Page 26 of The Guarded Monster’s Truth

My jeans take longer. He lifts me with one arm to strip them and my underwear down my legs, and the ease of it sends a fresh spike of heat through me. When I settle back into his lap, bare skin to bare skin, the head of his cock slides through my folds and the wet friction pulls a groan from both of us that fills the reading nook.

One hand lines him up and I sink onto him.

The angle from on top lets me take him deeper than the bed ever did, and the stretch spreads through me in a slow, thick drag that makes my jaw drop and my nails bite into his shoulders. He fills me inch by inch, his hands gripping my waist, guiding but not controlling, letting me set the depth. I take all of him. My thighs tremble against the armchair cushion, his head falls back and the sound he makes when I bottom out comes from the base of his spine.

"Fuck, Ava." His voice breaks on my name.

The first roll drags his cock against the spot inside me that makes my vision blur. His hands slide to my ass and grip, holding me open, and every thrust I take hits deeper than the last. The chair creaks in rhythm with us. The pendant swings between our chests, and the purring runs through his body into mine at every point of contact—his chest against my breasts, his cock buried inside me, his palms on my skin.

"I love you, Benjamin."

The words leave me in a whisper.

His rhythm falters. His hand comes up and cups the back of my head, and the two words he gives me come out rough and stripped of every cover he's ever used.

"I love you. I know it's too soon, but you are mine now."

My chest splits open and the tears come and I don't care. I ride him harder, my hands locked on his horns, and his mouth finds my throat, his teeth scraping against my pulse, and the purring turns possessive, a deep chest-rumble that I feel in my clit every time he drives up into me.

"Again," I tell him. "Say it again."

"I love you." Rougher this time. He snaps up into me and the thrust hits so deep a cry rips from my throat. "I love you." His thumb slides between us and circles my clit, and the orgasm builds from the base of my spine outward, fast and ruthless.

I come with his name in my mouth and his horns in my hands and every wall he ever built gone. My pussy clenches around him in waves that make my thighs lock and my vision go white at the edges. The clench pulls him over with me. He buries himself to the hilt and comes with a shudder that starts at his horns and rolls through his entire body, the purring turning to a roar that rattles the reading lamp off the side table and sends it swinging from the cord.

The horn pendant sits at my throat, heavy with his heat and mine.

Bruiser holds me in the armchair, my head against his chest, my legs folded over the arm of the chair, and the purring runs steady and constant beneath my ear. For the first time since I've known him, his hands are still. His palm rests flat on my back, the other arm draped over the armrest, and the man who spent years watching everything breathes like he's forgotten anything exists beyond this chair.

My phone sits on the table beside the folder. I reach for it without lifting my head from his chest. The contact I need lives near the top of my favorites, the editor I've trusted for six years, before Portland, before the Daily Record, before any of it.

I press call.

She picks up on the second ring.

"I have something big for you." A pause. "I also need to disclose that I'm in a personal relationship with a source connected to the piece. You'll have full transparency on sourcing. Your call on how to handle attribution."

Chapter 12

Bruiser

The scanner catches the first encrypted burst at six-oh-six, four minutes after Ava's byline hits the wire.

Her real editor's outlet. The headline runs clean and blunt: a federal agency using civilian journalists as unwitting surveillance tools, their assignments manufactured, their equipment wired. Four days of legal review, compressed from the usual weeks. The team spent a year circling Ridgeline Strategic and never broke through until my documentation landed on their desk—indexed, annotated, sourced in a format their lawyers could read without translation.

Harlow's name fills every channel. Damage control protocols. Blame assignments. Operational language I wrote at a desk in Virginia before I understood how it sounded from the other end. The first burst runs standard containment procedure, compartmentalization directives, a scramble to identify how many of their own assets the story just exposed. The second names Heckland. By the third, somebody in the chain has started pointing fingers at somebody else, and the whole structure sounds like it did the night I walked away from it.

This is the last time I sit at this desk for two months. The cork around me holds nothing but pin holes, and the monitors cycle through compound feeds that don't need me watching them. The scanner sweeps out of habit, the same way my lungs pull air. I don't know how to sit here without reaching for it. I don't know if I'll ever learn.

The first call comes through at seven. Ava's editor friend, conference-bridged with legal counsel. The outlet terminated Harlow's replacement at Pacific Northwest Monthly within the hour. The outlet revoked Harlow's credentials by end of business and published his Ridgeline Strategic consulting contract as an appendix. A Virginia firm paying a magazine editor through a routing account that also funded Humans First's expansion into Nightfall Cove. The contract speaks for itself.

By nine, the encrypted traffic confirms what I expected. The agency classified Heckland's entire operation as unauthorized. A rogue handler running off-book surveillance through civilian journalists. That's the narrative they'll sell, and it has the advantage of being half true. Heckland gets burned. The institutional apparatus rolls on. Nobody above him answers for it.

Then Agent Padron. The younger agent from Heckland's team, the man who parked at the Rusty Anchor for six hours. He contacted Ava's editor through a back channel and offered to go on record. The inspector general's office reached him first. Testimony about an unauthorized operation in exchange for immunity. Padron didn't flip because he found his principles. He flipped because somebody showed him what happens to junior agents when a handler gets disavowed and there's no one left to blame but the field team.

The agency didn't fold. They classified the operation, burned the handler, and went quiet. But quiet isn't gone — it's just waiting for the headlines to stop. Ava made sure they won't. Twelve thousand words and a byline that puts my name back in print every time they reach for me.

Knox finds me on the porch at first light.