Page 137

I have a sharp nose, sharper than most—it’s how I read the world, the first sense I trust and the last to lie to me. And I have catalogued some extraordinary scents in my time: the specific perfume of my own fear, the copper of blood, the woodsmoke of a penthouse going up with a cheating man inside it.

My nose has mostly been an instrument of survival, an early-warning system for danger. Yet, this warm braided smell of four people and a shared small triumph, of banana and chocolate and the men I have somehow been given—my nose has no danger to flag in it at all.

It simply registers, for once, safety.

The smell of a place where nothing is about to hurt me.

I did not know a room could smell like that. I am not certain I have ever, in my whole splintered life, stood in one that did.

“You’re staring at the oven like it owes you money,” Riot observes, hooking his chin over my shoulder.

“I’m supervising the chemistry.”

“You’re emotional about muffins.”

“I will end you,” I inform him sweetly, and he kisses my flour-dusted cheek and does not stop grinning.

The timer goes off, shrill and triumphant, and Doc pulls the trays from the oven with a folded towel, and the four of us hover over them like surgeons over a successful patient while they cool just enough not to scald.

Then we each take one.

We break them open, the steam rising sweet, the chocolate gone molten in the warm crumb, and we blow on them with absurd synchronized care before the first careful bite.

I taste it.

And beam in delight.

“It’s—it’s actually good. It’s really good.”

“Moist,” Silas pronounces with grave approval, then catches my expression. “I will use the word and you will simply have to endure it.”

“Better than good,” Riot mumbles around an entire muffin he has not bothered to break open. “Gonna eat all ninety-something of these. Festival gets none.”

“The banana-to-chocolate ratio is correct,” Doc assesses, which from him is a standing ovation. “You did that. The ratio was your call.”

He says it pointedly, holding my gaze, making sure I hear the part underneath—that the good thing in our hands has my fingerprints on it, that I am not a passenger to my own success.

It is a small, deliberate kindness, the kind he specializes in, and it lands somewhere deep. I made something today. Something good, something whole, something people will eat and enjoy and never know was forged out of a panic attack and three insulting men. I have spent my life destroying things with great precision.

I had forgotten I could also build.

I glance at the single perfect tray of a dozen, then at the recipe still calling for the full festival haul, and I let out a slightly hysterical laugh. “Only ninety-four more to go.”

Riot groans. Silas claps his hands in genuine delight. Doc reaches for the flour with the grim resolve of a man committing to a long campaign.

I sit on the counter in the warm, sweet, flour-dusted chaos of it, watching my three impossible men roll up their sleeves to make ninety-four more muffins simply because I wanted to bring something to a town festival.

The realization settles over me soft, total, and undeniable.

I was never really anxious about the muffins.

I understand that now. I was anxious because I wanted it perfect—because perfection has always been the only control I trusted, the armor I built after a lifetime of having every imperfect thing used against me.

If I could just get the sequence exactly right, hold every variable in my own two hands, then nothing could go wrong, then no one could hurt me through the cracks. Control was never about muffins.

It was about survival.

But they didn’t take the control away to fix me, and they didn’t let me drown in it either. They simply stepped in beside me and shared the weight—handed the control back in pieces I could actually hold, showed me that a thing doesn’t have to be done perfectly or alone to come out beautiful.