EPILOGUE #3
I catch her halfway to the stairs, intercepting her before she can disappear into whatever late-night routine she’s developed over the past few weeks.
“Hey.” I snag her wrist gently. “Got a minute? I want to show you something.”
Mason has gone to pick Judah up from the airport. Dom is working an event in Malibu.
So Phoenix and I have the rest of the evening to ourselves and I plan to make the most of it.
Curiosity flickers across her face. “Show me what?”
“If I told you, it wouldn’t be a surprise.”
“I hate surprises.”
“You love surprises. As long as they’re good.”
She opens her mouth to argue, then closes it. Her lips purse. “I guess you do have me there.”
I lead her down the hallway toward the room I’d waved off as storage when she first moved in and kept assiduously locked whenever she happened to be home.
Given what I know of her personality, Phoenix has been remarkably incurious about what’s in here, which either means she trusts me not to hide anything important or she’s been too distracted to care.
Probably a little of both.
We stop in front of the plain white door and I find myself hesitating.
What if she hates it?
Her eyes narrow. “Atticus. What did you do?”
I take a deep breath. “Open the door.”
“If there’s a taxidermied lobster in there, I’m breaking up with you.”
“Why would I…would you really?”
She considers this. “No. But I’d make you sleep on the couch for a week.”
God, my nerves can barely take this woman. “The door, firebird.”
Phoenix reaches for the handle, pushes the door open and lets out an audible gasp.
The room beyond is…well. I’m pretty proud of it, actually.
I’ve converted the entire space into what can only be described as a heat suite worthy of luxury hotels that specialize in such things.
Blackout curtains frame floor-to-ceiling windows that overlook the canyon.
The walls are painted in soft, warm tones of cream, honey and pale gold.
Thick carpeting muffles every sound. A climate control panel sits by the door, preset to the exact temperature ranges omegas prefer during heats.
But the centerpiece—the thing I’m most pleased with—is the beds.
Two of them. Both larger than king-sized, positioned side by side with just enough space between them to walk through, but close enough to be pushed together if desired.
Plush, special-ordered mattresses that cost as much as a family sedan.
Duvets in varying weights stacked neatly at the foot of each bed.
Pillows in every size and firmness, arranged in neat piles on the window seat.
An attached bathroom is visible through an open door with a clawfoot tub large enough for two, rainfall shower with multiple heads, heated floors.
There’s a mini fridge stocked with water and protein drinks. A cabinet full of supplies, like towels, blankets, the kind of snacks that don’t require cooking. Everything an omega might need during a heat without having to leave the safety of the nest.
Basically everything I could think of after spending way too much time on Pinterest and hiring one of the best contractors in town.
Phoenix stands frozen in the doorway. Her mouth opens. Closes. Opens again.
“Atticus.” Her voice is barely above a whisper. “This is…”
She trails off, clearly at a loss for words.
“Too much?” I try to read her expression and fail. “If you hate it, we can change anything you want—”
“There are two beds.”
“Yeah.” I step into the room, gesturing at the setup. “I figured you and Mason would want options. Sometimes you might want separate nests. Sometimes you might want to build together. This way you’re not locked into one configuration.”
Phoenix walks slowly into the room, trailing her fingers along the foot of the nearest bed. “We definitely need to push them together.”
I blink. “What?”
“These beds.” She’s already circling around to inspect the other side, eyes bright with an excitement I wasn’t expecting. “We need to push them together. Right now. Like, immediately.”
“You want one giant nest?”
“I want one enormous nest.” She spreads her arms wide, demonstrating the scope of her vision. “A nest fort. With enough pillows to build walls and tunnels and separate sections. Mason and I can build the most elaborate nest architecture known to omega-kind.”
The image that conjures makes me grin despite myself. “That sounds ambitious.”
“It sounds perfect.”
She’s already pushing against one of the beds, the frame moving less than an inch even when she throws her whole weight against it.
With a laugh, I move to help her. “On three?”
“Okay. One. Two. Three.”
We push. The bed slides surprisingly easily across the thick carpet, and within moments the two frames are flush against each other, creating one massive sleeping surface that takes up most of the room’s floor space.
Phoenix climbs onto the combined mattress immediately, testing the firmness, bouncing experimentally. When she laughs, the sound fills the space in the exact way I imagined it would.
“This is amazing.” She sprawls across the center, arms and legs spread like a starfish. “I can’t believe you did all this in just a few weeks.”
Heat crawls up the back of my neck. “It’s uh…it’s been a bit longer than a few weeks.”
Phoenix sits up fully, legs crossed beneath her. The movement is graceful, casual, but her focus on my face is absolute. “Atticus, when did you start working on this?”
Shit.
I really wish she wasn’t quite so observant.
“I might have started the renovation before we even left for the press tour,” I admit.
Her eyebrows climb toward her hairline. “How long before?”
“When did we first meet? That first table read for Midnight Serenade.” The confession scrapes its way up my throat. “I’d say sometime right after that. I think I called my contractor maybe a week later.”
Phoenix goes very still.
“I know how it sounds,” I continue, the words coming faster now.
“Presumptuous. Like I was assuming things I had no right to assume. Please don’t take this the wrong way.
And if it’s too weird or if you hate the idea that I was already planning to build you a heat suite within days of us meeting, then we can convert it to literally anything else.
A gym. A recording studio. A display room specifically for Gerald Jr. and whatever other stuffed animals you want me to obtain for you—“
“Atticus.”
“—or we could just go back to calling it storage, honestly, because that’s what I told you it was and technically I haven’t been lying if you think about it from a certain perspective. All of these heat supplies have to be stored somewhere—“
She’s suddenly right in front of me.
I didn’t even see her move off the bed. One second, she was sitting in the center of the giant nest-fort surface, and the next she’s standing on her toes, hands fisted in the front of my shirt, pulling me down to her level.
She kisses me.
Hard enough that it’s impossible to breathe through it.
When she pulls back, we’re both breathing hard.
“I love it,” she says simply. “I love all of it. I love that you built this for us before you even knew if we’d work out. I love that you’ve been planning for our future since the beginning.”
Relief floods through me so intensely it’s almost painful. “Yeah?”
“Yeah.” She kisses me again, softer this time. “Now help me test these beds properly.”
Phoenix drags me toward the mattress with surprising strength for someone barely five-four.
I follow willingly, my objections dissolving under the force of her enthusiasm. She pulls me down onto the plush surface, and we land in a tangle of limbs and laughter that quickly transitions into something more serious.
“Your next heat is still months away,” I point out.
“So?” Phoenix is already pulling her shirt over her head, tossing it somewhere into the room without looking. “You don’t need to be in heat to build a nest.”
“That’s…true.”
Phoenix works with manic energy, especially for an omega easily weeks away from their next heat.
She strips every pillow from the window seat, raids the cabinet of blankets, and commandeers the duvet in under three minutes.
Her hands move with the same instinctive certainty I watched during her heat at Judah’s house: folding, stacking, layering, creating walls and tunnels and cozy pockets with an architectural vision that would impress most engineers.
“Hand me that.” She snaps her fingers at a weighted blanket still folded at the foot of the bed.
I toss it over. She catches it without looking, already positioning it as some kind of structural support along the left flank of her creation.
“And that one.”
Another blanket. This one gets draped overhead, pinned between pillows to create a low canopy that transforms the center of the mega-bed into something that feels less like a bedroom and more like a den. Warm. Enclosed. Safe from the outside world and everything in it.
“Now you.” She points at me, then at the nest’s interior, finger jabbing with the authority of a general directing troop movements. “In.”
I wouldn’t dare argue.
The blankets shift around me as I settle, layers of softness closing in on all sides. The interior is warm without being stifling, enclosed without feeling claustrophobic, and every surface I touch is so obscenely soft it borders on criminal.
Phoenix follows me in and arranges herself against my chest like she belongs there.
Her back presses against my sternum. I curl around her automatically, one arm sliding beneath the pillow under her head, the other wrapping across her waist. Her fingers find mine and lace through them, pulling my hand flat against her bare stomach where her shirt rode up.
We fit.
The thought arrives without fanfare. No dramatic orchestral swell. Just a quiet certainty that settles into my bones like warmth from a fire. Her body against mine. Her breathing already slowing. The scent of vanilla and citrus woven through the clean cotton surrounding us.