She’s coming. I feel her pussy start to spasm, the walls contracting around me in a desperate grip. She’s crying out my name, her body arching off the bed.
"Come for me," I roar. "Take all of it!"
Her control shatters, and for once she lets me see what it costs her to stay. I’m right behind her. I feel the pressure building, a white-hot tide. I give one final, bone-deep thrust and let go.
I come hard enough to leave me breathless. I come hard, shaking above her, the thin barrier between us the only practical thing I still remember. I groan, my forehead dropping to her shoulder as I empty myself.
I stay there, buried deep, as the world stops spinning. The silence that follows isn't the silence of the vault. It’s the silence of a man who has finally found home.
When I can move again, I gather her closer on the bed—she protests exactly none of it, arms looped around my neck, boneless and warm—on sheets that will smell like her from tonight until the end of the world, if I have any say in it.
"We should sleep," she murmurs.
"We should." I don’t stop kissing my way along her shoulder. The adrenaline is gone. What’s left is worse. Slower. Deeper. A want with no emergency attached to it, which means it’s just the truth.
The second time is quiet, half-wrapped in blankets, her breath going ragged and soft against my jaw, my name a whisperinstead of a scream, and it wrecks me more thoroughly than the wall did. Desperate, a man can excuse. This—the unhurried rock of her hips, her eyes open on mine in the dark, the small smile she gives me right before she comes apart with a sigh—this has no excuse at all.
This is a decision.
Afterward she sprawls across my chest like she conquered it, tracing one of the old scars on my hand without asking about it. Someday she’ll ask. Someday I’ll want to tell her.
"This one," she murmurs, half-asleep, tapping the crescent below my left thumb. Not someday. Tonight. Of course tonight—she has never once waited for a door to be opened.
“Giovanni. He was twelve.” The story comes easier than any story has ever come.
"First winter after the massacre. He put his fist through a window because the grief had nowhere else to go, and he wouldn't let anyone near it—screaming, feral, blood everywhere. So I sat on the floor across the room and told him I'd teach him to make it stop hurting if he came to me. He came. I stitched him with a sewing kit and shaking hands. Twenty years old. First patient who mattered more than my hands knew how to handle.”
"And the scar?"
“He bit me.” I feel her smile against my chest. “Twelve-year-olds fight dirty.”
“You’ve been holding this family together since you were barely old enough to know how,” she says softly, and it isn't pity—God, anything but that. She's just reading me, line by line, and staying anyway.
"Somebody had to."
"Mm." Her hand flattens over the scar, over my hand, holding it. “Somebody still does. But it’s a two-person job now. Non-negotiable.”
She's asleep before I can answer, which is its own mercy, because I don't trust my voice with what it wanted to say. I pull back just enough to look at her. She’s flushed, her breath coming in short, jagged puffs.
"You're bleeding again," she whispers, her hand moving to my shoulder where the glass nicked me.
I don't feel it. "It doesn't matter."
She wriggles out from under my arm, and before I can drag her back she's returning with the kit from my bathroom—the good one, the one I keep stocked for brothers who bleed on my floors—and she climbs back onto the bed and kneels over me with an expression I know too well because it's usually mine.
"Hold still."
"It's a nick, Amara."
"It's a hole in the man I intend to keep." She wets the gauze and starts cleaning the gash along my shoulder, and her hands—God, her hands. Steady. Unflinching. She doesn't wince at the torn skin, doesn't go pale at the blood the way people do.
She just works, thorough and gentle and a little furious, her braid falling over her shoulder, and something in my chest cracks open so wide I have to look at the ceiling.
I have spent my life being the hands: patching, stitching, holding pressure while everyone else falls apart. Years of taking care of this family, eleven of them inside Vane’s rot, and I can count on one finger the number of people who have ever taken care of me back.
She tapes the dressing down with a precision that would shame half the trauma nurses in Chicago, then presses her lips, feather-light, to the skin just above it.
"There," she says. "Try not to get shot before Thursday. I have plans for you."
