13. Ember
EMBER
Cass pulls over.
He doesn't ask why. He noses the truck off the logging road onto the shoulder where the trees come in close, kills the engine, and the sudden quiet is enormous, just rain ticking on the roof and three people breathing and the heat in me roaring up now that we've stopped moving and there's nothing left to count.
I unsnap my belt. Lean forward between the seats so my mouth is close to the side of Gideon's face, close enough that the iron and clove of him floods everything.
"I want this," I say. "I need you both to hear me say it, because I'm only saying it once and I'm saying it clear. This is me. Not the heat. Me, deciding. If that's not something you can do, say so now and I'll sit back here and white-knuckle it to the cabin and we'll never speak of it again."
Gideon turns his head. We're a breath apart. His eyes search my face, clinical and careful and then not careful at all, and whatever test I just passed or he just passed, something in him lets go.
"Say it to him too," he says, low. "He's the one who needs to hear it."
I look at Cass. He's turned in the driver's seat, one arm over the wheel, watching me with those still pale eyes, and there's blood on his cuff from a man he killed twenty minutes ago and not one ounce of apology in him for any of it.
"I want this," I tell him. "You. Both of you.
Now." And then, because I learned contracts at my father's table and I'll be damned if I sign a blank one with my own body: "And hear the terms while I've still got the head to set them.
No knots. No bonding bites. Nothing that can't be walked back, not until I say different. "
"Agreed." Cass doesn't blink, doesn't bargain. One word, and it has the finality of a law passed. "Then get up here." It isn't an invitation. It's a man telling me where he wants me.
I climb over the console into the front, graceless, my bad leg protesting, and his hands are on me before I've landed, hauling me across his lap like I weigh nothing, arranging me where he wants me with the easy authority of a man done deciding things slowly.
Gideon's hands settle at my waist from behind.
Cass takes my jaw in one big hand and kisses me, and it's not gentle and it's not a question.
It's a man who decided something years ago and has finally been handed the right to do it.
I kiss him back like I've got something to prove.
His mouth opens mine and the cold coal of his scent flares and the heat in me answers it so hard I make a sound into his mouth I'd be embarrassed by if I had room left for embarrassment.
His thumb presses against the line of my throat, not choking, just there, a claim.
The other hand fists in the back of my hair and tips my head where he wants it, and the small loss of control sends a bolt straight down through me.
Gideon's behind me, his mouth at the back of my neck, right over the gland that's been screaming for two days, and when his teeth graze it I break the kiss with Cass just to gasp.
The clove of him. His hands sliding up under my shirt, learning the shape of my ribs, and where Cass takes, Gideon explores, and the difference between them is its own kind of unbearable.
"Quiet that mouth," Cass says against my lips, "unless it's my name coming out of it," and then he doesn't give me the chance to say anything at all.
He gets my shirt over my head in one motion.
Gideon flicks the clasp of my bra and Cass strips it off me, and for half a second both go still at the sight, and I brace for being assessed.
It doesn't come. Cass looks at me like he means to ruin me and take his time about it, and Gideon's hands come around to cup my breasts, thumbs dragging over my nipples, and the jolt arcs down through my belly.
Cass's mouth follows. I get a fist in his dark hair and he lets me hold on exactly as long as it suits him before he catches both my wrists in one hand and pins them at the small of my back, easy, leaving me arched and open between the two of them with nothing to do about it.
The casual strength of it, the way he just takes the use of my hands, makes everything brighter and hotter and louder.
"There she is," he says, low, watching what it does to me.
Gideon works the button of my jeans, drags the zipper down, slides over the front of my underwear where I'm already so wet it's soaked through, and the first press of him through the fabric tears a cry out of me.
"Soaked through," Gideon murmurs against my ear, the clinical calm of him fraying at the edge of every word. "You've been carrying this since the alley. Sweet girl. Give it to us."
"Listen to that," Cass murmurs. He's still got my wrists. He's in no hurry at all. "Good girl. Take what he gives you."
Gideon pulls the fabric aside, finds me bare and slick, strokes once through the wet of me and circles my clit with a pressure so exactly right my hips buck.
Cass pins me with a forearm across my hips, holds me still for it, makes me take it at the pace they decide and not the frantic one my body's begging for.
"Cass." His name comes out wrecked.
"I've got you. You'll come when we let you."
Two of Gideon's fingers slide into me and I clench around them and Cass's mouth is on my breast and Gideon's thumb is working my clit in tight relentless circles and it's too much and not enough and building too fast. Six years.
Six years of riding this out alone in a locked room with my own hand and my teeth in a rolled-up shirt so nobody could hear, and now there are four hands on me and two mouths and the heat has somewhere to go and my body doesn't know what to do with the abundance of it.
Fuck. Fuck.
I come apart embarrassingly fast. It tears through me, and I hear myself make a sound I've never made, and Gideon works me through it with his fingers and his low voice while Cass holds me steady, and when I come back down I'm shaking and gasping and furious at how badly I needed it.
And the heat's still there. Banked, not gone. It'll be back. But for one clear moment the roar has dropped to something I can think over, and in that moment I do the thing my body has been telling me to do since I first scented him in the rain.
I turn in Cass's arms and I bite him.
Not the blade this time. My teeth, at the join of his neck and shoulder, hard enough to mark, and he goes rigid against me and makes a low sound from somewhere deep in his chest, and his hand comes up to cradle the back of my skull, holding me there, letting me, while I set my claim in his skin in the only language my body has ever fully trusted.
The cold coal of his scent floods so strong it nearly takes me under again.
Something passes between us that has no words and needs none.
When I let go, there's a perfect red crescent of my teeth above his collarbone, and he looks down at it, and then at me, and there's something in his still face that I've never seen there before.
Not triumph. Closer to wonder, like a man who set a trap years ago for something he never believed would actually come.
Gideon presses a kiss to my bare shoulder, quiet, and I realize neither of them has asked for anything for themselves, that this whole time it's been their hands on me and nothing of mine on them, and I open my mouth to fix that.
Cass stops me with a thumb against my lips. "Not here. Not in a truck on a logging road with both packs hunting you." His voice is rough but the command in it is unmistakable. "When you have us, you'll have us somewhere I can take my time. This was for you. You needed it. Now you can think."
He's right. I can. The world's come back into focus, the heat down to a manageable burn, and I hate a little that he read my body better than I did.
I pull my shirt back on. Gideon hands me my bra without comment, the clinical calm back in place like he never had his fingers inside me, except for the way his pupils are still blown wide and the iron and clove of him is thick with want he's not going to act on.
Cass starts the engine. Pulls us back onto the logging road. His cuff still has blood on it and now his collar has my teeth in it, and he drives toward the mountain with both like they're things he's proud to be wearing.
We're most of the way home when he speaks.
"Knox and Rhys need to know what happened in town." A beat. "All of it."
I look at the mark on his neck. At the set of his shoulders. At what all of it means, the dead man and the dumpster and the front seat of this truck.
"They're going to smell us on each other," I say.
"Yes," Cass says. He doesn't slow down. "They are."