Page 182 of Filled

Then I move. Long, deep strokes that make her feel every inch. She arches into each one, moans spilling out of her, and Eli catches her mouth in a kiss to drink them down. Cruz abandons her neck and works lower, his tongue mapping her stomach, sliding toward where we’re joined.

“Cruz,” I warn.

He grins up at me, wicked and unrepentant. “What? I’m helping.”

His mouth closes over her clit, and she clenches around me so hard I have to stop moving or lose it entirely. He works her with his tongue while I stay buried inside her, and the twin sensations wreck her fast.

Her thighs shake. Her heels dig into the mattress. “I can’t—I can’t?—”

“You can,” Eli tells her, low and certain. “Let go, princess.”

She comes with a scream Brady muffles behind his palm, her whole body shaking, her walls pulsing around me in waves that test every ounce of restraint I own.

I don’t stop. Don’t give her a second to land.

I keep the same slow rhythm while Cruz keeps his mouth on her, and within a minute she’s climbing again, oversensitive and overwhelmed, tears sliding into her hairline while she begs for a thing she can’t name. Eli takes one of her hands. Brady takes the other. They anchor her while Cruz and I take her apart.

“Too much—it’s too much?—”

“Color, baby,” I ask.

“Green. Green, don’t stop, don’t you dare?—”

The second orgasm hits harder than the first. She thrashes against the bed, against their hands, her voice breaking into sounds that stopped being words. I fuck her through every contraction, feel each pulse grip me, and when she finally goes limp I let myself chase my own end. It builds from the base of my spine and detonates, and I bury myself as deep as I can get and pour two weeks of grief and fear and want into her.

I pull out with care and collapse beside her, gathering her against my chest while aftershocks ripple through us both. Cruz presses in against her back. Eli and Brady fold around the edges until the pile has no borders, no way to tell where one of us ends and the next begins.

We breathe together in the dark.

Her voice finds the silence first. Small. Frayed. Stripped of everything.

“I love you. All of you. I need you to hear me say it while I’m not falling apart.”

Nobody moves. Nobody breathes.

“When Gerald came through my door with that knife, I wasn’t scared of dying.” Her fingers tighten in mine. “I was scared of dying without telling you one more time. You’re the only real family I’ve ever had, and I almost lost it, and I?—”

Cruz makes a sound against her back that might be a sob. Brady’s grip on her hand goes white-knuckled. Eli presses his forehead to hers and whispers a thing meant only for her.

I hold her tighter. This woman who survived a childhood designed to break her, who became the heart of a thing none of us knew we needed.

“You’re never losing us.” I say it into her hair, and I mean it like a vow. “We’re yours. All of us, completely, permanently. Whatever comes next, we face it together. The blackmailer, the trial, the gym. None of it touches this room. None of it touches what we built.”

“Promise,” she whispers.

“Promise,” four voices answer, stacked on top of each other.

We rest. We don’t sleep.

Cruz hardens against her back first and Dakota laughs, wet and startled and alive.

“Already?”

“Sweetheart, I’ve got two weeks of backlog. Blame Eli.”

“I’ll take that blame.” Eli’s voice carries a warmth I’ve never heard from him before this year. Before us.

Round three finds its own shape. Brady ends up between Cruz and me, and it takes patience and half a bottle of lube and Eli’s steady voice walking him through the stretch, but when he’s finally seated between us, taking both of us, he makes a noise I’llcarry to my grave. Dakota kneels beside him, one hand working herself, the other stroking his face.