Chapter 21
Ezra
It's eleven PM and I'm standing in the hallway outside the spare room trying to decide if knocking on this door makes me a man who's following his instincts or a man who's lost his mind.
The bar is closed. Knox and Toby are in their room. I heard Toby laughing about something ten minutes ago, then quiet. Silas is in his room. Reading, probably. Silas is always reading.
The walls up here are thin. Not paper-thin, but shifter-thin, which is worse. I can hear Knox's heartbeat through the plaster if I focus. I can hear Silas turning pages. And I can hear Nico, on the other side of this door, not sleeping.
He's been in there for an hour. I heard him unpack — the suitcase zipper, the careful opening and closing of dresser drawers, the sounds of a man organizing a space the way he organizes everything. Methodical. Thorough. Then the bed creaking as he sat down. Then nothing.
He's awake. His breathing is too measured for sleep. The controlled rhythm of someone who's lying in the dark thinking about everything that happened today and not knowing how to stop.
I knock. Twice. Quiet.
"Yeah." His voice is immediate. Not startled, expecting. Like he's been waiting for this knock since I went to my room and closed the door and lasted exactly forty-three minutes before I stopped pretending I wasn't going to end up here.
I open the door.
The spare room is small. Bed, dresser, window that faces the back lot. The moon is coming through the curtains and Nico is sitting against the headboard in a t-shirt and boxers, Silas's book open facedown on his chest. He wasn't reading. He was holding it like a prop.
"Can't sleep?" I ask.
"I slept in this room for zero previous nights. My body doesn't have a pattern for it yet."
"Your body needs a pattern to sleep?"
"My body needs a pattern for everything." He looks at me. I'm in sweats and a t-shirt, barefoot, standing in his doorway like I belong there. "Are you coming in or are you going to stand in the hallway?"
I come in. Close the door behind me. The click of the latch is loud in the quiet — and I know Knox heard it. I know Silas heard it. And I know that tomorrow morning there will be a very specific silence at breakfast that communicates everything without a single word being spoken.
That's tomorrow's problem.
Nico moves over. Not a lot, the bed is a double, smaller than the hotel queen. He makes room without making a production of it, the way he does everything. I sit on the edge. The mattress dips under my weight and his body tilts toward mine by physics alone.
He sets Silas's book on the nightstand. His eyes are dark in the moonlight, steady, watching me with the directness that has been making my chest do things since day one. "You lasted almost an hour before coming to see me. I lasted about twelve minutes before I started hoping you'd knock."
"Twelve?"
"I unpacked for ten. Sat down. Immediately wanted you here." He says it the way he says everything; plainly, without performance. Data. "I don't know what to do with that. I've never wanted someone in a room I've been in for an hour."
"It's the mattress. Very inviting."
"It's a terrible mattress."
"I know. Knox got it at a garage sale."
"That explains a lot." He's almost smiling. The real one. "Ezra."
"Yeah."
"We have to be quiet."
"I know."
"Knox and Toby are—"
"Twelve feet down the hall. Silas is eight feet the other direction. And every single one of them can hear a whisper through these walls."
"And you still knocked on my door."
"I still knocked on your door."
The air shifts. The same charge as the hotel room, the same gravitational pull, except this time we're not in a beige box between the highway and nowhere.
We're in my territory. The bar, the building, the space where I live and work and exist. Nico is in my world now, in a bed that belongs to this pride, and my lion knows it.
My lion is extremely calm about this, which is more alarming than the growling. The growling I understand. This, the deep, patient stillness, the focused attention of a predator who knows exactly where his prey is, this is something else.
I reach for him. My hand finds his jaw. The line of it, sharp, precise, the architecture of a face I've been mapping from across a bar for two weeks.He turns into the touch. Not a flinch, not a calculation. Just the simple, animal response of a body that wants to be closer to the thing touching it.
I kiss him. Slower than the hotel room — deliberate, intentional, the way you do something when you know you're going to do a lot more and you want the first part to matter. His mouth opens under mine and his hand comes up to my wrist, holding on, fingers circling the bone.
"Quiet," I murmur against his lips.
"I'll try."
"You'll do more than try. Knox is—"
"Twelve feet away. I heard you." He pulls me closer by the wrist. "Then you'd better give me something to bite."
My entire body responds to that and I stop talking.
I push him down onto the mattress. He goes easily — Nico, who controls everything, who manages his own heartbeat, who has never let a situation happen to him that he didn't plan for.
He lies back and lets me settle over him and his hands find my hips and I feel the exact moment he stops thinking and starts feeling, because his whole body softens.
I kiss his neck. The spot below his ear that I found at the hotel and filed away for future reference. He inhales sharply — not a gasp, not yet, the precursor to a gasp. The sound of a man holding something back. "Let go."
"If I let go I won't be quiet."
"Then I'll help."
I kiss down his throat. His pulse is fast under my lips — not the survival sprint from Ash's dinner table, not the controlled rhythm of professional Nico.
This is something raw, something his body is doing without his permission, and he can't regulate it.
I feel him try. Feel the breath he takes, measured, deliberate, the technique of a man who manages everything.
I bite the junction of his neck and shoulder and the breath shatters.
"Fuck—" He clamps his mouth shut. His hand flies to his face, pressing his knuckles against his lips. Muffling himself.
"That's a start," I say against his skin. "But you're going to need a pillow."
"I am not putting a pillow over my face."
"You will when I get your clothes off."
His hips jerk up against mine — uncontrolled, the first truly graceless thing I've ever seen Nico do. I grin against his collarbone and he must feel it because he says, with tremendous dignity: "Don't be smug."
"I'm not smug. I'm observational."
"You're smug and your eyes are gold and it's — very distracting."
I pull back enough to look at him. He's right — I can feel the shift, the gold bleeding in, my lion rising to the surface without my permission.
It happens around Nico now. Around the warmth of his skin and the sound of his breathing and the way he looks at me like I'm a problem he wants to solve with his entire body.
"Is it too much?" I ask. Because I need to. Because the gold eyes are the lion, and the lion is the part that could scare him, and two weeks ago he was counting exits every twelve minutes.
Nico reaches up. Touches the skin beside my eye, tracing the edge where brown meets gold. His expression is focused, intent — the same look he gets when he's reading a financial report, except directed at my face.
"No," he says. "It's not too much."
Permission.
I pull his shirt off. He lifts to help — efficient even in this, even half-wrecked on a garage-sale mattress.
His chest is lean, defined, the body of a man who runs and eats nachos and has spent two years in hotel gyms. I put my mouth on his sternum and work my way down, slow, tasting him.
Salt and soap and the warmth that pools in the hollow of his ribs.
His hands are in my hair. Gripping, then releasing, then gripping again — the struggle of a man who wants to grab on and knows that grabbing on means making sounds and making sounds means Knox hears.
I pull my own shirt off because his hands need somewhere to go and I want them on me.
He takes the invitation — palms flat on my chest, then my shoulders, then down my arms, mapping me the way he maps everything.
Thorough. His fingertips trace the muscle definition with the same precision he uses on spreadsheets and it makes me want to wreck him.
I get his boxers off. He lifts his hips and I pull them down and his cock is hard against his stomach, flushed, leaking. I wrap my hand around him and his whole body bows off the mattress and the sound he makes is — not quiet.
"Pillow," I say.
"I'm fine—"
I stroke him once, slow, root to tip, twisting at the head. He grabs the pillow and shoves it over his face.
"That's what I thought."
"I hate you," he says, muffled.
"No, you don't." I stroke him again. His hips chase my hand, his stomach muscles clenching, the pillow pressed tight over his mouth. I can hear the sounds he's making through it — broken, desperate, the noises of a man who is extremely controlled in every other context and has no control here.
My lion purrs. Low, steady, the deep vibration that starts in the chest and radiates outward.
I've never purred during sex before. I've never wanted to.
But Nico's body under my hands, Nico's sounds through the pillow, Nico in my building in my pride in my life — my lion is content in a way that goes past desire into something territorial and permanent.
I take him in my mouth and the pillow does absolutely nothing.
"Ezra—" His hips jerk. His hand leaves the pillow and finds my hair, gripping, and I let him.
Let him hold on while I take him deep, slow, learning what makes him shake.
The flat of my tongue on the underside — he shivers.
Suction on the head — his thighs tense. When I swallow around him, his whole body goes rigid and he pulls the pillow back over his face with his free hand.