When do you want to have it.
My words. My decision. The Costa woman who spent five years being sidelined from every conversation that mattered is the one calling this meeting. The irony is not lost on me.
Jude does not answer immediately. He looks at the intercom on the kitchen counter. Then at the front door. Then back at me.
“Not without them,” he says. “All four of us. Or the conversation does not count.”
I nod. The same conclusion I reached thirty seconds before he said it. A surgeon and a cartel princess running the same equation and arriving at the same answer. We cannot decide the shape of this without the other two men in the room. Whatever this is. Whatever it becomes.
Tyra shifts in her sleep. The grey wolf adjusts with her, one worn ear flopping across her cheek. The lullaby cycles to a newtrack. Something with piano. Soft enough to be ambient. Present enough to remind us that the child at the center of this equation is ten inches away and sleeping through the most important night of her life.
I sit on my side of the bed. Jude sits on his. We do not touch. We do not talk. We wait.
My mind runs scenarios the way it always does under pressure.
Nick walks in, hears that Tyra is Jude’s, and his claim becomes a territorial line in the sand. Commander’s authority. First claim holds. The MC code.
Or Nick walks in, hears the truth, and burns the code the way he burned the mission.
Then there is Rafe.
Rafe. The golden-eyed beast who didn’t wait for an invitation. He was the first to claim the space between my thighs, his mouth silent but his body screaming worship. I can still feel the ghost of that bearskin rug against my spine and the weight of him as he drove his cock into me, stretching me wide, filling me until I was nothing but a vessel for his seed.
Then Nick, who took me in the shed with the roar of the generator drowning out the sounds of my pussy slapping against his thighs as he claimed me like a conqueror. And Jude, the surgeon, who used the shower spray to slick my walls before sliding home with a precision that made me scream for more.
Three men. Three cocks that have marked me from the inside out. I want all three of them. I don’t have a word for what that makes me.
The Costa compound had several. None of them were kind.
I am not in the compound anymore.
The front door opens.
Heavy boots. Cold air. Then Nick, filling the doorframe the way he fills every space. His dark eyes sweep the room in one operational pass. Threat assessment. Tyra asleep. Grey wolf in place. Jude on the edge of the bed. Me on the other side.
He reads the charge between Jude and me in half a second.
“What happened.”
Not a question. Nick does not ask.
I look at Jude. He nods once. He speaks.
Flat. Clinical. Three sentences with zero performance.
“Lucia and I met five years ago. On a flight from Chicago to Montana. Tyra is my daughter.”
The room empties of oxygen.
Nick does not move. His body goes still the way a predator goes still before it decides whether to fight or recalculate. His jaw works once. Twice. His gaze moves from Jude to me to Tyra to Jude.
The silence lasts eight seconds. I count them.
“Not here,” Nick says. He looks at Tyra sleeping ten inches away. His voice drops to the register he uses when the mission parameters have shifted and the new plan is still assembling. “She’s asleep.”
He opens the front door. Cold mountain air floods the room.
“Outside.”