I sit up.
A few photos of Senator Hargrove flash on the screen in quick succession and then cut to footage of the senator being led through a crowd in handcuffs.
“Hey!” Wyatt calls out. “We’re live! It’s on the news!”
He turns up the volume.
“—breaking tonight, Senator John Hargrove taken into custody earlier this evening following the unsealing of a federal indictment. Sources confirm the charges include racketeering, conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and multiple counts related to money laundering…”
By the time Jake and Damian come tramping up the stairs, the arrest footage is looping again. Two agents guiding him out toward a black SUV with their hands on his elbows, handcuffs glinting at his wrists. People with cameras shouting questions. This time the footage runs longer and I catch another man being brought out in handcuffs behind Hargrove. Neat but frumpy, tie slightly off, jacket a little wrong in the shoulders.
Adrian Mercer.
Jake’s phone buzzes and he lifts it quickly.
“Both are in custody,” Jake reads. “Ryder says DOJ’s folding everything together and Hargrove won’t post bail. He’s being charged federally, no deals.”
The footage cuts to a still image of Hargrove again, the word INDICTED stamped across the bottom of the screen.
The sound from the TV continues, Jake and Damian and Wyatt talking excitedly over it, but all the noise blurs and goes distant. I watch the replay of Hargrove being marched out like that in handcuffs and all I can hear are his words that night in the hotel.I want to be the reason you never look at yourself the same again.
Wyatt reaches for my hand, taking it in his big, warm grip, and the touch brings me back down to earth. I look up at him, at the carved line of his profile, then over at Jake and Damian. I think about Ryder, miles away in Washington, DC, putting the last signatures on a file that ends Hargrove. They’d wanted me to come. Keystone wanted to meet the witness who could link the video footage and coded terms with names and faces and activities, and Ryder had refused.You’ve done enough, he said.This is over for you.
Hargrove came for me. He thought he could have me, assumed I was his for the taking just because he wanted me, and Billy served me up on a platter.
But these men—my men—had taken the entire network out from top to bottom. Silas dead, Billy dead, Hargrove and his aide in jail. No more collar around my neck and no more impossible choices. I lean over and rest my head on Wyatt’s shoulder and sigh.
It’s over.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
WYATT’S CEILING HAS a water stain that used to look like a piston head—round, with a distinctive notch in the side. Now it’s just a softly diffused blob, spread wider over time, the edges feathered and indistinct.
I used to stare at it when I slept here alone, many months and another lifetime ago. Wyatt would be off doing his “mysterious work”—work I now know was infiltrating the very motorcycle club I’d escaped from—and he’d let me stay up here in his apartment while he was away, because it was more comfortable than my makeshift bed in the storage room downstairs. I remember clearly, embarrassingly, how much I loved the way the sheets smelled faintly of him, even washed and overpowered by detergent. Even then I had wanted to be close to him. But the idea that I would ever be here, curled up against him naked, with his arm heavy around my waist and his breath warm at my shoulder, would have felt outrageous and shocking.
How much things have changed since then.
I’ve been awake for a little while, staring at the ceiling, when Wyatt’s alarm goes off. He swings his arm over to the nightstand to silence his phone with a grace of motion he wouldn’t have managed several months ago, before his ribs healed fully and pain stopped dictating his movements.
Working at Leathernecks has always been special to me. I love my job here. But cozy in bed with Wyatt, my body stillthrumming from the night before, the last thing I want to do is leave the warmth of his body and get up and go downstairs.
And clearly Wyatt feels the same, because he drops his arm back over me and pulls me in close with a growl, pressing his hips forward until the hard weight of his erection nudges against my hip unabashedly. The evidence of his arousal sends a sharp pull of heat straight through my belly.
Wyatt slides a warm, broad palm up my thigh suggestively, and my body responds easily, desire humming through my bones, even after all the ways it was satisfied last night. We don’t share a bed every night the way we did in the clubhouse, and now when we do, I can’t get enough of him.
I move closer, fitting myself against him, and hook my knee over his, tucking my foot under his calf. He exhales through his nose, pressing his erection against me deliberately, and then lifts himself up an elbow and kisses me, soft and lazy and unhurried. It’s the kind of kiss that implies we have all the time in the world, even though we don’t. His tongue strokes mine slowly, and I make a low sound I don’t bother swallowing because we’re alone up here.
He pulls back just enough to look at me, his blue eyes gone dark in that way that automatically coaxes a response out of me.
“God, I want to fuck you all over again,” he murmurs.
“Do we have time?”
He shrugs. “I’m the boss.”
I laugh and slide my hand down his chest, over the hard planes of muscle, feeling him tense and shudder under my touch.
“Then fuck me,” I say.
