Page 67 of Make Them Pay

“I need you,” she says.

“You’ve got me.” I push into her slow and deep, watching her face the whole time. The heat of her around me is perfect. Tight. Familiar now and still brand new. “Fuck, Enley. You feel like home.”

I move with deliberate, deep strokes, keeping the pace unhurried even when every instinct wants to go harder. My mouth finds her neck, her ear, the soft spot just below it.

“I’ve been starving for this,” I tell her, voice rough against her skin. “Starving to get you under me, soft and open, and show you exactly how deep this goes. How much I love you. Wanted to take you slow and thorough until the only thing left in your head is me.”

She meets every thrust, hands sliding down my back, nails lightly scoring my skin. The pleasure builds steady and intense between us.

“Come with me,” I say against her mouth. “I want to feel it. Want to feel you break for me while I’m buried inside you.”

She does. The second orgasm hits her harder than the first, and the way she clenches around me pulls me right over the edge with her. I bury myself deep and come with a low groan, forehead pressed to hers, both of us shaking.

We stay like that for a long time, breathing together, bodies still joined. Eventually I ease out of her and pull the quilt over us. She curls against my side like she’s been doing it for years.

26

Enley

The nightmares come on the third night at the lake cabin.

I should've expected them. The body keeps score. It holds on to every image the mind pushes aside because there's no room for it in the middle of a crisis. Then, when the danger finally eases, it presents the bill at three in the morning with all the subtlety of a fire alarm.

The first nightmare is the warehouse. When Render rescued me. He moved through in less than half a minute, putting down three men with the cold efficiency of someone checking items off a list. In the dream I'm watching from above, like a camera on the ceiling, and every detail is sharp. The way the first guard's knees give out. The flash of the knife under the fluorescent lights. The sound the third man makes when he goes over the railing.

I wake with my heart racing and Render's arm solid around my waist. Moonlight from the lake comes through the window in a soft silver wash. He doesn't stir. The fever and the ten days of almost no sleep have finally caught up with him, and for the first time since I've known him he sleeps deeply enough that my sudden waking doesn't pull him out of it.

I lie still and count my heartbeats the way I did in the container. Not because I need to. Because the habit is still there, running in the background like old code that never got deleted.

The second nightmare comes about an hour later. This one is the facility. The stairwell. I'm not watching from above this time. I'm in it. The radio’s in my ear and I can hear everything: gunfire, boots on concrete, Diaz calling positions, Knight's breathing. But in the dream the sounds are wrong. Too loud. Too close. And when Render's voice comes through saying he’s got Poe, it doesn't stop. It keeps describing what's in the lower corridors with a clinical detail I never had during the real operation.

In the dream I'm not behind the shed. I'm in the corridor. And what I see there are the things that happened in the rooms Poe still doesn't talk about. The chair with the chains. The drain in the floor. The tools on the table that Serafina’s men used with the patience of men getting paid by the hour.

I wake again. Render's arm is still around me. The moonlight hasn't moved. My face is wet.

This time I get up.

The cabin is small enough that getting up means walking five steps to the kitchen counter. I pour water from the jug Sawyer stocked and drink it standing at the window, looking out at the lake. At this hour the water is black glass reflecting a sky full of stars the city never lets you see. Beautiful. Completely indifferent.

I've been part of violence now.

Not the distant kind you read about or watch on a screen. The kind that happens in rooms you're connected to by a radio. The kind where you hear the shots and know that each one is a decision someone made about another person's right to keep existing. And the person making that decision is someone you love. The love doesn't make the decision smaller. It makes it heavier.

Render killed people in that warehouse to save me. He would've killed in the facility if the operation had required it. He carries a weapon the way most people carry a phone, with the quiet, constant awareness that it might be needed at any moment.

I've accepted this about him. I accepted it the first night in the cabin when I set my conditions and chose to stay. I accepted it in the storage unit when he loaded magazines at the table with the calm precision of someone doing routine maintenance. I accepted it during the breach when his voice in my ear described the extraction with the controlled calm of a man who moves through violence the way I move through code.

But understanding something in your head and living with it in your chest are two different things. The understanding came the moment I realized who Render is and what the crew does. The living-with-it part is happening now, at four in the morning, in a cabin by a lake, while the man who killed for me sleeps in a bed I just left because the dreams he doesn't know about are showing me what that killing looked like from angles I was never supposed to see.

I don't regret any of it. That's the part that sits heaviest. I don't wish he'd been gentler in the warehouse. I don't wish the facility breach had been bloodless. Different choices would've meant Poe in a cell longer, the crew in chains longer, Serafina free longer. The violence was the cost, and the cost was worth paying.

But I still have to live with it. The images. The sounds. The knowledge that the world I've chosen to be part of, the one Poe kept me out of, includes rooms with drains in the floor and corridors that smell like gunpowder and people who stop being people in the time it takes a suppressed round to cross a dark hallway.

The lake doesn't care about any of this. The stars don't care. The moonlight lands on the quilt, on Render's shoulder, and on the floor where his boots sit neatly beside the bed because even in a room with no threats he keeps them within reach.

I go back to bed and slide under the quilt. His arm finds me automatically, settling around my waist with the unconscious certainty of a body that’s already learned where mine belongs. Even in the deep recovery sleep the fever earned him, some part of him is still tracking me. Confirming I'm here. Confirming I'm safe. Confirming the distance between us is measured in inches of warm sheet instead of feet of cold concrete.

I press my back against his chest and feel his heartbeat through my shoulder. Steady. Twelve to fourteen beats a second. The rhythm I learned to count in a different cabin that doesn't exist anymore.