“Yes, yes Noah. Fuck me, fuck me hard.” I screamed as he pounded me.
The bedroom window was open. And I knew I was loud.
I knew Jason was right outside on that side of the house, and I definitely knew he was hearing every single scream of mine.
But instead of feeling shy or guilty about it, I felt a weird sort of satisfaction. I felt victorious. I had heard AND seen worse. Maybe tonight I could make Jason feel a tiny fragment of what I felt a year ago.
Noah was pounding me and my screams kept getting louder. I was gathering up a blissful orgasm and was just about to come, when I heard a loud noise outside.
Not Jason’s voice. This voice had a louder baritone, and a strong Latina accent. Then there was a crash, low and hard, and then Jason’s voice, sharp and commanding, cutting across it.
Noah stopped fucking me and froze in his position.
Jason. Jason could be in danger.
I pushed Noah away from me and ran to the window. I was completely naked but I didn’t care.
What I saw in the garden below turned the blood cold in my chest.
Two figures. One of them Jason, who had one man’s arm twisted behind his back and his knee on the ground. The other — a second figure, emerging from the shadow of the garden wall with something in his hand that caught the moonlight with the specific, unmistakable glint of metal.
Pablo Moreno.
Scarlett’s bodyguard.
At my garden gate, barely visible in the darkness beyond the motion light Jason had installed, a third figure stood watching — dark hair, straight as a blade, arms folded.
She had found me.
They were here.
CHAPTER 23
JASON
I was sitting outside my tent listening to Camila’s passionate screams crying out Noah’s name carry through the open window above me, and I had not moved.
She used to cry out my name with a similar passion, as she’d plead with me to keep going, begging me to take her from behind sometimes. She’d be sore and wasted from one orgasm after another, sweating from pleasure, her chest heaving, her nipples perked up, but would keep asking for more.
Now she was fucking another man in the room above me. And I deserved every sound of it.
That was the conclusion I had arrived at somewhere in the last hour, sitting on my equipment boxes in the warm night air with my hands loose between my knees. Not the defensive, self-justifying version of deserving — notI had my reasons, I was protecting her, I had no choice.Just the plain, unadorned fact.
The only woman I’d ever loved was fucking another man, and I was supposed to sit there and feel the full weight of that without flinching away from it.
So I sat with it.
I thought about a dim room on Deck 4. The camera blinking red in the dark. Camila in the doorway, so still, so absolutely still, before she turned and ran.
Forty-five minutes of video. She had watchedforty-five minutes.
I sat with every second of the sounds from the window above me and made myself understand, in the most concrete way, exactly what I had done to her. Maybe for the first time, I truly understood.
I was still sitting with it when the motion sensor went off.
The floodlights snapped on and I was already moving.
Two figures on top of the boundary wall, caught mid-climb in the sudden brightness — one dropping into the garden, the other a half-second behind. Both armed. I recognized the bodyguard from Scarlett’s messages, the one she’d called Pablo, heavyset and capable-looking.
