Chapter 10 Bones
BONES
Emma’s halfway down the stairs when I reach the door, her back to me, shoulders tight with anger and hurt.
“Emma.”
She stops. Doesn’t turn around. Just goes still, one hand on the railing, like she’s deciding whether to keep walking or give me one more chance to say something worth hearing.
My heart is hammering so hard I can feel it in my throat.
I take the stairs two at a time, my boots clanging on the metal loud enough to wake the whole block. I don’t care. Don’t care who hears, who sees, what anyone thinks.
She’s leaving and I can’t let her.
Not again.
Not this time.
I catch her wrist just as she starts to turn, and she spins fast—dancer reflexes—eyes bright with unshed tears and something that looks like fury.
“What?” The word comes out sharp, wounded. “What do you want from me, Bones?”
Everything. I want everything.
But I can’t get the words out because my throat’s too tight and my chest feels like it’s caving in, so I do the only thing that makes sense.
I pull her into me and kiss her.
For a second she goes rigid, but then she makes this sound. Half gasp, half groan, like she’s been holding her breath and finally remembered how to exhale.
Her mouth opens under mine and suddenly we’re both trying to get closer.
Her hands fist in my shirt, pulling me down, and my hands slide into her hair, holding her exactly where I need her.
The kiss is desperate, uncoordinated, all teeth and tongue and six months of wanting packed into a single moment.
She tastes like whiskey and something sweet. Like coming home.
I press her back against the railing, needing to feel her against me, needing proof that she’s real and here and not a hallucination brought on by too much loneliness and liquor. My body covers hers, one hand braced on the railing beside her, the other still tangled in her hair.
“Bones—” She breaks the kiss just long enough to breathe my name, and the sound goes straight through me.
“I’m sorry.” I kiss her jaw, her neck, anywhere I can reach. “I’m so fucking sorry.”
“Shut up.” She pulls my mouth back to hers. “Just shut up and kiss me.”
So I do.
I kiss her like I’m trying to make up for the silence. Like I’m trying to prove something I don’t have words for. Like she’s oxygen and I’ve been drowning.
Her legs wrap around my waist and I lift her, turning us so her back is against the brick wall of the building instead of the railing.
“I missed you,” she whispers against my mouth between kisses. “God, I missed you so much.”
“I know.” My hands slide under her jacket, under her shirt, needing to feel her skin. “I know, swan. Me too.”
She’s warm. So fucking warm. And solid and real and here, and I can’t believe I almost let her walk away again.
My fingers spread across her back, pulling her closer—
And then I feel it.
Something rough under my fingertips. A bandage, maybe, near her left shoulder blade. Right where the tracker is.
I freeze.
Pull back just enough to see her face.
“What happened?” The words come out rough, breathless.
“Nothing.” She tries to pull me back, kisses my jaw, my neck, but there’s a hesitation now. A slight tensing in her shoulders that tells me there’s more to this. I lower her to the ground.
“Swan.” I catch her chin, make her look at me. “What did you do?”
Her eyes dart away. Guilt written all over her face.
“Emma—”
“I tried to cut it out,” she mumbles.
The words don’t register at first. Like my brain can’t process what she just said.
“You what?”
“I tried to remove the tracker,” she admits, still not meeting my eyes. “Last night at the motel. I was angry and drunk and I just . . . I wanted it gone.”
“Jesus Christ,” I mutter, carefully turning her to examine her back through her thin shirt. “How bad is it?”
“It’s fine. Just a scratch.” She turns back to face me. “I didn’t get far.”
I stare at her, trying to process this. She tried to cut the tracker out of her own body. After all this time, why now?
“Get upstairs and show me,” I demand.
“No.” She crosses her arms, chin lifting in that stubborn way I know too well. “It’s fine.”
“Emma—”
“I said it’s just a scratch, Bones. Drop it.”
This is the Emma I remember from when she was fifteen.
The one who’d climb out windows to avoid me, who’d lie straight to my face about where she was going, who’d fight me on every single thing just because she could.
The princess who made my life hell and earned me the shittiest assignment in MC history.
I love her so fucking much.
“You’re really going to make this difficult?” I ask.
“I’m not making anything difficult. You’re the one being dramatic about a tiny cut.”
“You tried to cut a tracking device out of your own body with—what, a steak knife?”
“It was a butter knife, actually.”
“Oh, well that’s so much better.”
“I think so.”
We stare at each other, her defiant, me exasperated. This could go on all night. She’ll dig in, I’ll push, we’ll circle each other like we always do.
Fuck that.
I move fast, bending to hook one arm behind her knees and the other around her back, lifting her off her feet before she can process what’s happening.
“What the—Bones! Put me down!”
“No.” I start up the stairs.
“I’m serious! Put me the fuck down!”
“Also no.”
She struggles, but I’ve got seventy pounds and two feet of height on her. Plus, I’ve been carrying lumber and drywall for months. She’s not getting free unless I let her.
“This is kidnapping!”
“This is me making sure you didn’t give yourself an infection trying to be stubborn.”
“I’m not stubborn, you’re just—”
“Overbearing? Controlling? Yeah, we’ve established that.” I shoulder open my apartment door and kick it shut behind us. “Still not putting you down.”
She’s switched tactics now, going limp in my arms like dead weight. Classic Emma move. I adjust my grip and keep walking toward the bedroom.
“I hate you,” she mutters.
“No, you don’t.”
“I really want to.”
“I know.”
In the bedroom, I set her on her feet but keep one hand on her arm so she can’t bolt. With my free hand, I start shoving her jacket off her shoulders.
“Don’t,” she says, batting my hand away and trying to pull it back on.
“Emma—”
“I said don’t!”
“Five minutes ago you were begging me to strip you bare and fuck you.” I catch her wrist when she tries to hit me. “So you’re either mine or you aren’t. I’m not risking everything I am unless every fucking part of you belongs to me. Do you understand?”
Her breath catches. Those storm-gray eyes flash with anger, with hurt, with something that might be fear.
“Say it,” I demand, still holding her wrist. “Tell me you’re mine. We both know it’s true.”
The silence stretches between us, taut as a wire. I can see her processing, weighing her options, trying to find an angle.
There isn’t one.
This is it. All in or nothing.
“I’m yours,” she finally says, voice barely above a whisper.
“Say it again.”
“I’m yours, Bones.” Louder this time, steadier.
“Music to my fucking ears.” I let go of her wrist. “Turn around.”
For a second, I think she’ll fight me again. That stubborn chin lifts, her jaw sets, and I can practically see the refusal forming on her lips.
Then she turns.
I carefully peel off her jacket, let it drop to the floor. Her shirt is thin, worn, old and comfortable. I pull it up her body slowly, my fingers skirting over her warm skin.
“Arms up,” I say, and it doesn’t escape me that we’re both breathing heavy.
She glances at me over her shoulder, her hair a mess. But she’s still so fucking gorgeous standing there in nothing but her jeans and a pale pink bralette.
I run the tips of my fingers up her spine, watching the way she shivers and knowing I’m getting hard just seeing the way the goosebumps spread over her skin. When I reach her shoulder blades, I pinch the edge of the bandage and peel it off as gently as I can. She doesn’t make a sound.
It’s a bit of a massacre, with several grazed lines and a couple of deeper gashes. The worst of them is about two inches long, angry red around the edges, deeper than she let on. She’d wrecked her skin before stopping—or before the pain or blood or reality of what she was doing forced her to stop.
“Jesus, Emma,” I rasp. “Why would you do this?”
She’s quiet for a long moment. Then her breath hitches, and when she speaks, her voice is small.
“Because you never came.”
I go still. “What?”
“I stayed at the motel. Our motel.” She stops, swallows hard. “I thought maybe you’d know. That you’d see I was there and you’d come.”
My chest tightens. “Swan—”
“You didn’t.” Her voice cracks. “So I got drunk and I tried to cut it out because what was the fucking point of having it if you weren’t even paying attention?”
“Emma—”
“For six months, Bones. You never came. Not once. And I did some stupid shit. Walked through bad neighborhoods at 2 AM. Took the subway to the end of the line in the Bronx just to see what would happen. Went to bars in areas I knew were dangerous.” She’s talking faster now, words tumbling out.
“I kept thinking, if he’s watching, he’ll come.
If he cares, he’ll show up. But you never did. ”
“I didn’t know.” My hands are shaking as I touch her shoulders.
“I couldn’t see. Stone took everything when he stripped my rank.
All my access, all my alerts, everything.
I couldn’t see the tracker anymore. Couldn’t see where you were, if you were safe—” My voice breaks. “I’ve been blind for six months.”
She turns to face me, her mouth a thin line, and I cup her face. “You have to believe me, swan. I had no idea you were in danger. If I’d known—”
“You would have come.”
“I would have burned everything down to get to you.” I press my forehead to hers. “I’m so sorry. I should have found a way. Should have just stayed in fucking New York with you.”
“No. You couldn’t. You’d die without the club.”
“I’m dying without you too,” I whisper.
Her hands come up to grip my wrists. “I know,” she whispers. “I know that now. But at the time, I felt abandoned. Like what happened between us meant more to me than it did to you. Like I was just another responsibility you were relieved to be free of.”
“Never.” The word comes out fierce. “Never, swan. You were never just a responsibility.”
“Then what was I?”
“Everything.” I kiss her forehead, her cheeks, her nose. “You’re everything. You always have been.”
Her eyes are wet when she looks up at me. “Bones?”
“Yeah?”
“Promise you’ll keep me this time?”
“Promise you won’t leave.” The plea is a ragged whisper, and when she looks up at me with tears spilling from her eyes, I lean in and taste the salt of her tears as I kiss her.
This time, I don’t just take—don’t just devour her anger and confusion and pain—I give back everything I’ve held inside for too long: how much it gutted me not to see her, how much every single day without her was like some slow, methodical unspooling of the world.
How there’s nothing else, no one else, not for me, not in this lifetime.
She’s kissing me back, frantic and hungry—nails scraping through my hair and then down my back—her whole body pressed up against me like she’s trying to crawl under my skin and make a home there. And fuck if I wouldn’t let her.
I scoop her up and half-carry, half-drag her to the bed, not even trying for graceful. The urgency is back—the need to melt the space between us until I can’t remember a life where my hands didn’t know every inch of her, until there’s not a cell in my body that remembers being alone.
Emma’s on the bed, hands in my hair, pulling me down. I’m half afraid she’s going to bite, half hoping she will. There’s no grace in the way we move—only need, pure and animal. I dig my hands into her hair, angle her head the way I want it, and kiss her so hard I feel her teeth against mine.
“Tell me, swan. Promise. Promise you’re mine this time.”