Chapter Seventeen
~ Jai ~
The nursery was too quiet. The kind of quiet that made the cotton in my ears feel like actual cotton, not a metaphor for the way shock settles in your nervous system after you’ve stabbed a man and watched him die on gravel under amber gate lights.
Grace lay in the crib the housekeeper had somehow conjured out of this wilderness estate like a woman who kept spare infant furniture in her back pocket, and she was doing the thing she did best: sleeping through the apocalypse.
I stood over the rail with one hand resting on the wood, watching her tiny chest rise and fall in the rhythm of someone who had decided, with the absolute conviction only infants and cult leaders can muster, that tonight’s bloodshed was a you problem, not a her problem.
My split lip throbbed. The butterfly closures pulled every time my mouth moved, which was more often than it should have been because I couldn’t stop thinking, and thinking made my face do things, and my face doing things hurt.
My ribs ached on the left side every time I took a breath that qualified as an actual breath and not the shallow, protective inhales I’d been defaulting to since Declan put his knee on my sternum.
Reyes had said two cracks, maybe. The imaging would confirm. I was not scheduling imaging. I was standing in a nursery watching a baby sleep and drumming two fingers on the crib rail like a man trying to Morse code his way out of a conversation with himself.
I stopped. The wood was warm under my palm. I started again. Two taps, pause, two taps, the particular rhythm of someone whose body needed to move even when the rest of him was very deliberately not moving.
Grace made a soft sound. A gurgle, wet and indifferent, the noise of a creature dreaming about milk or warmth or the pleasure of being carried by Braham Wolfe in a bloodstained Armani suit through a parking garage full of dead men.
Her tiny fist curled against the blanket, knuckles white, and then relaxed, and her breathing didn’t change.
The word “legal” turned over in my head like a stone I’d picked up and couldn’t put down.
Legal. Adoption. Together. Three words Braham had laid on the coffee table between our scotch glasses with the matter-of-fact certainty of a man discussing a real estate purchase, and I had said “that’s acceptable” like he’d offered me a mint and not the rest of my life.
The terror had not arrived. That was the part that kept catching.
I’d spent seven years as an Army Ranger and three years as a gay romance novelist, which meant I was professionally obligated to recognize emotional landmines before I stepped on them, and the landmine labeled “permanent commitment to an infant and the man who wants to bite your throat” had failed to detonate.
It had sat there, inert, while I finished my scotch and looked at Braham across a dying fire and felt nothing except the specific, inconvenient weight of something that had already been true for longer than I wanted to admit.
I stayed a beat longer than necessary. One more look at Grace, her small face relaxed in the amber light, the downy hair at her temples catching the glow like something soft and breakable that had already proven it wasn’t breakable.
Then I left, because the alternative was standing in a nursery cataloguing my feelings at two in the morning with a bruised rib and a shoulder that felt like someone had taken a cheese grater to it, and I had never once done that voluntarily in my entire adult life, and I was not starting now.
The hallway was dark. Timber walls, wide-plank flooring that creaked under my weight in the particular way old wood does when it’s settled into a structure and decided it’s staying.
The great room’s fireplace had burned down to embers, and the light that reached the hallway was the deep, reddish glow of something nearly out.
I turned toward the master suite because it was the only room in the house I hadn’t been in yet, and because I was fairly certain that was where Braham had gone after the study, and because I was done pretending I didn’t know why I was walking in that direction.
He was already there. Not pacing. Not checking his phone.
Just standing outside the closed door with his hands at his sides and his weight settled into his heels like a man who had been waiting since approximately the moment Grace closed her eyes, and had decided that waiting was not an inconvenience but a fact of the universe he was willing to accommodate.
He didn’t speak. Didn’t move. Didn’t do the thing where he said something weighted and certain and made the air in the hallway go still the way it did when Braham Wolfe decided it was time for the room to listen.
He just looked at me, those gold eyes steady in the half-dark, and then he reached for the door and opened it and stepped back, creating space without a word, and I walked through it.
The master suite hit like weather.
Dark timber walls, the kind that didn’t come from a lumberyard but from trees that had been standing when my grandparents were still figuring out how to tie their shoes.
Hardwood floors the color of aged whiskey, wide planks laid tight with the craftsmanship of people who understood that a floor was not decoration but foundation.
A stone fireplace on the far wall burning low, the flames casting long shadows across the timber and turning the air warm in a way that had nothing to do with the temperature and everything to do with the fact that fire in a stone hearth smells like something primordial you recognize in your bones before your brain catches up.
The bed was massive. Custom, obviously. The kind of bed that had been built for a man Braham’s size and then built again because the first version wasn’t quite right.
Deep charcoal linen, sheets that probably cost more than my laptop, pillows stacked in a configuration that suggested someone had thought very carefully about the geometry of sleep and decided that more was better.
Two leather chairs angled toward the tree line beyond the floor-to-ceiling glass, positioned close enough to the fire that the warmth reached both seats, far enough apart that two people could sit in them without touching unless they wanted to.
French doors stood open to a private balcony.
Beyond the glass, the silhouette of Douglas fir cut against a cloudy sky, black branches against deeper black, and the night air that came through carried pine and damp earth and the stillness of a forest that had been here longer than Portland had been a dot on a map.
The bathroom door was ajar. Stone tile was visible through the gap, and the edge of a soaking tub that looked like it had been carved from a single block of something expensive, and beyond it, the faint gleam of frameless glass where a rainfall shower waited.
The whole room smelled of wood smoke and cedar and the warm undercurrent I had stopped pretending I didn’t catalog.
That specific scent—Braham’s scent, layered into the timber and the stone and the linen the way a man’s presence works its way into a space when he’s been living in it long enough—cut through the blood and the pine resin still clinging to my skin from the gravel road, and I stood in the center of the floor and let it fill my lungs because the alternative was thinking about what came next.
I was not ready for that.
I looked around. At the bed. At the fire.
At the chairs positioned like an invitation.
At Braham standing in the doorway with his jacket off and his sleeves pushed up and the gash across his shoulder from the garage already closing the way wolf wounds do, pink and angry and half-healed in the span of hours that would have left a human bedridden for a week.
“I feel like I should be wearing a better shirt,” I said.
Braham closed the door. The latch clicked, soft and final, and he crossed the room with the unhurried pace of a man who had already decided how this ended and saw no reason to rush the middle.
He stopped close enough that the cedar-and-scotch smell of him cut through the wood smoke, and his gold eyes held mine with the steady certainty I had been collecting for three weeks and stubbornly refusing to name.
“You’re not wearing the shirt much longer,” he said.
Flat. Certain. The kind of statement that lived in the space between suggestion and fact and didn’t bother distinguishing between them.
I turned to look at him. His face was a map of damage I’d been avoiding inventory on—the split along his jaw where someone’s knuckles had connected, the bruising along his temple that the low light turned the color of old wine, the firm set of his mouth that happened when Braham Wolfe was holding something back and the holding was costing him.
“That’s very confident for a man whose face looks like that,” I said.
“Your face looks worse.”
“My face looks distinguished.” I touched the split lip gingerly. The butterfly closures pulled, and the sting was immediate and bright. “Rugged. Interesting. The kind of face that says ‘I’ve seen things’ and doesn’t feel the need to elaborate.”
“Jai.”
One word. My name in his mouth did the thing it always did—pulled tight somewhere below my sternum and released all at once, a wire snapping, the feeling traveling down my spine and settling somewhere I had stopped pretending I didn’t notice.
I dropped my hand.
“Yeah,” I said. “I know.”
The fire popped. An ember spiraled up the chimney, brief and bright, and the light caught the gold in his eyes and held there.
Braham’s hand found the small of my back—not pushing, guiding, the particular touch of a man who had decided that my ribs took precedence over whatever dramatic entrance I might have been planning—and steered me toward the leather chairs by the window before I could open my mouth and ruin the moment with something clever.