My hand finds the cold half of the sheet behind me before my brain catches up, before I remember the kiss in the dark and Bane's mouth at my ear andI have to be gone before you wake up. My fingers close around nothing. The pillow that should be Bane is just a pillow.
Something in my chest clenches.
He told you.
I close my eyes. Try to breathe past it. Try to remember what he said—you're not going to be without me again, that's a fact now, this thing in your chest, that's me—and—
Oh.
Oh, there.
It hits me before I've even gone looking.
A warm bright thread, thrumming low in my sternum. Bane. Not in this bed but in me. A pulse that isn't mine but lives next to mine now, steady, present, awake. I press my hand flat over my chest and the thread pulses back into my palm like a small kept secret.
Underneath it, two more.
Atlas, deeper. A weight at the base of my skull, the same weight I've worn for weeks without naming. The one that keptme upright when my body was trying to come apart at the seams. Anchor.
And Zero. A bright filament, somewhere in the house already, awake. A match kept lit in the dark. He's downstairs—I can almost feel the direction of him, the floor under him, the room.
Three.
I lie there. Sore. Naked. Marked. Smiling at the ceiling.
Mine.
I lift the sheet.
My body is a wreck. Bruises on my hips in the shape of fingers, dark on the bone where Bane's grip went tight when he was about to come. Slick dried on the inside of my thighs, sticky and cool. The deep low ache between my legs that says something thick was in me for a long time and didn't want to come out. My throat scraped raw from Atlas. The corners of my mouth chapped.
I lift my hand to my neck.
The bonding mark is right there—a clean half-moon at the junction of my shoulder, the skin around it warm and tender. I press it lightly with my fingertips and the thread Bane left in my chest answers—a small electric sweetness running down my spine, pooling low in my belly. I gasp out loud. Press it again on purpose. Same shiver. Same heat blooming under my navel.
Oh.
I am going to have to learn what that does to me. I am going to have to be careful where I press.
The other two marks live a little further down—Atlas's near the base of my throat, fully healed into the rest of my skin, Zero's near my pulse point, almost a scar. I press Atlas's. The answering thrum is slower, deeper, a settling instead of a sparking. I press Zero's. Bright flicker, like a wick taking flame, then steady.
I lie there a long time.
Naked. Sore. Thoroughly, repeatedly fucked. Marked by all three of them. Loved.
Usually by now I've done the math.
How many hours of sleep I got. How many hours till I have to fake okay. Where the pill bottle is. What's about to be hard about today. How long until Linda resurfaces in my mind.
I haven't done any of it.
I'm just lying here. Naked. Stupid with it. Sore in places I didn't know had nerves.
Happy.
I think I'mhappy.
I don't know what to do with that.
