Chapter 50 #3
He jerks and has me jolting with him as the motors stutter under the new resistance.
I can both feel and hear the RPMs dropping, and the froth goes from white to pink to a dark, spreading red under the moonlight.
The prop grinds and shrieks against skull, replacing Grady’s screams, and the engine labors while something heavy and tender and viscous gives way.
Then there’s one last awful thock before the blades shear through.
The rest of him goes slack in my hands.
Now that the resistance is gone, the engine screams back to full throttle before someone on the boat kills the ignition. The roar dies to a whine, then a tick tick tick…
Then nothing at all.
The marsh goes quiet.
Everything does.
The water beneath the stern spreads black and scarlet under the silver-blue moon, and I don’t look too hard at what’s floating in it.
After three more quiet breaths, I let go of his coat and what’s left of Grady Wilde’s headless body slides off the edge of the dock into the shallows with a heavy, graceless splash.
Dollar bills, a badge ID, and a Rabbit Hole receipt float up and drift away on the slow-moving tide.
Something shifts beneath the surface, some wake or shadow or creature already coming to investigate, and the black water swallows him whole.
I stand up slow. My hands are trembling. My arms are still shaking. Fuck, my whole body is vibrating at a frequency I can’t control, and there’s blood on my knuckles and under my nails and soaking into my jeans, and I genuinely can’t tell anymore what part of it belongs to me.
Then I look up and see Lucy.
She’s on her knees at the entrance to the dock, wrists raw, hair tangled, and just… staring at me.
She watched me do that. All of it.
And she’s not looking away.
There’s no horror on her face, no recoil, no fear.
I walk to her slowly, the fury draining out of me with every step and leaving something raw and desperate underneath. The rage inside me burned bright and fast and all the way out, collapsing to ash in my chest, and what’s left is terror and relief.
The sight of that gun pressed to her temple will never leave me.
Neither will the image of the Wilde slipping headless into the black water.
And neither will this look on Lucy’s face right now, all gratitude and wonder and something that feels so, so dangerously close to what’s been wrecking me for months that I can’t bear to put a name to it. Because what if I’m wrong?
She launches into my open arms the moment I drop to my knees in front of her, and I catch her, keeping us from being knocked sideways.
My fingers knot in her hair, my arm locks around her waist, and I hold her so tight that if she disappeared from my arms right now, she’d be taking my soul with her.
“Thank you,” she whispers.
I shudder against her as she clings just as desperately, and the fact that she’s here, warm and breathing and real, almost undoes me right there on the dock.
“Lucy.” My voice breaks on her name. “Fuck, you’re safe.”
“Because you saved me,” she whispers.
“Always, baby.” I press my mouth into her hair and rock her against me, my whole body still shaking from the fight, from the fear, from all the ways this could have ended with me holding nothing but grief instead. “Fucking always.”
Then she fists my jacket lapels and kisses me.
It’s fierce and grateful and starving and I meet that need instantly, like sucking down oxygen after drowning.
Her mouth is hot, trembling against mine, all urgency and need, and when her tongue strokes into my mouth, I feel it low in my gut like a punch.
I hold her tighter, one hand buried in her hair, the other splayed wide at the small of her back and kiss her like I can sear every vow I’ve ever made her into her lips.
She tastes like salt and smoke and cherry tart, all tinged with the bitterness of what she survived, and I swear to God I can feel the moment she stops shaking in fear and starts trembling for me.
Somewhere—in the way, way, way far back reaches of my mind—I know Kian’s men are sweeping through the ruins, checking bodies and collecting weapons.
I know Dorman’s getting zip-tied, X is holding Duchess, and Kian McKennon is coming our way with murder on his mind and every right in the world to put me out of his misery.
I know I’m kneeling on a blood-soaked dock with my girl in my lap, soaked in the proof of everything I just did to keep her alive, every dead man in this graveyard and every stain in that marsh a line item on my resume for the job he already told me I failed.
And I can’t make myself care.
Not when Lucy kisses me like this, melting into me so I can fill in the cracks of her soul, like she can mine.
Not when every smooth lave of her tongue over mine feels half-gratitude and half-claiming.
Not when I can feel how alive she fucking is, how real, how mine she could be if this mad world would just leave us the fuck alone for five goddamn minutes.
But then something cold and metal presses hard to my head, and I go still.
“I told you the next Fury I see is a dead one.” The gun cocks. “I make good on my promises.”