Chapter 22 Maya
MAYA
Warm.
That's the first thing. Warmth along my back where the sheets have absorbed the heat of two bodies through the night, warmth from the low remains of the fire still ticking in the hearth, warmth in the particular golden quality of the light coming through the window and landing in a stripe across the bed.
I'm alone.
Jace's side is empty but not cold. The pillow still holds the impression of his head, and when I press my face into it I catch pine and woodsmoke and the warm, specific scent of his skin, and my body responds before my brain does, a slow curl of pleasure in my belly that remembers last night.
Male voices from somewhere down the hall. Low, easy, the cadence of people who've had the same morning conversation a thousand times. The smell of coffee reaches me next, strong and dark, followed by something richer. Bacon. Toast. Cake?
I close my eyes and let myself have this. Thirty seconds of feeling safe.
Then Jace's voice comes back to me. From last night, mumbled against my hair, already half-asleep.
Don't go breakin' us, sweetheart.
My eyes open.
I know what I haven't told them. I know exactly what it is and exactly what it would change and I have run the calculation so many times that the math is automatic.
If they find out from someone other than me.
If Daniel finds out where I am and the information reaches them before I can frame it.
If the thing I'm carrying detonates in the middle of whatever fragile, extraordinary structure is building between the four of us.
I didn't do anything wrong. I know that. I know it with a certainty that lives in my bones even when my brain tries to argue otherwise. But knowing I'm not at fault and knowing I'm being fair are two different things, and right now, lying in sheets that smell like Jace, I am not being fair.
The timing is wrong. That's what I tell myself.
Everything between us is so new, so unlikely, so easily shattered by the wrong word at the wrong moment.
How do you tell three men who are just beginning to let you in, that the version of you they're building something with is incomplete?
That there's a piece missing, and the missing piece substantial?
I don't have the answer. What I have is the smell of breakfast pulling me out of bed and the coward's instinct to delay this reckoning one more day.
I push back the covers and find my robe from yesterday folded on the leather chair near the fireplace. Jace did this for me. That small, unexpected act of care sits in my chest alongside the guilt and makes both of them heavier.
I slip out of his room and down the hall to mine.
Wash my face, brush my teeth, pull my hair back.
The woman in the mirror looks rested. She looks like someone who slept well in a man's arms and woke up to coffee and voices and warmth.
She looks, for the first time in months, like someone who belongs somewhere.
The kitchen is bright with morning light.
Reid is at the stove, moving with the unhurried efficiency of a man who has cooked the same breakfast a thousand times and could do it in his sleep.
Flannel rolled to his elbows, beard catching the light, spatula in hand.
Jace is leaning against the counter next to him with a mug, saying something I can't hear that makes Reid shake his head.
Reid sees me first. His eyes find mine across the kitchen, and the smile that comes is slow and warm and uncomplicated.
"Good morning, sleepyhead."
"Look who's alive," Jace says. He's grinning.
"Leave her alone," Reid says, without heat.
"I'm just saying, some of us have been up since five."
"Some of us didn't have the night she had," Reid says, completely deadpan, and Jace chokes on his coffee and I feel the blush climb my throat like a brush fire.
Reid pulls out a chair. "Sit. Eat." He sets a plate down, eggs and toast and bacon, and gives me the look of quiet authority that runs through everything he does. "You skipped dinner last night."
The blush deepens. Jace smirks into his mug. I sit down and focus very hard on the eggs because if I look at either of them right now I will combust.
"Technically," Jace says, "she had a very balanced evening. Cardiovascular activity. Hydration. Fresh air."
Reid gives him a look. Jace grins. I eat my eggs and feel the warmth settle over me, the easy rhythm of their banter, the absence of awkwardness. I expected this morning to be complicated. Loaded with subtext and careful navigation.
Instead, it's just breakfast. Jace teasing.
Reid anchoring. Coffee and eggs and the sound of forks against plates.
The ease of it surprises me. As though what happened between me and Jace, what happened between me and Reid, has rearranged something in the household and the new arrangement is simply how things are now.
I look at the empty chair at the end of the table.
"Where's Owen?"
The air shifts. A fractional change in pressure.
Reid and Jace exchange a look. Quick, fluent, the silent language of men who've been reading each other for years.
"He had some things to take care of," Reid says. "Went out early."
"Business stuff," Jace adds, too casually.
I look at the empty chair. At the place where Owen's plate would be, where his coffee would be, where his quiet, precise presence would be anchoring the end of the table the way it always does.
He left early enough to avoid me. To avoid sitting at a table where the morning-after energy between me and Jace would be impossible to miss, where the shift in Reid's behavior toward me would be equally legible.
The guilt I woke with doubles. Layers now. The secret, and this. The sense that my presence in this house is pulling something apart even as it builds something else.
Reid's fingers find my chin. Gentle. He lifts my face until I'm looking into his steady and certain eyes.
"Eat your breakfast," Not a command. A reassurance shaped like one. "Let us worry about Owen. Okay?"
I nod. He holds my gaze for one more beat, his thumb brushing my jaw, and then he lets go and picks up his fork and the moment closes.
I eat. The food is good and I'm hungrier than I realized and little by little the knot in my stomach loosens. Not because the worry disappears but because the ease between Reid and Jace is real and solid and infectious, and being inside it feels like standing in a warm current.
Reid tells Jace they need to move the wolves between enclosures today. Something about the drainage in the east pen and new fencing that needs testing. Jace nods, asks about tranquilizers, Reid says no, these two know the routine, they just need patient handling.
"You want to come?" Jace asks me. "It's pretty incredible to watch up close."
I want to. The thought of seeing Reid with the wolves, of watching the specific quality of attention he brings to creatures that trust him, pulls at something in me. But my editor's last email sits in my inbox like a ticking clock, and I'm three illustrations behind where I should be.
"I'm running late on the book," I say. "I need to stay and work. If that's okay."
"More than okay," Reid says. "The office is yours."
They finish eating. I stand and start gathering plates, waving them off when they try to help. "You cooked. I clean. That's the deal."
Reid comes to me at the sink. He doesn't say anything.
He just stands behind me, puts one hand on my hip, and presses his lips to the top of my head.
Long. Warm. The weight of his hand steady on my hip, his chest close enough to feel the heat of him through my shirt.
Not dramatic. Not claiming. Just present, in the way that Reid is always present, fully and without performance.
"See you this afternoon," he says. His voice hums against my hair.
He goes. And then Jace is there, quick, his hands finding my waist as he spins me around to face him.
He grins, drops a kiss on my mouth, fast and warm and tasting like coffee, and then another on my jaw, and then he whispers, "Miss me," against my ear, and he's gone before I can respond, jogging after Reid with the screen door banging behind him.
I stand at the sink with ghost of two different kisses on my skin and something expanding in my chest that is too large for the careful life I built and too real to put back.
The house goes quiet.
I wash the dishes. Dry them. Put them away. Then I go to the office, open my laptop, and try to disappear into work.
It takes a while. The illustrations come slowly at first, my hand following muscle memory while my mind circles the same territory.
The secret. Owen's absence. The two kisses.
Jace's whisper in the dark. But the work has its own gravity, and eventually the fox kit on my screen starts to breathe, starts to have weight and texture, and my thoughts narrow to the specific problem of getting the light right on its fur, the way morning sun would catch the red and turn it copper at the edges.
I work through the morning. Through lunch, which I forget to eat.
Through the early afternoon, when the light in the office shifts from bright to golden and the shadows of the pines outside the window lengthen across the floor.
The fox kit is done. The meadow behind it is done.
I'm working on the border illustration, thistle and wild sage, when I realize I've been productive in a way I haven't been in weeks.
The office is quiet. The house is quiet. The only sound is my pencil on the tablet and the distant, occasional call of a bird outside the window.
The door opens.
Not gently. The door swings wide, fast, hitting the wall behind it, and Owen is standing in the frame.
He's breathing like he's been moving fast. His jacket is still on, collar up against the cold he's brought in from outside. His hair is windblown. His blue eyes are fixed on me with an intensity that erases every careful, bounded version of him I've catalogued since I arrived.
This is not the Owen who moves through the world like someone trying to take up as little space as possible.
Something broke while he was gone.
I stand up from the desk. My pencil clatters against the tablet. I don't pick it up.
He doesn't speak. He stands in the doorway and looks at me and the silence between us is the loudest thing in the house.
One second. Two.
He crosses the office in four strides. His hands come up and frame my face, both palms against my jaw, fingers in my hair, and he pulls me to him and kisses me.
Not carefully. He kisses me like a man who has been holding his breath for weeks and has finally, finally stopped.
His mouth is warm. His hands are shaking. And I don't hesitate.
I kiss him back.