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I feel good.

Really-fucking-good.

My body isn’t wound tight. My mind isn’t already running through exits, threats, and everything that could go sideways before breakfast. Even my siren is settled, the hum beneath my skin falling into the same easy rhythm as the low vibration coming from Carnage behind me.

I lie here for another few seconds, almost suspicious of how fucking comfortable I am.

I don’t do mornings like this.

I don’t wake up in someone else’s bed.

I definitely don’t wake up wrapped in a man I barely know and immediately decide moving would be the worst idea I’ve had all week.

Yet here I fucking am.

Twelve years of moving before sunrise taught me that staying still costs more than it earns, that a bed shared too long becomes a cage with a door someone else controls. I learned to slip free of arms before they tightened, to be gone before anyone woke enough to notice, and somewhere along that education I convinced myself waking up wrapped around another person was a weakness I’d trained out of my body.

Except here I am, tucked against Carnage’s chest with his arm heavy around my waist. Apparently, every survival instinct I’ve spent years sharpening has decided this is a perfectly acceptable place to stay.

I count the ways I could leave… the window, the door, the three feet of floor between his bed and the hallway I could cross without waking him if I move carefully enough. My mind runs the calculation out of habit, the same way it always has, sorting exits the way other people sort grocery lists.

But I don’t move toward any of them.

His arm tightens around me instead, pulling me a little closer as his fingers shift against my hip, and I go still.

Not because I want him to move them.

Mostly because I really fucking don’t.

This is usually the point where I leave. Before morning turns whatever happened the night before into something that needs discussing. Before somebody starts looking at me like waking up together means we owe each other something. I’ve always been good at getting out before any of that has a chance to happen.

Except Carnage is still asleep behind me, and instead of looking for my jeans, I’m lying here wondering how long I can get away with staying exactly where I am.

His breathing changes against the back of my neck.

Shit.

I feel the second he wakes.

My siren stirs beneath my ribs first, reacting to the change in him as sleep loosens its hold. His hand stops against my hip, and for a second neither of us moves.

I have no fucking idea what happens now, so I turn carefully in his arms.

His amber eyes meet mine. His hair is a mess, flattened on one side and sticking up on the other, and there’s something so unexpectedly normal about seeing him like this that my nerves ease before I can stop them. No leather cut, no clubhouse full of brothers, no hellhound pushing behind his eyes, or anger over the voice ripped out of him.

Just Carnage.

His gaze moves over my face before settling on my eyes again, and I wait for the awkwardness.

For him to pull his arm away.

For one of us to suddenly become very interested in getting dressed.

For anything that tells me last night belonged to last night and morning changes things.

His thumb brushes my hip instead.

Once.