LOGINEMBER’S POVThen she is gone, and the room lets its breath out, and I realize my hand is shaking around the fork.Knox takes it. The fork, then the hand. Pries my fingers open gently and folds them up in his.“I’m sorry,” he says. Low. Just for me. “She’s— she was always strange. Lonely kid, strange grown woman, in and out of this house her whole life with no one to tell her how to be around people. I didn’t think she’d—” He stops. His jaw works. “I should have warned you. I didn’t think. I’m sorry.”“It’s fine.” It isn’t fine. My skin still feels wrong where she’d touched it.“It’s not.” He brings my knuckles to his mouth. “But it will be. I’ll handle it. Not tonight. Tonight you eat something, because if you don’t, Marjorie cries, and I cannot take two crying women in one evening, I’m only one man.”He nudges my plate toward me, and the grin comes back, careful, coaxing, pulling me back from the cold place Hale put me in.“Eat. It’s good. She’s been cooking since Nathaniel called to
EMBER’S POVI just stare at her.I am desperately trying to find a polite, socially acceptable response to the fact that his cousin just asked about our sex life, but my brain has completely short-circuited.I don’t understand her gameplay. I don’t understand the rules of whatever twisted, psychological chess match she is playing, but the sheer, unblinking avidity in her eyes makes my skin crawl.Knox’s silverware hits the table with a sharp, violent crack.“Shut your fucking mouth, Hale.” His voice is laced with such a pure, creeping disgust that the temperature in the room instantly plummets. He looks genuinely repulsed by her. “If you ever speak about what happens behind my bedroom doors again, I will have you physically thrown out of this house.”Hale doesn’t even flinch. She just gives a little chiming laugh, completely unbothered by his rage.“Oh, don’t be a prude, Knoxie. We’re all adults here. I just want to know everything about the girl who finally caught you.” She tilts her
EMBER’S POVA scream rips out of my throat before I can stop it. I flinch violently backwards, clutching the towel to my chest, my wet shoulders hitting the tile.Knox goes from relaxed to instantly, terrifyingly lethal in a millisecond.A deafening, inhuman snarl tears out of him as he shoves me firmly behind his massive back.His muscles lock tight, his claws already tearing through his fingertips, ready to slaughter whoever is standing on the other side of that wood.And then the bathroom door opens.“I thought you two might be hungry!”I come about a foot off the floor.Knox’s arm clamps around me like a vice, a second snarl building in his chest, and there, standing fully in the open doorway, is Hale.Hands clasped under her chin, beaming at us through the steam like she’s wandered into a tea party.“Oh, goddess,” I exhale, the breath trembling out of me in a soft, shaky rush as my racing heart slams against my ribs.“What the fuck, Hale,” Knox growls, the words tearing out of hi
EMBER’S POVHe just keeps devouring me, messy and generous and so fucking hungry, until the coil in my belly snaps hard and I come with a sharp cry, back arching against the marble, my pussy pulsing around his tongue while he licks me through every shaking wave.My walls flutter around his tongue as I grind against his mouth, sobbing his name while he holds me steady and licks me through every aftershock.He rises before my knees can give out, catching me against his chest like I’m something he’ll never risk losing again.In one smooth motion he lifts me, my wet legs wrapping tight around his waist, and then he’s pushing into me — slow, so he can watch.The thick head of his cock stretches my pussy open inch by torturous inch while he holds my gaze, eyes dark and burning with something so much deeper than lust.He sinks in deep, never looking away, until he’s buried to the hilt and I’m gasping at how completely he fills me.He stays there, hips flush to mine, letting me feel every thi
EMBER’S POVSomething moved across his face.“Ember.”“She’s got days, Knox. I’m sure you know this already. Days! And I have a thing inside me that pulled my father back from the dead. I’m not going to sit on it and let her die in a clean little hospital room while I learn how to set a dinner table. I won’t.”“You nearly didn’t come back from it.” His voice drops flat, going the way it had on the runway. “Maurice. Sapphire took you completely — you were gone, Ember. Your eyes, your face, everything. The house was coming apart around us and I couldn’t reach you and I have never in my life been that afraid of anything. I burned my hands getting to you. I pulled you back through something I don’t even have a name for, and I still don’t know what would have happened if it hadn’t worked. And now, you want to do that again. On purpose. For someone who isn’t even—”“For my friend.” My eyes are stinging. “For the woman who took my hand in a hospital and made me eat ice cream and told me I de
EMBER’S POVHe carries me up the wide dark stairs, away from the line and the happy crying and the cousin with the frozen smile, into a part of the house that feels different the second we cross into it.Older. More majestic.He carries me over the threshold of the big double doors at the end of the hall, and finally sets me down on my feet just inside the doorway.His hands linger on my waist for a second, his mind already somewhere past talking.Then I actually look at the room, and my brain flat lines for real.It is bigger than the entire apartment Gale and I lived in.Not a room, a country. A bed you could lose a family in, a wall of black windows with the mountains stacked up behind the glass, a low fire already going in a fireplace big enough to stand in, and everywhere that soft expensive dark that doesn’t show off how much it cost because it doesn’t have to.“This is your room,” I say.“Our room.”“Knox, this is your room.” I turn in a slow circle. “I had a whole apartment sm
KNOX’S POVHe blinks, the picture of innocence. “I’m not sure I understand. I explained the purpose quite clearly at the beginning of the evening. Conflict resolution. Closure. An opportunity for all parties to—”“Bullshit.”The word is deadpan, and I see Logan’s head snap up, see Gale’s sobbing st
EMBER’S POVI slump back into my seat unconsciously, not realizing how rigidly I’d been holding myself until the tension drains away.Knox lifts our entwined hands to his lips and presses a kiss to my knuckles, his eyes on me.It slows the tightening in my chest. Loosens the knot that Harrison’s qu
EMBER’S POV“Because I saw you on the news.” His voice cracks again. “During a press conference. I saw you standing up there, speaking to the camera, saying five words they have haunted me every night. You are dead to me. And though it wasn’t directed at me, I felt it so much. I felt it down to my
EMBER’S POVMy mother stands in the doorway, draped in designer everything as always.A silk dress in garish emerald that probably cost more than she can actually afford. Jewelry dripping from her neck, her ears, her wrists, every piece fighting for attention.Hair and makeup done to perfection, no







