"What the hell is this?"
My voice hits the suite, breaking the loaded silence. Three men, one doorway, and the air rearranging itself into something I didn't agree to breathe.
Miles stands closest. Blake leans against the far wall like a gargoyle, and Spencer holds the window with the city scattered behind him.
"How did you find out?" My nails dig crescents into my palms hard enough to draw blood. "Which one of you decided to bid on me like I'm livestock at a county fair?"
"I saw it." Blake's voice lands flat as concrete. "Your phone. The hallway. You dropped it screen-up and the site was open."
My stomach bottoms out so hard my knees negotiate with gravity. The entire religion of denial I built in a stairwell, demolished in six words.
"You said nothing." My jaw locks until my molars scream. "You picked up my phone, saw it, and handed it back like you were returning a pen."
"I told my brothers that night." No apology in his tone, no softening—just the blunt architecture of a man who has never confused honesty with kindness. "What I didn't do was tell you, because you would have run."
"I wanted to come to you immediately." Miles steps forward, hands open at his sides like someone approaching a lit fuse. "Blake wouldn't let me."
"And Spencer?" I turn to the window, where storm-blue eyes have been tracking me since I crossed the threshold. "What was your vote in this little boardroom meeting about my body?"
"Let her choose." His voice is low, unhurried, a hand pressed flat against the base of my spine from across the room. "But make sure we're on the other side of it."
"The bid was mine." Blake pushes off the wall. "The amount was Spencer's call."
"So this was—what? A group project?" My laugh comes out serrated, the sound of someone discovering the safety net was built by the people she was falling away from. "Three brothers purchase the half-blood janitor. Very philanthropic."
"It wasn't about purchasing anything." Miles's green-hazel eyes hold mine with a steadiness that makes my ribs compress. "It was about making sure nobody else did."
"I didn't need rescuing." The words come out through clenched teeth. "I had a plan. This was my decision and you hijacked it."
"Your plan was to let a stranger buy you." Blake's gaze doesn't waver. "Did you read the other bids, Bailee? Did you check a single profile?"
My silence answers for me. His jaw tightens like I've confirmed something that makes him want to put his fist through the suite's imported wallpaper.
"We couldn't sit there knowing what you were walking into." Miles runs a hand through his hair, cracking something open in his composure—underneath the warmth, something raw and barely held. "I couldn't."
"I saw your face today. In that corridor, hours ago." Spencer hasn't moved from the window, but his voice fills the room like smoke filling a sealed jar. "I'm not interested in pretending I don't know what I saw."
My throat works around a response that won't form, because his accuracy is a scalpel and I'm standing here without anaesthesia. I open my mouth to argue—and their scent hits me in the chest.
Not one scent. Three. Miles—warm, sun-soaked, something bright that wraps around my chest and pulls. Blake—cedar and cold metal, sharp enough to make my teeth ache. Spencer—woodsmoke and leather, settling at the base of my skull like a palm cupping the back of my neck.
Together in this closed room, the three of them are a frequency my body has been tuned to without permission. My skin flushes from collarbones to hairline, heat spreading in waves I can't suppress or redirect.
My pulse feels visible—jumping at my throat, my wrists, the insides of my elbows. Something behind my eyes burns toward gold, and every cell I own stages a mutiny against the woman trying to hold this argument together.
"Are you okay?" Miles tilts his head, his mouth caught between concern and something thoroughly insufferable. "You look—"
"Fine." My voice comes out strangled, two octaves wrong. "Continue the interrogation."
"You don't smell fine." Blake watches me from across the room, grey eyes cataloguing every flushed inch with clinical precision. "Your scent's changed three times since you walked in."
"That's none of your business." My lungs stall. His honesty is worse than cruelty—I can't build a wall against someone simply stating what's true.
"It's a pheromone response." Spencer says it direct, unadorned, devastating. "Your wolf side recognises us. It's not something you can override."
"My wolf side can go to hell." The gold in my eyes flares, and all three of them track the shift like predators registering a frequency only they can hear.
"For someone who can't shift, your eyes are remarkably opinionated." Miles's voice softens into something warm that makes me want to throw a lamp at his beautiful, insufferable face.
"Don't." I point a finger that trembles against my will. "Don't you dare enjoy this."
Blake doesn't speak. He watches me argue while my body writes a counter-argument across every visible inch of skin, and his mouth shifts by a millimetre—the most satisfaction I've ever seen him permit himself.
Spencer holds my gaze across the room and lets the silence fill with everything neither of us is saying. No teasing, no commentary—just those storm-blue eyes and the unhurried certainty of a man who already knows what I haven't admitted yet.
"The money is yours regardless." Miles breaks the silence, and every trace of amusement has left his face. "Walk out right now and the payment clears by morning. No conditions. No strings."
"He means it." Blake uncrosses his arms, palms flat against the wall behind him. "So do I."
"So do I." Spencer's gaze doesn't release mine. "But I'd rather you stayed."
The room holds its breath. My coat is still on, the door still unlocked, every rational calculation I own pointing toward the hallway and the cold street beyond.
My mother's surgery, the deposit, the heartbeat I'm trying to buy more time for—all of it handled whether I stay or go. They've made that surgically clear, and the clarity changes the math entirely.
Because without the money as a reason, all that's left is the question underneath—the one I've been dodging since Miles said my name in an atrium, since Blake caught my phone, since Spencer tracked my scent in a corridor and called it fear.
"Why." The word comes out hoarse, scraped from somewhere below my voice. "Why does it matter if I stay."
"Because nobody's asked you that before." Miles steps closer, close enough that his scent blankets my chest and my ribs crack open against every standing order. "What you actually want. Not what you need, not what you're willing to endure—what you want."
My hand finds the door handle behind me. The metal is cool against my burning palm, and I grip it like the last rung of a ladder I've been climbing my whole life. Three men, three scents, three sets of eyes waiting for an answer I've never been asked to give.
My fingers open. The handle clicks softly back into place, and the sound is the loudest thing in the room.
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