"Callie." My name in his mouth, broken, reverent, like he didn't know he was saying it. “Fucking hell.” I wrapped my legs around his waist, pulled him deeper, and we found a rhythm that was messy, urgent and perfect. His forehead dropped to my shoulder, his breath hot against my skin, and every thrust built the pressure inside me higher, tighter, a wave gathering force with nowhere to go but through me.
I could feel it coming. The tension coiling in my belly, my thighs, everywhere he was touching me. His hand slid between us, his thumb finding the exact right spot, and he worked me with the same devastating consistency he'd been using since the beginning. Steady, relentless, and utterly sure of what he was doing. The combination of his hand and his body inside me was too much. I was shaking, gripping his shoulders, my breath coming in sharp, broken gasps.
"Let go," he said against my ear. The same words he'd said last time, but the voice was different. Rougher. Darker. The voice of a man right on the edge himself. "I want to feel you. Come for me."
I shattered.
It hit me like a wave, starting where his body met mine and radiating outward, through my belly, my chest, the tips of my fingers. I came so hard I stopped breathing, my body clenching around him, my nails buried in his back, a sound tearing out of me that I didn't recognize as my own voice. It went on and on, pulsing through me in waves, and he kept moving, kept driving into me through it, extending it until I was gasping and oversensitive and trembling beneath him.
He followed me seconds later. His whole body went rigid, his hips pressed deep, and he came with his face buried in my neck, his breath searing against my skin. I felt him pulse inside me, felt the shudder that ran through his body, felt the exact moment the tension broke and he let go of everything he'd been carrying.
He stayed inside me. Dropped his weight onto me, careful, keeping some of it on his forearms, but enough that I could feel the solid reality of him pressing me into the mattress. His breathing was ragged against my neck. My fingers moved through his hair, slow, tracing the shape of his skull, feeling the dampness at his hairline.
Neither of us spoke. There was nothing to say that our bodies hadn't already said. The threat was still out there. The Jackals, the cop, the danger that had followed me to this town, this man and his bed. But in that moment, with the weight of him on me and the beat of his heart against mine and his breath slowing in the hollow of my neck, none of it could touch us.
He rolled to his side eventually, pulled me into him, my back against his chest, his arm heavy around my waist. His mouth found the place behind my ear and stayed there, warm, breathing me in.
I pressed back into him. Felt his arm tighten.
SIX
ANGEL
I left her sleeping.
It was still dark, maybe four in the morning, the compound quiet except for the wind in the pines and the occasional creak of the lodge settling around us. Callie was curled on her side in my bed, one hand resting on the sheet where my body had been. She'd sleep for a few more hours. I needed her to stay exactly where she was while I went and did what I'd been planning since we’d found out the Iron Jackals had shown up in Forsaken.
Ghost was already on the porch. Ghost operated on instinct, on some frequency the rest of us couldn't hear. He was standing in the dark with his hands in his jacket pockets and his face giving away nothing at all.
Hawk came out of the workshop thirty seconds later. He was carrying something under his jacket that I didn't ask about because I didn't need to. Hawk brought what Hawk thought was necessary and his judgment had never been wrong.
Duke, Razor and Priest were already by the bikes. Razor was rolling his neck the way he did before things got physical, slow, deliberate, cracking something loose. Duke had his game face on, the flat expression of a man who'd spent years as a cavalry scout reading terrain and killing distance. Doc was leaningagainst the workshop door, arms folded, watching the road. Rook was inside, doing whatever he needed to do. I trusted each and every one of these guys with my life.
"Two of them," Ghost said. "Staying at the motel on Route 12, outside Millbrook. Room nine. They've been rotating, riding into Forsaken during the day, back to the motel at night. Rook's been keeping tabs on them."
"Just two. Scouts. The rest of the chapter is back in Elk Ridge."
I nodded. Two scouts meant they hadn't committed. They were testing the water, seeing how much resistance they'd get, reporting back. Which meant the people who'd sent them, the cop or whoever was above the cop, hadn't decided yet whether Callie was worth a war. Good. That made this simple. We'd send a message they couldn't misread.
The motel was the kind of place that existed in every small town in Montana, a single-story strip of rooms behind a gravel parking lot, a blinking vacancy sign, a front office with the lights off. Two Harleys parked outside room nine. Iron Jackals saddlebags. No subtlety. These men weren't hiding.
Ghost went around back. Hawk and Razor posted at either end of the building, shadows against the walls, covering the parking lot and the road and anything that might come from any direction. The others stayed with the bikes, visible, Harleys lined up in a row so that when those two pricks came outside, the first thing they'd see was how badly they were outnumbered. I walked to room nine and knocked on the door.
Thirty seconds. Shuffling inside, a light coming on, the sound of someone swearing. The door opened and a man stood there, mid-thirties, shirtless, bleary-eyed, a Jackals tattoo across his collarbone. He saw me and his face changed. He didn't know who I was. But he knew what he was looking at. A man filling his doorway at five in the morning and who was not there to talk.
"Get your brother up," I said. "Outside. Now."
He could have argued. He could have reached for whatever was sitting on the nightstand behind him. He looked at my face and didn't do either. He woke the other one and they came outside in jeans and boots, no cuts, no weapons, standing in the gravel parking lot with the motel sign buzzing overhead and the mountains black against the sky behind them.
They saw the bikes first, then they saw the guys behind me and to the sides. Then they looked at me and understood that whatever they'd been sent here to do, it was over.
"You've been riding through my town," I said. "Asking about a woman. Sitting outside the diner, talking to people who don't want to talk to you, making a fucking nuisance of yourselves in a place you don’t belong in."
The first one, the one who'd opened the door, shifted his weight. His eyes kept moving, counting bodies, looking for exits. There weren't any.
"We're just passing through," he said with a smug smile.
"Shut up." I said it quietly. That was the thing about quiet. Shouting tells a man you've lost control. Quiet tells him you never lost it in the first place, and that's much worse. "You're here because someone sent you. A cop in Elk Ridge with blood on his hands and a secret he needs kept. He pointed you at a woman named Callie Mercer and told you to find her. So you rode into my fucking town, my territory, and started sniffing around like you had the right."
