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Her ankles lock at the small of my back and pull me deeper, greedy, and I give her exactly what she asks for. One hand splays under her hips to change the angle, tilting her until every stroke drags where she needs it, and her head drops back against the wall, her mouth falling open on a sound with no shape to it. I catch that sound with my own mouth. I swallow it. I feed it back to her in a growl.

"There." Her nails bite my shoulders. "Right there, don't stop, don't you dare stop."

I don't. I set a rhythm she can't ride out or run from, relentless, my hips driving up into her while I hold her open and pinned and shaking against the only finished wall in this house I built for her. Sweat slicks between us. Her thighs clamp my sides. The wet slap of us fills the raw skeleton of the great room, obscene and perfect, and I have wanted this exact sound for three empty weeks.

"Mine," I growl. "Say it."

"Yours." She clenches around me, hard. "Yours, yours, always."

That word finishes me. She goes over again a heartbeat later, clamping down, dragging me with her, and I bury myself to the hilt and come with a roar that rattles the whole unfinished house.

We stay there. Locked together. Wrecked and heaving against the only wall I ever finished in this place.

I ease her down slow, keeping her upright with both hands until her knees find the job again. She sways into me anyway, boneless, and laughs against my sternum, a small used-up sound. I gather her flannel off the subfloor and drape it over her shoulders. I retrieve one of her boots from where it landed three feet away. Small acts. An Orc courts with them when the loud gestures run out.

"You made me lift my own beam," she mumbles into my skin, "and then you made me forget my own name against it. That's a lot of range for one afternoon."

"I set the beam." My hands map her spine, gentling. "You did the hard part alone for three weeks. All I did was walk back through a door I never should have walked out of."

She tips her face up. Her eyes are red-rimmed and blazing. "You're going to have to say the whole thing again. When I can hear it properly. Somewhere that isn't a wall."

"As many times as you need." I set my mouth to her damp temple. "I'll build it into the framing so you hear it every time the wind blows through."

"Don't leave again," she whispers into my neck.

I tighten my arms around her until there is no daylight left between us.

"Never," I promise. "This is home now. You're home. Wherever the frame's still bare, wherever the roof still leaks, we finish it together. You and me and a hundred years."

She goes quiet against my throat. Then she huffs a laugh into my skin, warm and unguarded, the first fully honest sound I've heard out of her in three weeks.

"For the record," she says, "the beam's still crooked."

I glance up. It is. Set true in the hangers, but the loft line above it runs a hair off level, the way a thing does when a stubborn woman raises it alone with the redirect rigged wrong.

"We'll shim it," I say. "In the morning."

"Together," she says.

"Together." I gather her up off her unsteady feet entirely, one arm under her knees, and carry her toward the air mattress in the corner, because morning is hours off and I have three weeks to make up for.

CHAPTER 33

JILLY

We finish the house the way we started it. Together. Except this time there's no ring light.

I make the calls the morning after, which is a strange way to describe an afternoon, since neither of us moves off that air mattress until noon. I ring the two sponsors still hanging on and I tell them the barndominium series is done. No finale. No reveal content. No grumpy orc content, ever again.

One of them threatens to sue. I laugh and hang up and it lands like taking off shoes two sizes too small. The other just goes quiet, then asks, almost human for a second, whether I'm okay. I tell her I've never been better. For once in six years of scripted answers, it's the truth.

"You just walked away from money," Oggan says from the doorway. He's got a mug of coffee in each hand. He passes me one. Sweetened exactly the way I like it, which he has never once asked about and somehow always gets right.

"I walked away from a leash." I sip. "There's a difference."

He grunts. It's his approving grunt. I've catalogued all his grunts now. Eleven distinct ones, and I love every single one.

We work.