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The mattress is firm, the air smells faintly of gun oil and pine, and my arm is, yep, cuffed to the fucking headboard.

Of Holden’s bed.

I don’t scream. I don’t flinch. I don’t do any of the things a normal, functioning person would do when they wake up restrained in a prepper’s murder cave.

No. My brain? It goes one place.

Porn.

Like immediate, filthy, degenerate-level porn. I don’t even know what the plot is yet but my thighs are already trying to inch together. Because somewhere deep inside me, some chaos-coded piece of my DNA went yes please to being tied down by a stoic woodsman with rage issues and survivalist thighs.

And that’s when I see him.

Holden.

Sitting in the chair across from the bed like it’s a goddamn throne, his legs spread, his eyes locked on me. Beside him, he’s got a tray, coffee, eggs, toast cut into triangles like I’m a five-year-old or a feral raccoon he’s trying to lure into domesticity. In hands?

A knife.

And not just holding it. He’s sharpening it. Real slow. Blade against whetstone. Rhythmic and steady and just ominous enough to be hot.

He doesn’t say a word. Just watches me wake up. Watches me realize. Watches me look from the food to the cuffs to the knife and back to him.

And I swear to God, I feel my own pulse drop straight between my legs.

“You cuffed me,” I say, my voice all scratchy and low and wrecked.

His mouth curves, just a little. “Figured I’d return the favor.”

“You made me breakfast?” I ask.

“You like triangle toast,” he says.

I lick my lips. “You gonna kill me with that knife, Holden?”

He stands, slow and measured. Like he knows exactly what he’s doing with every inch of his body. He moves to the edge of the bed, and trails the flat of the blade, not the edge, just the cool, smooth steel, down my collarbone, between my breasts, slow as a sermon and twice as sinful.

“Only if you ask real nice,” he murmurs.

Jesus.

I whimper. Like an actual, involuntary whimper. Because I am so far gone for this man it’s embarrassing. It’s undignified. It’s deranged.

And also? It’s exactly the life I planned for.

He sets the knife aside. Then his hand slides between my legs like it belongs there, like he’s not even questioning it. Fingers press into me, find heat, find wet.

He lets out a low, rough sound in his throat. “You’re soaked,” he mutters. “From a knife and some triangle toast?”

“I have multiple kinks,” I say, breathless.

He strokes again. “You have something. Jesus.”

And just when I think we’re about to shift gears, just when my hips lift and my brain short-circuits and I think maybe I’ll let him slice the shirt off me like a sexy prepper lumberjack fantasy gone off the rails, the door opens.

“Morning,” Wade calls out casually, already halfway into the room. “I brought.” He stops, sees me chained, spread, and barely coherent.

Sees Holden knelt over me, hand still between my thighs.