Chapter 15 Obscured
OBSCURED
BLADE
Iwoke up reaching for a body that wasn't there.
The mattress beside me was warm. Dented. The sheets carried cedar and sweat, and underneath that, something sharper—antiseptic, the ghost of Kai's handiwork on Logan's shoulder. From behind the bathroom door, the hiss of a running shower.
I dropped my arm back to my side and stared at the ceiling.
My room had changed in the two days after the cattle ranch.
After the Iron Wolves compound. The walls were still bare, the weapons rack still mounted, the footlocker still positioned at the foot of the bed.
But the flannel shirt had migrated from the chair to a hook on the back of the door.
A second pair of boots sat beside mine. A battered leather watch on the nightstand that wasn't mine, next to the Ka-Bar that was.
Two days since Billings. Two nights of Logan falling into this bed beside me and both of us being asleep within minutes, the exhaustion pulling us under before our bodies could remember what they wanted.
I'd held him. He'd held me. We'd slept like men who'd forgotten what rest felt like and were trying to relearn it all at once.
The ceiling stared back. My mind did what it always did when the body was still.
It replayed.
The six Wolves who'd surrendered at the compound.
Zip-tied, sitting in a row against the wall of their own ruined clubhouse while the smoke from the RPG damage drifted overhead.
Two of them had talked. The rest had stared at their boots with the empty look of men whose infrastructure had collapsed and who were wondering what came next.
What came out was clarifying. Gravedigger—Victor Graves, president of the Iron Wolves—had pulled out weeks before we'd ever hit. Taken a handful of men loyal to him personally, not to the club, and disappeared. Just gone. No forwarding address, no plan communicated to the rank and file.
The remaining Wolves who stayed had done so for one reason: Whitfield's money.
The trafficking operation paid well enough that a dozen men without a president had been willing to keep running enforcement, and Whitfield had installed her own leader to replace Gravedigger.
Spur. An ex-military mercenary with the tactical training to command and the cruelty to enforce, appointed directly by the woman who signed the checks.
Spur, whose blood I cleaned from the throwing knife I'd pulled out of his skull.
I'd told the six survivors what had happened. Whitfield was in trouble. The evidence was with a federal prosecutor. Spur was dead. The Iron Wolves compound was about to become rubble. They had one option: leave. Walk away. If I ever saw any of them again, the conversation would involve fewer words.
They'd left. On foot, heading east toward Billings, carrying nothing but the clothes on their backs and whatever reckoning was waiting for them when the federal investigation widened.
After that, the ride to the large cattle ranch, toward the remaining dozens of enslaved workers.
Kai and Rosa worked on Irish's graze and Logan's shoulder—the bullet wound needed proper stitches, and Logan had sat on the tailgate of a van with his jaw clenched and his eyes fixed on the middle distance while Kai's needle went through the torn flesh in neat, practiced loops. Logan hadn't made a sound.
We'd hidden behind a ridge near the ranch and watched through binoculars as official vehicles arrived.
Black SUVs with federal plates. Men and women in windbreakers stepping out with clipboards and bottled water and the careful body language of people trained to approach traumatized populations.
The workers at the cattle operation had come out of the housing slowly, blinking, and the agents had extended their hands.
Tyler's contact had moved fast. The wheels of federal authority were finally turning in the right direction.
We'd ridden home after that. Ten hours of highway with the wind pressing against my face and the borrowed Harley eating miles and the exhaustion settling into my bones.
Church happened as soon as we arrived. Hawk at the head of the table.
The debrief. The Wolves' compound destroyed, Spur dead, six survivors released, workers recovered, evidence transmitted, Whitfield's warrant pulled out from under her at the gates while she stood there holding it.
The room had absorbed the information in silence, and the silence had been the good kind.
One piece was still loose. Tyler's federal contact had called yesterday with news that landed wrong.
Whitfield had vanished.
Resigned from the Bureau—or been removed, the details were murky—and disappeared. Irish and Nolan had been running her financial trail since the call, but the woman who'd built a trafficking empire across three states didn't create said empire without learning how to disappear.
She was out there. The woman who enslaved people who looked like my mother was somewhere breathing free air, and the thought sat behind my ribs like a fire that wouldn't go out.
The shower cut off.
I listened. The squeak of the faucet handle. The drip of water on tile. The rustle of a towel being pulled from the rack. Footsteps—bare, wet, the heavy pad of a big man moving across bathroom tiles.
The door opened.
Logan stepped through with a white towel wrapped around his waist, slung low on his hips.
Water still on his shoulders. His hair damp, pushed back and to the side from his face, the brown strands dripping onto the muscles of his neck.
Steam curled around him from the bathroom.
The bruises around his throat had shifted—the dark purple softening to yellow at the edges, the fingerprints still visible but fading, partially hidden by the tan his skin carried from four years of ranch work.
The stitches on his left shoulder were clean, the wound closed, the skin around it renewing.
His body was a problem. The kind I had no interest in solving because the problem was the point.
Thick through the shoulders and arms, the ranch-built muscle carrying a density that gym work couldn't quite replicate.
His stomach was flat, the abs defined, the V-cut at his hips directing attention downward where the towel hung low enough to be a suggestion.
My cock was already hard. Had been since I'd woken up, but the sight of Logan wet and half-naked in my doorway upgraded it from inconvenient to need.
He looked at me. Serious. The blue eyes holding mine with an intensity that had nothing to do with missions or debriefs or the war we'd just fought.
"We've had enough time." His voice was low. Morning-rough. "The rest, the recovery. All of it. I'm done waiting."
"Logan—"
"I could hear you thinking from the shower, Diego. Your brain's the loudest thing in this compound." The corner of his mouth lifted. Just a fraction. "Turn it off."
I looked at him. The water on his shoulders. The bruises on his throat. The blue eyes that were asking and telling at the same time.
"It's off."
His hands went to the towel. One pull. The fabric dropped to the concrete floor.
His cock hung between his legs, half-hard, thick and heavy, the slight curve to the left I remembered from yesterday night when we'd been too wrecked to do anything about it.
His thighs were massive. His body was solid.
Everything about him was built for work and endurance and sustained effort that started slow and didn't stop until the job was finished.
He moved toward the bed. Climbed onto it with his hands first, then his knees, crawling forward over me on all fours.
His body hovering above mine. The damp from his skin pressing cool against the heat of mine through the thin air between us.
His face hovered above me. His mouth inches from my mouth.
"Hi." His word came quiet. Almost amused.
"Hi."
He kissed me. Soft at first—his lips against mine, gentle, a kiss that belonged to the mornings we'd spent lying next to each other. Then his tongue found mine and the gentleness burned off in a rush.
His mouth opened wider. My hand found the back of his damp head and pulled him harder against me. The kiss went from tender to consuming in two heartbeats—teeth catching lips, his groan vibrating against my tongue, two days of unfinished business igniting between us.
He pulled back. His breath uneven against my face. His hands found the sheet covering my waist and pulled it down. Slow. His eyes following the fabric as it slid past my stomach, my hips.
My cock was hard against my abdomen. I slept naked. Had since the army. His gaze dropped to it and a low sound came out of him—a groan that vibrated through his chest, raw and involuntary.
He looked up at me. The blue eyes warm. Playful. Almost innocent, which was a lie his mouth was about to disprove.
"Fuck..." The word left me when his hand wrapped around my cock. Slow grip. Firm. His thumb tracing the vein along the side, making my hips lift off the mattress.
He held my eyes for one more second. Then he looked down at my cock in his hand and lowered his mouth.
He swallowed me to the base in a single drop.
No buildup. No teasing. Just the wet heat of his mouth swallowing my entire length, his throat opening around me, his nose pressing against my abdomen.
The sensation was so sudden and so total that the sound I made was a noise that came from the deepest of me.
"Jesus—fuck—" My hands found his damp hair. My fingers tightening involuntarily.
He sucked me slow, long strokes from tip to base, his lips tight around the shaft, his tongue doing things on the head that made my vision lose focus.
His left hand found my balls—cupping, rolling, a gentle counterpoint to the firm suction of his mouth.
His right hand wrapped around the base and stroked when my dick wasn't all the way down his throat.