Chapter 64
Ash
I’ve lost count of how many orgasms the guys have given me.
I’m boneless on the furs, three men surrounding me, and the look in their eyes says we’re nowhere close to finished.
Good. Neither am I.
“Knees, troublesome thing.” Kieran’s voice has gone scrape-raw. There’s no ice in it anymore. “I’ve been polite long enough.”
I should argue. I always argue. It’s kind of my thing.
But my body moves before my brain can object and suddenly I’m on all fours in the center of our bed, knees on the wolf-pelt, and I can feel myself dripping onto the fur in a way that should embarrass me and absolutely does not.
“Look at her.” Finnian’s voice turns guttural. I glance back over my shoulder and find him with his hand already at his belt, fingers tapping his thigh. Probably counting something. “Heart’s at one-forty. She’s going to come the moment one of us touches her.”
Kieran moves behind me. I feel his cold hands grip my hips and I gasp, not from the temperature. From the contrast. I’m soaked and burning and his palms hit me like snow on coals and the steam of it rises against my lower back, real steam, white in the lamplight.
“Finn.” Kieran’s voice. “Under her.”
Finnian moves without hesitation. He slides beneath me on the bed, settles on his back, and suddenly I’m hovering over him. His chest under my palms. Heart pounding so hard I can feel it in my fingertips.
His hands come up to cup my face.
“Hi,” he says softly. So damn innocent when he’s anything but innocent right now.
“Hi yourself.”
He pulls me down into a kiss and his mouth tastes like the citrus-and-old-paper scent of his quarters, like the wine he had before we got home. He kisses me like I’m the last sentence of the only book he ever wanted to write.
His cock feels hot and hard between us, notched at my entrance from below. He doesn’t push. Doesn’t move. Just waiting.
While he’s kissing me, I feel Kieran notch himself at my entrance from behind. The cold of him meets the wet of me and the gasp that hits Finnian’s mouth isn’t even mine, it’s the breath I would have used.
“Ready?”
“For you?” I break the kiss long enough to look back. His eyes are silver-blue and bright, and there’s frost on his eyelashes. “Always.”
He pushes in.
The stretch is not perfect.
It’s too much and it’s finally, and the cold of him goes so deep I feel it ring against my pelvis like a struck bell. I moan, and my forehead drops to Finnian’s chest. His hand grips the back of my neck holding me there like he can’t bear me being even that far away.
“There she is.” Kieran’s hands grip my hips hard enough to bruise. The frost is spreading down my thighs in a fast lattice and where it meets my heat it melts and runs. “Gods. Gods. The court will have to make do with whatever’s left of me after this, she’s taken the rest.”
“Don’t talk like you’re leaving.” I get the words out somehow. “Don’t you dare.”
“Never. Never, troublesome thing.”
He thrusts and I see white at the edges of my vision.
Finnian’s other hand rests on my hip. Lifts me. Makes room for himself.
I feel him pressing at my entrance alongside Kieran.
Oh.
Oh.
“Breathe.” Finnian’s voice, strained. “Breathe through it, sweet thing. Just breathe and let me in.”
I know this stretch. I’ve done this before. It doesn’t make it easier. It makes me want it more.
I exhale. Bear down. And Finnian slides in alongside Kieran. Slow, slower than I think I can stand, the warm of Finn against the cold of Kieran with me wrapped around them both, well, the sound that comes out of me isn’t human. It can’t be.
Two of them. Deep inside my pussy. Both at once.
The contrast is what undoes me. Cold and warm and the heat of my own body pulled tight between them, and I can feel where they’re touching. Not just pressing into me but pressing into each other, and the awareness of it makes me clench around them so hard Finnian curses in a language I don’t speak.
“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, me still 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 a home.
Orion’s savage joy. Two centuries of guarding empty groves and wanting nothing more than to love.
They love me.
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.
He looks at Kieran. At Finnian. And the three of them hold a weird meeting right then, right now.
With the next heartbeat they’re shuffling. Kieran pulls out and I whimper at the loss and the cold leaves me empty enough that I’m shaking. Finnian slides out, too, and I’m hollow and reaching and starting to fall apart in a way that has nothing to do with sex.
“Easy.” Orion catches my hands. “We’ve got you. We’re not going anywhere.”
“Then why did you stop—”
“Because.” Finnian sits up and pulls me into his lap. I straddle him, his cock pressed against me but not in, and his hands are shaking where they grip my hips. Shaking. The man who never trembles. “We need to tell you something.”
My heart stops.
The old wound screams. Here it comes. The end. They’re going to —
“I love you,” he whispers, quiet and certain as he presses a soft kiss to my lips.
“I love you,” he says again, this time swiping at the tears under my eyes.
“I have loved you for one year, four months, and eleven days. I started counting the night you walked into my life. I kept counting through everything. And I will keep counting until the count outlives the stars and probably after that.”
I can’t breathe.
“I love you,” Kieran’s voice rumbles from behind me. “I have loved you since the moment we sparred in the middle of the night. I didn’t know I was capable of it until you. I don’t want to go back to who I was before. I don’t fit in him anymore. I want you. I want this. Forever, troublesome thing.”
The tears come and I can’t stop them and I don’t try.
“I love you.” Orion presses his forehead to mine, his breath hot, his hand cupping the back of my skull like he’s been holding it forever. “I loved you before I knew the word for it. I’ve waited lifetimes for you.”
“You do.”
The words crack out of me.
“You all do. I—”
Say it. They said it first. Say it back.
“I love you.” It comes out broken and ugly and nothing like I imagined. My nose is running. “All of you. I love you so much I can’t breathe and I spent twenty-eight years learning that love means losing people and you…you stupid, stubborn, impossible men. You made me unlearn all of it.”
“Say it again,” Finnian breathes.
He pulls me down onto his cock with a groan and I sob through it, full of him again, my body remembering what it just lost.
“I love you.”
“Again.”
“I love you—fuck—I love you both.”
Kieran pushes Finnian down to the bed with a palm on his shoulder. “Trust me?” he asks of Finn.
“Undecided,” he replies but lies down anyway.
“Focus on him, Ash.” Kieran kisses my shoulder.
Then he stretches out beside Finn on the bed. Their hips touching, butt cheek to butt cheek, legs tangling, both of them flat on their backs. Their cocks press together, pointing up. I slide off Finn long enough to look down.
Understanding dawning on my face. I grip them both and slide down slowly. It’s the most delicious stretch. Burning for a moment before I rise and fall, listening to their chorus of moans.
Orion moves behind me. His hand smooths down my spine to my ass, slow, patient, as he presses me forward onto Finn’s chest. Then he climbs onto the bed and straddles Kieran—knees by Kieran’s ears, groin right above his face. Hovering.
I feel his fingers part my ass and the cool slick of something—magic or oil or both, his magic is both—eases the way before he presses his fingers in.
“Easy, Thorn. Easy. Breathe for me.”
The stretch is impossible and then it isn’t as he works me open.
For a moment I have no idea how this is going to work until it does. He leans forward and slides into me. From his position over Kieran, his balls press into Kieran’s face. Kieran doesn’t care. Orion growls so deeply it vibrates through every place we’re connected.
Three of them. Inside me.
“Again, Thorn.”
“I love you.” Three of them. Three bonds. Three men who chose me when they didn’t have to. “I love you. I love you. I love—”
The orgasm hits without warning.
Not building.
Detonating.
I shatter with their names on my lips. The thorns under my skin erupt outward in a slow spiral up my forearms. Green, then blue-green, then gold.
And they don’t stop fucking me with that torturous rhythm.
Finnian thrusts up into me and Kieran grinds alongside him and Orion fucks me with deep, devastating strokes and I’m sobbing through another orgasm before the first one finishes.
They move as one. Like they had practice, weeks of it, but tonight is different and we all feel it, the rhythm cleaner, the bond tighter, the thing between us finished.
“Ours.” Orion’s teeth find my shoulder. The same spot where he bit me before. “Say it.”
“Yours.”
“Ours.” Kieran’s cold hand wraps around my throat. “Forever, troublesome thing.”
“Forever.”
“Ours.” Finnian’s hands grip my face and force me to meet his eyes.
Tears track down his cheeks and he doesn’t wipe them.
“Every part of you. Every version of you. The soldier. The changeling. The queen. The woman who walks into my office in the middle of the night when she can’t sleep. All of you. Mine. Ours.”
“Yours.” I’m breaking and they’re holding the pieces. “I’m yours. All of you. Always.”
The third orgasm crests and I feel them go with me.
Orion comes first.
He roars against my shoulder, his cock pulsing inside me. The fire on his skin flares hot enough to make Finnian gasp and then settles, settles, settles into something soft and gold. He sinks forward over my back. Off Kieran’s face.
Finnian follows. Gasps my name like a prayer. Ashlynne, the full one, and spills inside me alongside Kieran.
And Kieran—
The man who has held himself together since he was a child to keep his sister alive. The Unseelie heir who has not let go of anything once in three hundred years. Gone.
He breaks inside me. Not like a sob. Is a sob. The sound of something old finally allowed to set itself down.
When I finally open my eyes, we lay collapsed on the furs. A tangle of limbs that shouldn’t work and does. Orion face first in the furs. Kieran and Finnian still in me, their cocks pressed together inside me, neither willing to be the first to leave.
Finnian’s eyelashes are wet. Kieran is shaking. I can feel it where his chest is pressed to my back, fine tremors running through him, the long unwind. When I turn to the other side Orion has a wet patch on the fur where his cheek is pressed against mine.
My hand threads through Orion’s, the life debt glaring at me. “You should get rid of that,” I say around a yawn.
“Orion,” Kieran breathes. “Thank you for saving my life.”
The mark dissolves under my gaze.
“What?” My head swims as I sit up, my brow pinching.
Kieran lazily opens his eyes. “You all saved me in a way. If it weren’t for you I don’t know where I’d be, and that is a truth.”
“It’s bullshit how easily that worked.” I run my finger over where the mark was a moment ago.
Orion just chuckles. “Sometimes it is just that easy.”
This is our happily ever after. And we fucking deserve it.