I hold her because there’s nothing I’d rather do. I pin her hips to my mouth and drag her up the cliff she doesn’t know she’s still hanging from until she crests and shatters, breath yanked out of her, a sharp cry tearing through the quiet. I ride her through it, tasting every tremor, making sure her body relearns what safety feels like: me, here, unmovable.
When I crawl up her body, her eyes are back. Blown wide with pleasure and wet and furious. At the world, at me, at what was almost taken. Good. I want the fight back in her.
“Say it,” I breathe, caging her face in my hands. “Tell me where you are.”
“Here,” she whispers, voice raw. “With you.”
“Good girl.” I kiss the corner of her mouth and then the center, slow, deep, letting her taste herself on my tongue, letting her feel the control shifting—not away from her, not from me, but into the space we only make together.
“My wife,” I say against her mouth. “Mine to protect. Mine to pleasure. Mine to keep.” I pull back and drive in, slow at first, then harder, deeper, giving her exactly what her body demands. Her nails rake my shoulders while her legs lock at my waist. She lifts to meet every thrust like she’s trying to climb me from the inside.
I set my hand on her throat, not squeezing—just there, a brand of heat and promise. Her eyes flash, and I feel the choice spark through her like gunpowder ignited. She tilts her chin, daring me. I answer with force, hips snapping, rhythm turning punishing and precise, each stroke a reminder: she is alive and wanted and mine. Her composure fractures; the little soundsbecome raw and helpless. I shift her knee higher and find the angle that makes her arch and curse and forget the dark corridor and the smell of a van and the shape of a stranger’s hand.
“Eyes on me,” I growl. “It’s just us here. Don’t let anything else in. Just this. Just us.”
She holds my gaze while she falls apart—tightening around me, gasping my name like a vow. I don’t stop. I take her through the aftershocks and into another wave, and another, until there is only sweat and heat and the vicious drum of our hearts locked together.
When she’s shaking, I catch her wrists and pin them above her head, lacing our fingers, owning the give and take of her body while I own the night that tried to take her. “Say who you are.”
“Your wife,” she pants, wrecked and blazing. “Your—Cayce, please?—”
“Mine.” I slam into her, the word a sentence and a salvation. She breaks again, a long, ragged sound spilling out of her, and I follow, burying myself deep and coming hard, every muscle locked, every thought white-hot and singular: keep her.
We breathe there for a long beat, chests heaving, the world finally, blessedly quiet.
It’s only a short while later that I stand and pull the sheets up around her. She blinks up at me. “Where are you going?”
“Stay here for me,” I say, calm as the blade I’m about to take out into the dark. “I need you safe while I end this.”
Her pupils flare, and her gaze flicks to the side. “But what if—” She closes her eyes. Draw a deep breath. She nods once, fierce. “Okay, yes. Of course.”
I hesitate, then, reaching into the nightstand, I pull out a pair of cuffs that I ordered in case my kitten wanted to play. I fasten one cuff, then the other, to the headboard—soft leather, snug butnot brutal—then run a finger under each strap to check the fit. I tilt her chin up.
“Guard at the door. Stay here, kitten.” I kiss her hard, then softer. “I will come back to you after I destroy the last of these nightmares that haunt us.”
She swallows and lifts her bound hands like an offering. “Go, then,” she whispers. “End it.”
I drag the blanket up to her waist, press my mouth to the pulse in her wrist, then her sternum, then her lips. I step back and take one last look: my wife—flushed, cuffed, safe, fury banked to embers.
“Your uncle dies tonight,” I say, voice even. “And then this house will only ever know our happiness.”
I tuck a dagger and a gun, shoulder my coat, and leave the room with the quiet certainty of a man who is exactly what the world should fear.
Tiernan meets me at the back stairs with a dark expression and his phone in his hand.
“You sure,” he asks.
“Yes.”
“Rafferty’s already moving on the southside properties,” he says, and the way he avoids my eyes says he knows I told Raff to hold a piece back for me if anyone else got to him before I did.
“Good.”
We take the side door. The street air is November-clean. The car is running. I slide in; Tiernan drives. We don’t put music on. We don’t need any prayers for absolution.
Not for this. I’ve been haunted by the need for vengeance for years, and it’s finally come due. Absolution will ride hand in hand with that ghost until it’s laid to rest.
Halfway across town, my phone buzzes. Rafferty.
