Page 57 of Cold Ignition

He understood it now.

Rangi moved first.

He always did when it came to this—bridging distance, making the first contact feel inevitable instead of risky. His hand slid up Keanu’s arm, slow enough to be read, firm enough to be felt, fingers curling around muscle like he’d already decided this belonged to him.

“Will you let us have you?” Rangi murmured, voice low, warm, threaded with something that wasn’t quite teasing and wasn’t quite serious either.

Keanu huffed a quiet breath, something close to a laugh catching in it. “Only if you let me have you back.”

“Fuck yes,” Rangi said, leaning in and taking Keanu’s mouth with a deep kiss, licking into his mouth as Alexios made himself useful and began stripping him of his clothes. “God, I love the way you kiss.”

Alexios stepped in then, closing the distance with a different kind of certainty—less heat, more precision. He reached past Keanu to the wall panel and dimmed the lights another fraction.

The room shifted. Shadows deepened. Edges softened.

Everything narrowed to breath and touch and the space between three bodies that had stopped pretending this wasn’t going to happen.

“Look at me,” Alexios said.

Keanu did.

There was no hesitation now.

Alexios’s hand came to his waist, steady and grounding, while the other slid up the center of his naked chest—measured, deliberate, mapping him as if committing the terrain to memory. He didn’t rush. He didn’t take more than was given.

Rangi removed his clothes, and although Keanu really wanted to watch, he could not look away from Alexios.

“From here on out, it is not Rangi and Alexios and then you,” Alexios said quietly. “It is us, the three of us, equals. And we do not fucking walk away from each other or what we have”

The words weren’t a challenge.

They were an anchor.

Choice, laid out clean and undeniable.

Keanu felt it land and settle, something in him aligning with it instead of resisting. “I’m not walking away.”

Rangi’s grin flickered—sharp, satisfied, a flash of teeth that spoke of something more primal. “Yeah,” he murmured. “We know.”

Keanu groaned, arching his back when Alexios’s hand curled around the steep strength of his erection.

“Fuck, that feels so damn good,” he said.

He felt Rangi move behind him, pressing against his back, the hard steel of his own erection pushing into the taught muscles of Keanu’s ass, and he couldn’t help but push back against him

“Get on the bed.” Rangi rasped in his ear, not a command, but an invitation that carried weight.

Keanu answered by moving.

He turned to sit on the bed—one hand finding Rangi, the other Alexios—pulling them both onto the mattress with him as if the choice had been sitting in him all along, waiting for permission to surface.

Rangi’s mouth found his fast, certain, the contact hot and immediate, a low, approving sound vibrating through his chest as Keanu met him with equal force. There was nothing careful about it—no testing, no hesitation—just the collision of want that had been building for two long, deliberate days. His hands held Keanu’s face, tilting it and moving him to just the right angle for the depth of possession he wanted.

Keanu felt it everywhere.

In his chest.

In his hands tightening at Rangi’s back.