A pause.
“I carried them out. All three. Two of them were already dead. Kowalski lived another six months.” His jaw works. “I called the breach because I was certain. Because I spoke. Because my words gave three men permission to walk into a burning building.”
His golden eyes come up.
“I stopped speaking in certainties after that. I stopped speaking unless there was nothing else.”
The porch holds.
“Ours was not a certainty.” His eyes move to me. Then to Jude. Then to Nick. “It was a choice. Choices do not require words. They require doing.” He crosses his arms over his chest. The posture he uses when a thing is settled. “I am choosing.”
Nick stares at him. Ten seconds. Fifteen.
“Nobody is asking you to be anything,” I say. “I am asking you to stay.”
He looks at me. The look is long and stripped of every layer of his authority until there is nothing left but the man who carried me out of that shed with his hand on my back. The man who is in love with a woman who will not be contained and is deciding whether love is enough to override every instinct he was raised on.
“If this goes wrong, it does not hurt just us. It hurts her.” He looks toward the front window of the cabin.
“Then we make sure it does not go wrong,” Jude says.
Nick looks at me. Dark eyes. Not soft. Accepting. The distance between those two things is enormous and he has crossed it in one exhale.
“I am not going to be good at this,” he says.
“I know.”
“I am going to be jealous. And possessive. And difficult.”
“I know that too.”
“And you still want this.”
“I wantyou,” I say. “All three of you. Jealousy and possessiveness and difficulty included. I am not looking for easy, Nick. I am looking for real.”
He stays with it. Then he nods. Once. The same sharp chin dip Jude gives. Brothers.
Rafe moves to my side. His hand finds mine. Fingers closing around my palm, his calluses dragging against my skin. The heat of it travels straight up my arm. The first time he has touched me in front of the other two. Not hidden. Not stolen.
Declared.
His thumb presses against my pulse point. Steady.
I look at the three of them. Nick against the porch railing, arms crossed, jaw tight, committed. Jude on the wooden steps, steady. Rafe beside me, his hand around mine.
This does not have a name. No word for what four people are building in a mountain cabin while a cartel boss hunts them and a child sleeps between them. No clause in the MC handbook. No precedent in the Costa family history. Three men who want the same woman and a woman who refuses to be divided.
It is new. It is terrifying.
It is the first thing I have chosen for myself since I kept a baby no one wanted in a compound full of people who told me I was stupid for keeping her.
I squeeze Rafe’s hand.
We step back inside the warm cabin. The lullaby ends, looping back to the first track. Tyra does not stir.
Nick pushes off the heavy front door and crosses to the bed. He stands over Tyra for a long moment. The sleeping child he read bedtime stories to through the intercom. The child he protected since she walked through the cabin door. Jude’s by blood. Nick’s by something that does not have a biological name but is written in every story read through static, every perimeter walked in the dark, every time he saiddo not leave the cabinwith the full weight of a man who would burn this mountain to keep her safe.
He reaches down and pulls the blanket higher over her shoulders. Tucks it around the grey wolf. His scarred hand against the fabric, careful and quiet.