t told your head.”
“I said shut up.”
I know what they’re seeing. A week’s worth of me choosing them with my hands while my mouth lied through its teeth, gathered into a pile and slept in like a secret.
For three men who spent six years with a cold empty space in the middle of their pack, my ridiculous shrine is the loudest yes I could possibly have given, and I gave it without meaning to, and now they’re standing in my bedroom doorway staring at it like it’s the finest thing anybody’s ever made them.
But I’m crying now, a little. From the heat, the relief, the unbearable fact of being seen this all the way down and not laughed at once.
Cal lays me back into the middle of my own honest, ridiculous nest, and the three of them fold down around me, careful, close, so much warm alpha in every direction that my whole screaming body finally, finally goes quiet.
“Tell us what you need,” Eli murmurs into my temple. “We’ll give you every bit of it.”
Three sets of hands settle on me then, careful as anything, mapping slow, and everywhere they touch the fever banks down and a better heat flares up to take its place.
Cal’s mouth finds my shoulder. Eli’s palm spreads broad and warm over my belly like he means to hold the whole storm still.
Rhett’s fingers thread up into my hair. After five hours of scratching at an itch through a cast, being touched by the three of them at once is nearly too much to live through, and I don’t ever want it to stop.
The next wave climbs my spine, slow and enormous, and this time I’m not meeting it alone. What comes out of me isn’t fear, or shame, or a single one of the careful things I’ve hidden behind my whole life.
It’s just their names, all three, over and over, like the only prayer I’ve ever meant.