Maddox’s hand found mine. He squeezed.
“You know where I stand,” he said quietly. “I’ve already been the one talking about it. I want you alive. I want the life. There’s nothing I won’t do to keep both of them.”
Four of them.
I looked at Dean.
He hadn’t uncrossed his arms. He was back against the wall, in the half-shadow, and for a long moment I thought he wasn’t going to speak.
Then he did.
“I’m in.” His voice was rough. “I was in the second I looked in your eyes back at that dive bar.”
“Dean...”
“Don’t.” He pushed off the wall, his eyes fixed on me. “I’m not letting you die. I’m not letting this realm take you because the magic wasn’t strong enough to hold. Whatever that means. Whatever it costs.”
He came across the room then, and he took my other hand. His fingers were cold but steady.
“I want the life too,” he said, quietly. “I want it with you. I want it with them. All of us. When this is done and you’re on the other side of it, I want the quiet years. I’m not walking away from that because I have to share a room.”
I was crying. Properly crying. The tears were running down my face and I hadn’t given them permission to start.
“Okay.” My voice cracked. “Okay.”
Maddox lifted my hand and pressed his lips to my knuckles. Dean brought his mouth to my temple and held it there. I could feel them all through the bond now, all five, and underneath the nervousness and the heat and the slightly stunned quality of having just agreed in principle to the strangest evening of our lives, there was something else.
Love. Enormous, unambiguous love. Five shades of it. Woven together and pulling me up.
Ryder finally spoke again.
“Right.” His voice was soft. “So. Practical question. When?”
I wiped my face with the back of my hand and laughed again, shaky.
“Tonight.”
Chapter Thirty-Six
Alyssa
We waited until nightfall. Not for any magical reason. We were making this up as we went along, but I doubted we’d need moonlight or ritual or any of the ceremonial trappings that the old courts would have insisted on. It felt more right that it just needed us, together, with enough privacy that the rest of the camp wouldn’t feel the shockwave of five courts’ worth of magic merging through one woman’s body.
The chamber was lit by soft firelight bouncing off the stone walls. Someone had brought furs and blankets, layering them over the bed, and the air smelled of the herbs that grew in the cracks between the floor tiles. Warm. Earthy. Alive.
Five men. One woman. A room that suddenly felt much smaller than it was.
The nervousness surprised me. I’d been with each of them individually. I’d even been with more than one of them before. I’d loved each of them separately, learned the particular geography of each body, discovered where they were sensitive and how they sounded when they lost control. But all of them at once was an intensity I’d never experienced.
“Stop thinking so hard.” Ryder’s voice, warm with amusement. He was leaning against the wall with his arms crossed and that crooked smile that meant he could see right through me. “You’ve got your battle-planning face on. This isn’t a military operation.”
“It’s a little bit of a military operation,” Tank said mildly from where he sat on the edge of the bed, and the unexpected joke startled a laugh out of me that broke the tension like a stone through glass.
“You’re all impossible,” I told them.
“And yet here we are,” Ryder said, pushing off the wall and crossing the room to me. His hands found my waist, light and sure. “Impossibly yours.”
He kissed me before I could respond. Slow, like he always kissed, with a sweetness that belied the storm he carried inside. His mouth was warm and tasted like the tea he’d been drinking. When his tongue touched mine I felt the Autumn bond spark to life between us. Not the full surge. A flicker. A promise of what was to come.
