7. Inessa
SEVEN
INESSA
The countdown until Dmitri arrives to do my fathers dirty work continues.
The Brennan play works. Knox and Forge approach the customs agent at his home in Metairie, a ranch house with a boat in the driveway and a wife who answers the door in a Tulane sweatshirt and is horrified to see two bikers at her door.
Brennan goes white when they show him the payment records.
He agrees to pull the shipping manifests and the inspection logs for the container in question, in return for him to be kept out of this.
Three days later, we have everything. The complete chain. Viktor's bank accounts to the shell company to the wire transfer to Brennan's payment to the container clearance to the weapons shipment. Documented, timestamped, irrefutable.
It's enough to end my father.
I should feel triumphant. Instead, I feel hollowed out.
I'm sitting on the porch of the house at sunset, drinking bourbon I found in the kitchen cabinet, Maker's Mark, decent, probably left by whoever else has stayed here.
The ice is melting fast in the glass because Louisiana in June doesn't allow cold things to stay cold.
The sky is doing the thing it does here in the evenings.
Going orange, then copper, then the deep bruised purple that settles over the river and the city like a lid.
The jasmine bush by the porch steps has bloomed, and the smell of it is so thick it's almost a taste.
Sweet, narcotic, the smell of a place that grows things whether you want it to or not.
I've been in Baton Rouge for twelve days. In that time, I've theoretically dismantled my father's financial empire, and fallen in love with a biker.
The last one is the problem. A really big one.
Forge pulls into the driveway. The Road King's engine announces him, that low, unmistakable rumble that I feel in my sternum before I hear it with my ears.
He cuts the engine and sits on the bike for a moment before swinging off.
He's been doing that lately I noticed, taking a minute before he comes inside.
I watch him through the porch railing. One hand on the handlebars, head slightly bowed, like he's collecting himself.
Like the ride over is the last space where he can be just a man on a motorcycle, and walking through my door turns him into something more complicated.
I know the feeling. I sit on this porch every evening at 5:45 and listen for his engine, and the fifteen minutes between hearing the Harley and seeing his face are the most charged minutes of my day.
He drops into the other porch chair, a wicker one that creaks under his weight. I pour him a bourbon without asking. He takes it. Our fingers brush on the glass. Neither of us acknowledges it. We've been not-acknowledging things for twelve days.
"Brennan delivered," he says.
"I figured he would."
"We hand this to the feds and your father goes away for a long time."
“I know, that fact isn’t lost on me.”
We drink in silence. The street is quiet, the neighborhood settling into its evening rhythm.
Cicadas hum in the live oaks, their sound rising and falling like a pulse.
Somewhere down the block, a woman calls her kids in for dinner, her voice carrying through the warm air with the casual authority of motherhood.
A dog barks in response. A screen door slams. The ordinary sounds of a life I've never had, playing out around me like a movie I can finally see myself in.
The bourbon burns on the way down and warms on the landing. I'm not much of a drinker, my father's men drank too much and it made them sloppy and dangerous, so I learned early to sip and drink very little. But this is different.
As we sit, the two inches between us are the same two inches that have been there for days, a gap that neither of us closes and neither of us widens.
It's become its own geography. I know the exact temperature of those two inches.
I know what the air feels like between his arm and mine and it's warmer than it should be.
"I called a contact at the FBI field office in Houston," Forge says. "Agent named Reeves. She’s not keen on my MC, but we’re a means to an end. She’s been building a case against your father for two years. She's interested."
"How interested?"
"Interested enough to fly to Baton Rouge tomorrow."
Tomorrow. The endgame is tomorrow.
"When this goes to the feds," I say carefully, "my father will know it came from inside. There's no one else who had access to those financials."
“Yeah, he'll figure out it was you. Which also means Dmitri doesn't wait five more days. He comes immediately is my guess."
“Yeah, my father will go down fighting. Being betrayed by his own daughter is not going to go well.”
Forge takes a slow drink of bourbon. Sets the glass on the porch railing.
"Then you leave tonight."
“No. I can’t.”
He turns to look at me. "Inessa?—"
"I'm not running before it's finished. I started this. I need to see it through."
"If Dmitri gets to Baton Rouge before the feds move on Viktor?—"
"Then I'll deal with Dmitri."
"How? He's a cold blooded killer Inessa. We aren’t playing around here."
"I know what Dmitri is. I've known him most of my life."
The look on Forge's face is something I haven't seen before. Not anger, he doesn't do anger, not the visible kind. It's closer to fear. For me. The idea that something could happen to me is making this man afraid.
"I won't let him touch you," Forge says. His voice is low. Certain. The voice of a man making a promise he intends to keep with his body if necessary.
"You can't promise that."
"I just did."
"Forge—"
“I'm telling you, not as the president of this club, not as part of our deal — as a man who gives a damn about what happens to you that Dmitri Volkov won’t touch you."
The bourbon is warm in my chest and the sunset is turning the sky to copper and gold and this man is sitting on my porch promising to stand between me and the most dangerous person in my father's organization, and I can't pretend anymore.
I can't pretend this is strategic. I can't pretend he's a means to an end. I can't pretend the way my body lights up when he walks into a room is anything other than what it is.
I set my glass down decisively.
He looks at me with those dark eyes.The jaw that never unclenches except in the small hours when we're working at the kitchen table and he forgets to hold it tight.
I put my hands on his face.
His skin is warm. Stubble rough under my palms. I feel his breath catch, a tiny hitch, barely there, the kind of involuntary reaction that a man like Forge would hate because it reveals something he can't control.
"Inessa," he says. Warning. Last chance to step back.
"Sullivan," I say back. Not stepping back.
He stands in one fluid motion, chair scraping back, his body rising to full height, and suddenly my hands are on his chest because he's too tall for me to hold his face when he's standing. I can feel his heartbeat under my right palm. Fast. Faster than I expected from a man who controls everything.
"I'm not going to be able to stop," he says. "If you kiss me, I'm not going to be able to stop."
"I know."
"This changes everything."
"I know that too."
He cups my face in his hands. His palms are scarred and rough and they hold me like I'm something that could break. Not because I'm fragile, because I matter. The difference between my father's hands and Forge's hands is the difference between ownership and reverence.
"Tell me you want this," he says. "Not because it's strategic. Not because I can protect you. Tell me you want me."
"I want you. Not the president. Not the protector. You. Sullivan."
He kisses me.
His mouth is firm and certain and devastating. He kisses me like he fights, no hesitation, no half-measures, complete commitment. His hands slide from my face into my hair and he angles my head back and deepens the kiss, his tongue against mine, and my entire body goes liquid.
I grip his shirt. Pull him closer. He tastes like bourbon and something darker, something that's just him, and I can't get enough of it.
I press against him and feel the hard length of his body, chest, abdomen, the unmistakable ridge of his cock pressed against my hip — and the sound I make into his mouth is embarrassingly desperate.
He walks me backward. Through the front door. Down the narrow hallway. My back hits the bedroom wall and he presses me there, his body covering mine, one hand braced beside my head.
"We should talk about this," he says against my mouth. Still kissing me between words.
"We've been talking for ten days. I'm done talking."
He pulls back enough to look at me. His eyes are black in the dim hallway, pupils blown wide, the careful control I've come to associate with Forge completely gone.
"Then tell me what you want."
I pull his shirt over his head. His body is a map of violence, scars across his ribs, a healed gash on his left shoulder, bruised knuckles. He's not sculpted or pretty. He's built for damage and survival,, and I want to trace every mark with my tongue.
"You," I say. "All of you. Don't be careful with me."
The restraint breaks. I see it in his eyes, the restraint breaking, the control giving way to raw, consuming need. He lifts me like I weigh nothing, my legs wrapping around his waist, and carries me to the bed.
He drops me onto the mattress and follows me down. His mouth finds my neck, my collarbone, the scar he's been staring at for days, the small crescent above my left breast that I've never explained because nobody's asked.
"What's this?" he murmurs against my skin.
"Cigarette. I was nineteen. One of my father's men thought I needed a reminder about obedience."
He goes very still. I feel his breath hot against the scar. Then he presses his lips to it, not a kiss, an act more intentional. A consecration. An unspoken promise that no one will ever burn me again.
He unbuttons my jeans. I lift my hips and he pulls them off, then my underwear, and I'm bare from the waist down in front of a man I've known for ten days. It should feel too fast, too dangerous, too much.
It doesn't. It feels like the first honest thing I've done with my body in years.
He spreads my thighs, his fingers find me wet and hot and ready, and when he slides two fingers inside me, I arch off the bed with a gasp that sounds like it came from someone else.
"Fuck," he breathes. "You feel?—"
"Don't stop."
He doesn't stop. He works me with his fingers, slow, deep, deliberate, finding the spot that makes my vision blur, while his mouth moves down my stomach, my hip, my inner thigh.
When his tongue replaces his fingers, I grab fistfuls of the sheets and my world narrows to the point where his mouth meets my body.
He's precise even here. Thorough. Devastating. He licks me like he's studying me, learning what makes me come apart, tracking every gasp and tremor. When I try to close my thighs, he holds them open with scarred hands and murmurs, "Stay open for me."
I come panting his name, and the orgasm hits me so hard I stop breathing, my body clenching around nothing, wanting him inside me with a desperation that borders on pain.
He strips off the rest of his clothes, his cock is thick and hard.
"Look at me," he says.
I study him. He’s above me, braced on his arms, his body blocking out the ceiling light. His dark eyes holding mine.
He pushes inside me.
The stretch is intense, he's bigger than I expected, and I feel every inch as he slides deeper. I dig my nails into his shoulders and he hisses through his teeth but doesn't stop.
"More," I say. “I want more.”
He gives me more. All of him. He bottoms out and we both stop, breathing hard, the sensation of being connected so completely, it’s almost unbearable.
"You okay?" he asks.
"If you ask me that again I'll hurt you."
He laughs, a real, low, surprised laugh and then he starts to move.
He doesn't go slow. I told him not to be careful, and he listened.
He fucks me with the single-minded intensity of a man who's been holding back for too long, his hips driving deep, his hands gripping my thighs hard.
The bed protests under us. But I don't care.
I wrap my legs around his waist and match his rhythm, taking him as deep as my body will allow, and the sounds filling the room are raw, animal and honest.
"You feel like mine," he growls against my ear. "You feel like you were always supposed to be mine."
"I'm not anyone’s…”
"Not like that." He slows down. Looks at me. His brow pressed to mine, both of us panting. "Not like ownership. But like finding something you didn't know you were missing."
The words undo me more than the sex. I pull him down and kiss him and feel the orgasm building again, a pressure in my lower belly that spreads like heat through my entire body.
"Come for me," he says. “I want to feel you come for me."
I shatter. My body locks around him, clenching, pulsing, and I cry out against his mouth. He follows me over, three hard thrusts and he comes with a groan that vibrates through his chest into mine, his arms trembling as he holds himself above me.
Afterward, we lie tangled in the sheets. His hand rests on my stomach. My fingers trace the tattoo on his forearm, close enough to read now. Nobody chooses the fire. The fire chooses you.
"Who said that?" I ask.
"I did. After I killed Tommy Delacruz in the fight."
We're quiet for a long time. His thumb traces circles on my skin. The ceiling fan clicks overhead quietly.
"I don't want to disappear," I say into the dark.
His hand freezes on my stomach.
"When this is over," I continue. "The deal was I disappear. New name, new city, new life. But I don't want that anymore."
He turns his head to look at me. In the dark, his eyes are bottomless.
"What do you want?" he asks.
"To stay. Here. With you."
He doesn't answer right away. He pulls me closer, an arm around me, my body against his, my head on his chest. I can hear his heartbeat. Steady. Strong.
"There's a war coming," he says. "Dmitri, your father, whatever happens with the feds. Staying means being in the middle of it."
"I've been in the middle of a war my entire life. At least this time, I get to choose which side I'm on."
His arms tighten around me. He presses his lips to the top of my head.
"Then you stay," he says.
I fall asleep in Forge's arms, and for the first time in twenty-eight years, I don't dream about running. I dream about staying instead.