Chapter 17
Skylar
I wake slowly, the way a body does when it’s finally stopped bracing for impact.
For a few seconds, I don’t open my eyes.
The nest is warm around us, blankets tucked close, pillows shifted out of whatever shape Emrys built last night and into whatever shape sleep decided we needed more.
His palm rests against my stomach, and one of his legs is thrown over mine like he’s claimed the space by accident.
Kade is behind me, broad and warm, one heavy arm draped across both of us.
Cedar and vanilla sit deep in the blankets with my own amber threaded through them, all of it settled enough that my body believes it before my brain gets there.
No one asks me to move. No one has shifted away in the night. No one woke up and decided this was too much.
That should feel less impossible.
Emrys stirs first, making a quiet sound against my chest before his fingers flex against my skin.
I slide my hand down his back, slow enough not to wake him all the way, and feel him settle again.
Kade’s breathing changes behind me a minute later, his arm tightening once around us in a silent check before his mouth brushes the back of my shoulder.
“Morning,” he says, voice rough.
Emrys lifts his head, eyes still heavy with sleep and curls smashed on one side. He looks from me to Kade like he’s checking that we’re both still here, and the sleepy satisfaction on his face does something dangerous to the center of my chest. “Bath,” he says.
I blink at him. “Good morning to you too.”
“The water will feel good.” He says it like that explains everything, then rubs his cheek against my chest before pushing himself up. “You both look like the nest tried to kill you.”
Kade’s hand slides to Emrys’s waist to steady him as he crawls over our legs. “The nest lacks discipline.”
“The nest has been through a lot,” Emrys says, offended on behalf of the pile of blankets he absolutely abused last night. “Don’t be rude to her.”
I sit up slowly, my back giving one hard complaint before it agrees to participate in the day. “I am not taking sides in a nest dispute before coffee.”
Emrys points toward the bathroom. “Bath first. Coffee after. I have spoken.”
Kade looks at me over Emrys’s shoulder, mouth almost curving. “He has spoken.”
Apparently that settles it.
The bathroom is too small for three men to move around easily, which does not stop any of us from trying.
Emrys starts the water, tests it with his wrist, then adds something from a small bottle that smells like cedar softened by sugar and warm spice.
Kade sits on the wide edge of the tub while it fills, one foot braced on the floor, tattoos dark over his chest and arms in the morning light.
He looks too large for the room and too comfortable in Emrys’s space, which is one more thing I’m not ready to examine directly.
Emrys climbs in first, sighing when the water reaches his hips.
He holds a hand out for me without looking embarrassed about it, and I take it because apparently this is where we are now.
I settle behind him with my back against the cool porcelain, his body between my legs, his spine warm against my chest. The tub is large enough for two comfortably and three if everyone accepts certain realities about knees, shoulders, and personal space.
Kade stays on the edge for a while, one hand resting on Emrys’s knee where it breaks the surface of the water.
Nothing happens, which is exactly why it matters.
No one reaches for more. No one turns the room into heat because heat would be easier than this.
Emrys leans back against me, his head tipped under my chin, and Kade’s thumb moves slowly over his knee while steam softens the window glass.
My hand rests low on Emrys’s stomach beneath the water.
Kade’s fingers brush mine once when he shifts, and neither of us pulls away.
The conversation starts in pieces. Emrys tells Kade that Clarence’s dog has apparently been upgraded from menace to assistant menace after stealing napkins from two tables and hiding under the front counter like a fugitive.
Kade listens with the slight curve at the corner of his mouth that means he is deeply amused and unwilling to reward anyone with a full laugh.
I tell them the station coffee machine has been making a sound like it wants to confess to something, and Emrys pats my wrist like I have suffered bravely.
“It’s a workplace hazard,” I say.
“It’s burned coffee, Noah,” he says, and then goes still against me.
The name hangs there, quiet and careful. Not a mistake, exactly. More like he found it in his hand and did not know if he was allowed to hold it yet.
Kade looks at me.
I feel the old reflex rise, not panic, not quite, but the familiar urge to turn the moment sideways before anyone can see what it means.
The name is not a secret in the legal sense.
It sits on documents if someone digs far enough.
But almost no one uses it. Not Reyes. Not the station.
Not anyone who knows me as Detective Grayson and lets that be enough.
Packs used it. The ones who actually knew me.
The ones I let close enough that leaving them hurt.
Emrys starts to pull away. “Sorry. I didn’t mean— I saw it on your ID when you…”
“It’s all right,” I say, and my voice comes out quieter than I expect. I lace my fingers through his under the water, holding him where he is. “Noah is fine. It’s just not a name most people know.”
His shoulders ease, but he doesn’t make a joke. He only turns his head enough to look at me. “Do you like it?”
I think about lying because that would be simpler, then let the truth stay small. “I do when it’s said by the right people.”
Emrys smiles, not big, not triumphant. Pleased in a way that makes my ribs feel too open. He leans back against me again, thumb brushing over my knuckles under the water, and Kade watches us with something unreadable moving through his face.
For a while, the only sound is water shifting and the city outside the window. Then Kade says, “My last pack used my first name at the end.”
Emrys goes very still against me.
Kade’s gaze stays on the water, his hand still resting on Emrys’s knee.
“Not when things were good. At the end. When they were tired of trying to get anything soft out of me. It happened slowly, one person at a time. Nobody slammed a door. Nobody made a speech. They just stopped expecting me to show up with anything except answers, plans, and a body to put between them and trouble.”
He tells it evenly. No self-pity. No request for comfort. That somehow makes it worse. Kade has always made restraint look like strength, but this is the underside of it, the part that cost him and kept costing him because he decided the cost was cleaner than asking anyone to stay.
“I thought the soft version of me was the liability,” he says. “If they saw how much I needed, how much it took to hold everything together, they would leave faster. So I made sure they never saw it. By the time I understood what I had done, they were already gone.”
Emrys’s fingers tighten around mine. I keep my other hand against his stomach, feeling his breath hitch beneath my palm.
Kade finally looks at me. There is no challenge in it. No deflection. Just the truth set down between us, waiting to see if anyone will step around it.
“They left because they couldn’t see you,” I say. “Not because of what they would’ve seen if they had.”
Kade goes still in that complete way he has, every part of him locked onto the words. For a second, I think I have gone too far. Then Emrys moves.
He sits up, water sliding down his chest, and reaches for Kade with both hands. Kade is twice his size and still somehow the one who looks caught when Emrys frames his face and pulls him down. Their foreheads touch. Emrys holds him there, thumbs moving slow along his jaw, and Kade lets him.
That is the thing. Not the confession. Not even the words. Kade lets himself be held.
His eyes close. His hand comes up, not to take control, only to cover one of Emrys’s wrists like he needs to feel the contact from both sides.
I sit behind Emrys with my hands resting lightly at his waist and watch the man who has been holding every room together put a little of his weight into someone else’s hands.
Amber opens under my skin, warmer than it has been in years.
No one speaks for a long time. Emrys keeps Kade’s face between his palms. Kade stays bent over the edge of the tub, forehead to forehead with him, breathing carefully through something that looks too deep to rush.
The water cools by degrees. My back aches against the porcelain. None of that matters enough to move.
Kade’s hand eventually shifts to the back of Emrys’s neck, steady and careful. “Sweetheart,” he says, voice low.
“I know,” Emrys whispers, though I do not know what he is answering.
Maybe he does. Maybe that is enough.
My phone rings from the living room.
The sound cuts through the room hard enough that Emrys flinches against me. Kade’s hand tightens once at the back of his neck before he lets go. The phone rings again, muffled through the bathroom door, and whatever softness had settled over the morning starts pulling back before I even stand.
“I have to get that,” I say.
Neither of them argues. Kade shifts off the edge of the tub and reaches for a towel without being asked. Emrys looks up at me from the water, eyes still too soft from what just happened, and I hate the way the case has already stepped between us.
The phone is still ringing when I cross the living room with a towel around my waist and water dripping down my back. Caldwell’s name lights the screen.
I answer on the third ring. “Grayson.”
Road noise comes through first, then Caldwell’s voice, clear and focused in the way it always gets when something has gone wrong. “You sound like I interrupted something.”
“You did,” I say, because I do not have it in me to lie this morning. “What do you have?”
“Vesper and Cardinal. I ran what you gave me against the task-force files. The overlap is real. Same shell structure, same routing patterns, same kind of laundering behavior we saw around Hex’s supply lines.”
I lean against the back of the couch, towel damp at my waist, and look toward the bathroom door.
Low voices carry from inside, Emrys saying something I can’t make out, Kade answering in that steady baritone that still sounds a little raw.
“Kade’s company files show the same spine.
The approaches to Rourke Securities, the Vesper donation overlap, the money moving before the latest request. They went after Kade because he wouldn’t give them client access. Then Emrys became the lever.”
“That tracks with what we’re seeing.” Caldwell’s road noise shifts, a turn signal clicking twice before it cuts off.
“The Vesper matters more than we thought. Before Hex was caught, the task force tracked him taking meetings there. Three confirmed. Maybe more. We never got a clean ID on who he met.”
My grip tightens on the phone. “You’re saying Hex was meeting someone tied into the same money pattern that just touched Rourke.”
“I’m saying Hex, Cardinal, the Vesper, and your assault case are no longer separate threads.”
The room seems to get colder despite the steam still on my skin. “Who was he meeting?”
“We don’t know yet.”
“Caldwell.”
“I know.” His voice flattens. “We are pulling the old hotel requests, but the first pass came back polished. Private events, donor traffic, several names hidden behind legal entities and staff accounts. Whoever he met knew how to use a hotel like that as cover.”
I close my eyes for one second. Behind the bathroom door, water moves. Emrys laughs softly at something Kade says, the sound gentle and half-broken from the morning we were having. I open my eyes again because I cannot afford to keep them closed.
“Why are you driving?” I ask.
Caldwell does not answer right away.
That is the answer before he says anything.
“Hex got out,” he says.
For a moment, I hear nothing else. Not the traffic on Caldwell’s end. Not the apartment. Not the water. Just those three words landing and taking the warmest part of the morning with them.
“When?”
“Last night. They are still piecing together how. It looks internal, or close enough to internal that the distinction might not matter. Someone moved resources, timing, access, all of it. The same network that kept feeding him while he was contained decided he was more useful out.”
My towel is cold against my skin now. My hair drips onto the floor. I stare at the coffee table, at the blanket still folded over the arm of the couch, at the evidence of a room where I had almost let myself believe the day could start softly and stay that way.
“He is tied to this,” I say.
“We do not have proof yet.”
“But you called me.”
“Yes.”
I look toward the bathroom again. Emrys is quiet now. Kade is too. They know something has changed even if they cannot hear the words. The pack is in the other room, warm and close and real enough that leaving it feels like tearing skin.
Caldwell keeps talking. Facility breach, timing, possible internal help, teams already moving. I should be writing it down. Instead, I stand in Emrys’s living room, dripping water onto the floor, holding the phone too tightly and listening to the case walk back into the apartment without knocking.
Hex is out.
The Vesper is no longer a loose overlap. Cardinal is no longer a separate shadow. The thing that touched Emrys, Kade, and the life we have barely started building has a door open somewhere and a man moving through it.
The bathroom door opens behind me.
I turn and find them standing there, Emrys wrapped in a towel with Kade behind him, one hand on his shoulder. Emrys takes one look at my face, and whatever question he was about to ask disappears.
“Skylar?” he whispers.
I lower the phone from my ear, Caldwell still talking against my palm, and force the words out because the morning is already over and they need to hear it from me.
“Hex got out.”