Page 113 of What We Become

I hook my hands under her thighs and lift. She laughs, startled, and her legs lock around my waist on instinct while I take the stairs two at a time.

“Jesus,” Milo calls from the kitchen. “No fair, we just got home.”

“Claim jumpers,” Micah adds, laughing.

“Don’t break the banister,” Eli says.

Knox huffs.

Sage’s mouth is at my jaw, my throat, her breath warm and quick. “Now it’s starting to feel more like home.”

“Anywhere you are is home, wildcat.”

I carry her down the hall and kick the bedroom door shut behind us, setting her on the ground. The room still smells faintly wrong too—fresh linen, dustless surfaces, the sterile touch of strangers—but the second I press her against the closed door, it starts to belong to us again.

She grips my shirt in both fists, yanking me closer like she’s claiming territory, and I let her because right now, that’s exactly what I need—to feel her reclaiming this space, reclaiming me.

Her nails scrape lightly over my skin as she pulls the shirt up and off, tossing it somewhere behind us without breaking eye contact. Those gray eyes of hers are all heat and challenge, the kind that always hits me like a direct order to my blood.

I brace one hand against the door beside her head and lean in, my mouth finding the curve of her neck where her pulse jumps under my lips. I bite. She arches into it, a soft gasp escaping her, and I taste the faint salt of her skin, the heat of it against my tongue. “You’re going to kill me one of these days,” I murmur against her throat, my free hand sliding under the hem of her sweater—Eli’s sweater, I realize with a flicker of amusement that quickly turns possessive. It hangs loose on her frame, and I drag it up and off. She’s not wearing a bra.

“Not if you kill me first,” she whispers back, her fingers working at my belt with that deliberate focus she gets when she’s done playing. The buckle gives way, and she doesn’t hesitate, popping the button on my jeans and dragging the zipper down so slow, I grit my teeth. Her hand slips inside, wrapping around my cock with a confidence that sends a jolt straight through me. I’m already hard, and the way she strokes me—firm, unhurried—pulls a low groan from my throat that I can’t quite swallow.

“Wildcat,” I warn, but it comes out rough, more plea than command. I capture her mouth again, harder this time, my tongue sweeping in to taste her while I shove her leggings down her hips. She kicks them off without breaking the kiss, and then it’s just her bare against me, all that warm skin and the press of her body like she’s trying to merge us into one. I lift her again, easier this time, pinning her to the door with my hips as her legs wrap around my waist.

She rolls against me, deliberate friction that makes my vision haze at the edges, and I can feel how ready she is, slick and hot where we connect. “Now,” she breathes into my mouth, her nails digging into my shoulders. “Holden, please.”

I don’t make her wait. I shift, line myself up, and push in slow. Her breath catches halfway. Her nails stop moving on my shoulders. I file both, the way I file everything about her, because one day I’ll want the record. She moans, head falling back against the door, and I bury my face in her neck, setting a rhythm that’s deep and controlled at first, each stroke pulling another sound from her that goes straight to my gut.

The room fades—the sterile smell, the unfamiliar cleanness—replaced by us, by her scent and the salt of sweat and the way her breath hitches when I angle just right. I grip her thighs, holding her open, and pick up the pace, driving harder as her walls clench around me. She meets me each time, thrust for thrust.

“That’s it,” I mutter, voice gravel in my own ears. “Take what I give you.”

She does, her hands in my hair, pulling me closer as the pressure builds in both of us. I can feel her getting close, the way her moans turn ragged, her legs trembling around me, and it pushes me right to the edge. One more deep thrust, and she shatters, crying out my name as her body pulses hard, dragging me over with her. I follow with a groan, spilling into her, the release hitting harder than expected.

We stay like that for a minute, panting against the door, her forehead pressed to my shoulder while I catch my breath. Slowly, I pull out and lower her to the floor, but I don’t let go, keeping her steady as her legs wobble. She looks up at me with that post-orgasm haze in her eyes. “Welcome home,” she says, voice husky.

I huff a laugh, brushing a strand of hair from her face. “Yeah. Something like that.”

But even as the words leave me, the house settles back around us, still smelling like somebody else’s hands.

She gives me another kiss, then pads into the bathroom. The shower starts. I pull my jeans back up and stand at the bedroom window, looking at the street through the gap in the blinds.

Same street. Same mailbox. Same view I’ve had for years.

Nothing out of place.

I should feel relieved. Odin’s team swept the house. The cameras are live. The locks are new. The man who built a wall around my girlfriend is allegedly on a boat somewhere in the Atlantic.

Allegedly.

My years on the force have taught me not to believe in cold trails. Trails go cold when the person at the end of them wants you to stop looking. And Stephen—the man who sat in our girlfriend’s diner for six months without triggering a single alarm—is not the kind of man who disappears. He’s the kind who repositions.

I said a version of it to his face. Odin said possible but unlikely and moved on to her birthday, and I let him.

Behind me she starts humming in the shower.

So I’m at a window building a case I have no intention of filing.