CHAPTER THIRTEEN || DANIEL
After my research breakthrough, I excused myself to go take a shower—I ought to have done it right after breakfast, but I’d been too eager to lose myself in my work.
I’d planned on heading back to my own cabin, but the twins insisted I had everything I needed to shower here.
They didn’t seem to want to let me out of their sight.
Their cabin was larger than mine and their bathroom was, too, so I wasn’t exactly complaining.
I stood under the spray of hot water for a long time, with my eyes closed, trying to make my brain catch up with everything that had happened.
I’d been expecting them to condemn me for not being powerful enough to stand up to my family.
Or for being foolish in thinking that anything justified casting a spell that my own family—who had loose ethics by anyone’s standards—had forbidden as being too dangerous.
Instead, Lee and Hunter had both forgiven me.
It was everything I’d wanted for two years. Everything I’d told myself I didn’t deserve.
I was rinsing my hair when my senses sharpened suddenly. Through the bathroom door and across the cabin, I could hear Lee and Hunter as clearly as if they were speaking in the room with me.
“—we can’t both be his mate,” Hunter was saying. His voice was low and tense, but I still heard him just fine. “That’s not how it works! One wolf, one mate. That’s the rule.”
“We’re not exactly a normal case,” Lee replied, his tone more strained than usual. “We used to be one person! That means technically both of us—”
“So, what, then? We just trade him back and forth? Is that what you’re suggesting? He’s a person, Lee, not a timeshare!”
“No, of course not. But one of us has to be—”
“Which one?” Hunter’s voice sharpened. “Because I’m not stepping aside, Lee! I can’t. I’ve spent two years trying not to want him. I’m done pretending.”
“I’m not stepping aside either.” Lee didn’t yell but he definitely sounded less composed than I’d ever heard him before. “I love him, Hunter. I’ve loved him since before I even understood what that meant. Don’t ask me to give that up.”
“Then where the fuck does that leave us?” Hunter demanded.
“Daniel will decide,” Lee replied, after a long moment of silence. “We’ve done enough damage to him. It needs to be his choice. Not ours. Always, from here on out.”
“And may the best wolf win,” Hunter said flatly.
An ominous silence fell between them after that.
I turned off the shower and stood in the tub, water cooling on my skin, my heart slamming against my ribs, my brain struggling to keep up.
Could Hunter and Lee still feel so strongly about me? This was all happening at breakneck speed, and I hadn’t even considered the possibility that I might come between them. But Hunter and Lee were arguing about which one of them got to be with me.
As if the solution could only be one or the other. As if the three of us together—the way we’d slept last night, the way the mate bond was always a steady thrumming presence between all of us equally, the way every dream for two years had contained all of us—meant nothing.
As if there was any way in hell to make a choice between Hunter—impulsive, passionate, and outspoken—and Lee, always measured, steady, and kind.
No. Absolutely not. I wasn’t choosing between them. And they couldn’t make me.
I dried off in record time and then pulled on a T-shirt and a pair of sweatpants—Hunter’s again, because I hadn’t brought my own clothes—and steeled myself. About to make either the best or the stupidest decision of my life, I opened the bathroom door.
The twins were on the couch. Hunter was on one end, his arms crossed over his chest, his jaw set and his gaze dark.
Lee sat at the other end, his hands wrapped around a mug of coffee, his expression troubled as he stared out the window, turned away from Hunter.
But they both looked over when I stepped into the main room of the cabin.
“I’m not choosing between you,” I said flatly, without preamble. “So you guys can knock it off, right now. Both of you.”
Hunter’s eyebrows shot up. Lee’s fingers tightened on his mug, but his lips parted with surprise.
“Wait, how the hell—” Hunter began.
“I heard you. But that’s not important.” I crossed the cabin, my hair still damp, my skin not fully dry, and stood trembling in front of them. “What’s important is that you can’t ask me to choose. I won’t do that. That’s not how this works.”
Lee set his mug down on the coffee table. “Look, Daniel—”
“No! I love both of you.” The words were out before I could second-guess them, raw and completely irreversible. I met Hunter’s eyes, then Lee’s. “I’m in love with both of you.”
The twins exchanged a startled glance at that.
“Not one of you more than the other. Not one of you instead of the other. Both of you. Equally. Completely. I want us to have a future together. All of us.”
A chill danced up my spine as I realized that, sooner or later, if they agreed to the reversal spell, our shared future might be extremely temporary. I shoved that thought away with every bit of violence it deserved.
They both stared at me, flabbergasted.
“Don’t you get it? You’re both him! You’re different pieces of the person I’ll always love, no matter what. And I see him in both of you every single day! Which means I’ve already spent my whole life loving you—both of you—even before there were two of you.”
Hunter’s expression softened, his lips parting.
But Lee frowned, his eyebrows drawing together as he studied me. “That’s easy to say, but what does that mean in practice, Daniel? What, exactly, are you suggesting?”
“If there’s going to be anything between us, it’ll be all three of us.
Together. A triad. Or a throuple. I haven’t decided on what to call us yet.
” I paused. “It’s that or it’s nothing at all.
We’ll go back to how things were before.
Because I’m not hurting one of you—or myself—to make the other happy. ”
Total silence followed in the wake of my speech.
Hunter and Lee sat with that for a long moment. Then they glanced at each other again, in unison. Then, a moment later, they both looked back at me.
“You’re serious,” Hunter stated.
“Dead serious.”
“All three of us,” Lee said carefully, as if testing the shape of it. “Together. At the same time. Romantically, sexually—” His breath caught on that word, his green eyes smoldering as they locked on mine. “You’re proposing a three-way relationship.”
“Yes.” I held my ground. “Since we’re talking about it now, the mate bond connects all three of us. Not me and Hunter or me and you—it’s all three of us, at the same time.”
Lee considered me, as if sizing me up. “The mate bond doesn’t seem to differentiate between Hunter and me, does it? It never has.”
It startled me how casually they were talking about the mate bond now. Again, I was struck by how much had changed between us in a single day. But all that really meant was that, buried under all the anger and pain, had been love all along.
Hunter tilted his head to the side, his eyes locked on mine. “This is really what you want?”
I thought back to last night. Hunter’s arm draped possessively over me. Lee’s face—the face I loved more than anything—soft with sleep. Their combined warmth around me, reassuring and perfect. The promise of a home I’d never really had, except with them.
“Yes,” I said firmly.
The twins traded another look. This one wasn’t surprised or hostile. Instead, it was questioning.
“Daniel, we need to know that you actually want this,” Lee said, turning back to me. Concern filled his eyes as they searched mine. “That you’re not just trying to keep the peace. There’s no need to martyr yourself, if this isn’t what you really want.”
“Because you do that,” Hunter added roughly, his gaze searching mine, the same way Lee’s had when I turned to him. “And this won’t work unless you mean it. This isn’t the time for self-sacrifice.”
They were really asking me, and I needed to give them the most honest answer I possibly could, because everything—our entire shared future—hinged on this.
I’d once loved Hunter Lee Jameson with an intensity that had frightened me. Could I love Hunter and Lee in the same way? But the moment I’d asked myself that, I already had the answer.
“Yes,” I said. “I want this. I swear I do.”
The twins exchanged another lingering look. Hunter nodded at Lee, emotion blazing in his eyes. And when Lee turned back to me, I saw his gaze was smoldering, too.
“We accept your proposition,” Lee said, his voice turning husky.
With those four words, the possibilities of what the three of us could be together—everything we could do together—unfurled in my mind for the very first time.
Oh. Oh.
“Well then,” Hunter said, standing. He moved toward me with a deliberateness that made my pulse spike, his gaze filling with want. “Maybe we should put this to the test. A trial run.”
I took an involuntary step backward. “Wait. Now?”
Hunter and Lee exchanged another glance. Something shifted between them in that moment—an agreement—and when they turned back to me, their expressions were identical.
Dark. Intent. Hungry.
Lee stood as well. He was nearest to me. He closed the distance between us without hesitation.
Then he stopped, searching my gaze for permission, his eyes hooded with desire and his lips parted slightly. “Nothing will happen here that you don’t consent to. Never.” He paused. “May I kiss you, Daniel?”
My stomach did backflips, but I nodded.
Lee smiled. Then he cupped my face in both hands, tilted it up to him, and kissed me.
His lips were warm and his thumbs traced the line of my jaw as if memorizing the shape of it. When his tongue found mine, gently and deliberately dominating me, my cock began to harden in my borrowed sweatpants.
Oh yes. Oh yes, please. More of this.
When he pulled back, his green eyes blazing, I was breathless.
Then Lee stepped back, a smile tracing across his lips, and Hunter was there in his place.
“I’m going to kiss you now,” he growled, his eyes searching mine.