Three men chose me.
Two of them share my bed.
The third has watched me from behind a shut door since the night I walked in bleeding. He has wanted me every night since. He has never once reached, and I have never once knocked.
That door is about to open.
All the way.
For the first time since I was fifteen, I have a home. Ronan, who holds my whole weight like it's nothing. Tiernan, who talks me out of my own head and never stops. And Cormac, down the hall, with the lamp still burning. The war is won, and still I stand in my warm kitchen at four in the morning, counting the exits. Nobody warns you that when the running ends, you're a woman with nothing to be afraid of and no idea what to do with her hands.
Then a photograph arrives before dawn. A stolen boy on a ferry. On his shoulder, a hand that walked out of my family's fire and was never charged.
The man who holds him isn't Doyle. Doyle killed for meaning. Fearghal Mahon invoices. He doesn't want the boy. He wants what the boy is worth, and he's patient, and he's cheap, and he's the first hunter I've ever met who reads people the way I do.
I can't outplay him. The boy in that box is me at fifteen, back to a wall, counting exits. The only way to reach a child who trusts no warm room is to finally walk all the way into mine. All three doors. Even the one that never opens.
Especially that one.
It's the whole door or the cold.
