Page 71 of Forbidden Protector

"You're an optimist, Blackwater."

"You're welcome to prove me wrong."

I roll one on with a hand that isn't quite steady, and I like that it isn't. I come down over her, both forearms braced either side of her head, and go into her slow, an inch at a time, watching every second of it cross her face.

"More," she says, not a request. "Give me more."

So I do. Every inch, and she takes it with her back arched and her nails already finding my shoulders. I set a pace that has nothing careful left in it, and she meets every stroke, wet and loud and shameless. Her nails are dragging down my back and her teeth are at my shoulder. Both of us are leaving marks the other one is going to feel for days.

"Mine." I say it against her ear, ragged, not a question. "Tell me you're mine."

"Yours." She gets it out in pieces, breathless, her hands fisting in my hair to pull my mouth back to hers. "God, Holt. Only yours."

I go over the edge right behind her, her name the last word my mouth still remembers how to make, and for a long time after neither of us moves at all.

When it's over we're tangled on a motel bed neither of us can afford to be embarrassed by anymore. Her head on the arm that used to answer only to orders, my hand spinning slow circles on her spine.

"We just burned down both our lives in one day," she says into my chest, not sorry about it.

"Better view from the ashes."

"That's disgustingly poetic for a man who talks in four-word sentences."

"Don't get used to it."

Her phone goes off on the nightstand before either of us can decide what to say next. She reaches for it without lifting her head off me, and I watch her whole body go still reading the screen, the good kind of loose gone rigid in half a second.

"Someone claiming to be a witness," she says. "Says they've got ledger pages. Wants to meet. Alone, off the highway, tonight."

My phone lights up on the floor where my jeans landed. Same message, near enough, from a number I don't recognize and already don't trust.

We look at each other across a bed that just held the only good thing either of us has left, and I already know we're going.

TWENTY-TWO

MACKENZIE

I know it's bait before I finish the second line.

Parker Branton. I don't recognize the name, but the message reads like a man who's run out of better options.

Ledger pages. Proof of the Calgary structure, dates and signatures. I can't go to the Bureau, they own the Bureau. Meet me alone. Two miles north of the Birch Creek bridge, the pullout by the old grain elevator. Tonight, before anyone else disappears.

Real witnesses don't narrate their own danger like they're pitching a limited series. They show up shaking, or they don't show up at all.

Whoever wrote this wanted me to feel the stakes instead of just believe them, and that's the tell. That's always the tell.

"It's a trap," I say out loud, to the dark room, because saying it makes it a fact I've committed to instead of a fear I'm still negotiating with.

"I know." Holt's already off the bed, pulling his jeans up off the heap they made on the floor an hour ago. "Branton's real, though. Hauled hay on our north place a couple of seasons. Horse rolled on him years back and he's walked crooked ever since, left side."

"So somebody used a real name?"

"Somebody used a real man." He finds my shirt on the floor and hands it over. No rest for either of us tonight, apparently, not even the kind we just earned. "Get dressed. We're not doing this from a motel room."

We drive to his place in two vehicles and one silence, and by the time I've got my vest on, he's already cleared the counter and laid his kit out across the kitchen island like a surgeon setting up a table, hair tied back low at the base of his neck, which I've only seen once before, at the hangar this morning.

"I love your hair," I tell him, because it's true and there isn't going to be a better window to say it in. "Every shiny inch of it. I had both hands full of it an hour ago and I fully intend to again, so don't get any ideas about cutting it off to be tactical."