I cover her body with mine and push into her in one stroke. Deep. She gasps and her nails dig into my shoulders, and I hold there, letting her feel every inch, letting the fullness register before I move.
When I move, it's not slow. The headboard hits the wall on the first thrust and doesn't stop. She wraps her legs around me and takes it, meets it, her hips rising to match the pace I'm setting.
Someone put a photograph of a dead man in her car as a warning. Someone out there thinks they can touch what's mine and I'll stand down. They’re wrong.
I drive into her harder and she cries out and pulls me closer, and every sound she makes is proof they're wrong.
She comes again, clenching around me so tight my vision whites out, and I follow her over with my face buried in the curve of her neck, my body locked against hers, emptying myself into her like I can leave something behind that marks her from the inside out.
After. Her breathing against my collarbone. My weight on her, too heavy, but she holds me there when I try to shift.
"Stay," she says.
I stay.
She presses back into me, laces her fingers through mine, and the last thing I feel before I fall asleep is the beat of her pulse against my forearm, steady and alive and close.
Tomorrow we’ll move faster and chase Rainey Weathers across state lines. We’ll dig deeper into Thornton's operation and get the evidence to the one person who can turn it into a case.
Tonight, the photograph in my jacket pocket burns against the back of the chair where I hung it, and the woman in my arms is breathing, and that's the only thing keeping me from driving to Merrick's house and ending this with my bare hands.
9
KENNA
"This is a terrible idea," I say, for the third time in twenty minutes.
"You said that." Colt kills the truck lights and lets the engine idle to a stop. We're parked behind a stand of cottonwoods off the access road to Thornton Livestock's ranch, and the darkness out here is absolute.
"I keep saying it because it's still true. We should get Rainey's evidence first. We go to Creede, we find her, we build the case from the outside in. We don't break into the headquarters of the man who's been killing people."
"Thornton's hauling stock to the Tucson event. He left this afternoon, and his main crew went with him. The ranch will be skeleton staffed, and the office is a stand-alone building behind the main barn." He pulls a flashlight from under the seat. "We're not here to confront anyone. We're here to photograph what we can find and leave before anyone knows we were here."
"You rehearsed that."
"I drove four hours rehearsing it. Are you going to argue, or are you going to bring the camera?"
The dashboard light catches the line of his jaw and the cords of muscle in his neck, and my body reminds me unhelpfullythat those muscles flexed the same way when he had me pinned against the motel door.
I shut that down fast. We're about to break into a building owned by a man who kills people. Now is not the time to be distracted by Colt's neck.
I bring the camera, which is my phone camera since the actual camera equipment was taken with everything else. That's another reason this timeline is compressing: without my data, we're trying to rebuild from scratch, and the clock Merrick started when he sent that photograph is ticking.
The Thornton ranch sits in a shallow valley south of Albuquerque, accessible by a county road that hasn't been graded in years. The main house is dark. The stock barn is dark. The only light comes from a security lamp on the barn's exterior, throwing a cone of yellow across the gravel lot.
The office building is exactly where Colt said it would be: a prefab metal structure behind the barn, used for paperwork and scheduling. It has one door and two windows. There's no visible security beyond the barn's exterior light.
We move fast. Colt tries the door and finds it locked. He checks the windows. The second one slides up with a metallic groan, the latch rusted enough that a firm push pops it loose.
"Ranch offices," he says, boosting me through the frame. "Nobody maintains what they don't think anyone's looking at."
He follows me through, and we're inside. Colt clicks on the flashlight, keeping the beam low and angled toward the floor.
The office is small and cluttered. A metal desk is buried under paper, and two filing cabinets stand against the far wall alongside a wall calendar marked with event dates and stock assignments and a coffee maker with a brown ring inside the pot.
The air smells stale and trapped, like the door hasn't been opened in days.
Colt takes the filing cabinets. I take the desk.
