Chapter 19 Cayce
CAYCE
She’s home, but her body hasn’t caught up.
The doctor we trust cleared her. No concussion, no broken ribs, only a few bruises where angry hands got ideas.
Good news. Useless news. The distance isn’t in her skin; it’s behind her eyes.
She’s standing at the window, staring off into the distance at something I can’t see, breathing like she’s keeping time for someone else.
Pru dropped food on the counter and threatened to force-feed Cat, and swore she’d cut my balls off if I let my wife get sick.
Tiernan swept the house twice and posted men where shadows think they’re safe. Don Marco sat at our table and drank water like it was penance and promised me anything that starts with the word “war.”
Then they all left because I asked them to. It’s quiet now. Just us. A streetlight paints the ceiling in lines. The city hum is soft as wool.
“Caterina.”
Her name should pull her straight home. It doesn’t. It drifts over her like incense and touches, but doesn’t stick.
I come to stand beside her and take her hand. Warm. Present. Not here. I press my mouth to her knuckles and count to five. “Look at me.”
She does, slow, like surfacing. Focus finds me by degrees. I keep still so she doesn’t have to chase.
“I’m here,” I tell her. “We made it out. You’re not there.”
Her throat works. “I know that with my head. And I was fine when we were leaving.”
“And your body?”
“It’s misplaced,” she says, trying to smile and running out of energy halfway.
“Okay,” I say. “Let’s bring it back.”
She blinks once, wary. I don’t blame her. After a night like that, most men make the mistake of stepping away from touch. I’ve learned better. What shock steals from her, I can call home with attention, with heat, with yes. Not a distraction. A map.
“Tell me what you need,” I ask.
Her fingers tighten in mine. “You.”
I lean closer. “Then let me.”
I strip her and sink to my knees, mapping her for harm. A scrape at her knee. A bruise just starting at her hip. I kiss both marks with the kind of care that rewrites the night—my mouth laying down truth where fear tried to make a home. She shivers. Good. She’s hearing me.
“Mine to keep safe,” I murmur against her skin. “Mine to bring back.”
I ease her onto the bed and part her thighs with my hands, slow, deliberate, like opening a book I memorized before I knew language.
I kiss the inside of her knee, then higher, then higher still, every touch a claim and a prayer.
When my mouth finds her heat, she jerks—a live wire finally catching spark.
I moan into her, greedy, and work her with my tongue until the first sound breaks loose from her chest. Not fear. Want.
“That’s it,” I tell her, voice rough. “Come back to me.”
I keep it relentless—worship and demand in equal measure—my mouth learning her again while my hands hold her steady. She clutches at my hair and the sheet and then at nothing, like she can’t decide where to anchor.
I hold her because there’s nothing I’d rather do.
I pin her hips to my mouth and drag her up the cliff she doesn’t know she’s still hanging from until she crests and shatters, breath yanked out of her, a sharp cry tearing through the quiet.
I ride her through it, tasting every tremor, making sure her body relearns what safety feels like: me, here, unmovable.
When I crawl up her body, her eyes are back. Blown wide with pleasure and wet and furious. At the world, at me, at what was almost taken. Good. I want the fight back in her.
“Say it,” I breathe, caging her face in my hands. “Tell me where you are.”
“Here,” she whispers, voice raw. “With you.”
“Good girl.” I kiss the corner of her mouth and then the center, slow, deep, letting her taste herself on my tongue, letting her feel the control shifting—not away from her, not from me, but into the space we only make together.
“My wife,” I say against her mouth. “Mine to protect. Mine to pleasure. Mine to keep.” I pull back and drive in, slow at first, then harder, deeper, giving her exactly what her body demands.
Her nails rake my shoulders while her legs lock at my waist. She lifts to meet every thrust like she’s trying to climb me from the inside.
I set my hand on her throat, not squeezing—just there, a brand of heat and promise.
Her eyes flash, and I feel the choice spark through her like gunpowder ignited.
She tilts her chin, daring me. I answer with force, hips snapping, rhythm turning punishing and precise, each stroke a reminder: she is alive and wanted and mine.
Her composure fractures; the little sounds become raw and helpless.
I shift her knee higher and find the angle that makes her arch and curse and forget the dark corridor and the smell of a van and the shape of a stranger’s hand.
“Eyes on me,” I growl. “It’s just us here. Don’t let anything else in. Just this. Just us.”
She holds my gaze while she falls apart—tightening around me, gasping my name like a vow. I don’t stop. I take her through the aftershocks and into another wave, and another, until there is only sweat and heat and the vicious drum of our hearts locked together.
When she’s shaking, I catch her wrists and pin them above her head, lacing our fingers, owning the give and take of her body while I own the night that tried to take her. “Say who you are.”
“Your wife,” she pants, wrecked and blazing. “Your—Cayce, please—”
“Mine.” I slam into her, the word a sentence and a salvation. She breaks again, a long, ragged sound spilling out of her, and I follow, burying myself deep and coming hard, every muscle locked, every thought white-hot and singular: keep her.
We breathe there for a long beat, chests heaving, the world finally, blessedly quiet.
It’s only a short while later that I stand and pull the sheets up around her. She blinks up at me. “Where are you going?”
“Stay here for me,” I say, calm as the blade I’m about to take out into the dark. “I need you safe while I end this.”
Her pupils flare, and her gaze flicks to the side. “But what if—” She closes her eyes. Draw a deep breath. She nods once, fierce. “Okay, yes. Of course.”
I hesitate, then, reaching into the nightstand, I pull out a pair of cuffs that I ordered in case my kitten wanted to play. I fasten one cuff, then the other, to the headboard—soft leather, snug but not brutal—then run a finger under each strap to check the fit. I tilt her chin up.
“Guard at the door. Stay here, kitten.” I kiss her hard, then softer. “I will come back to you after I destroy the last of these nightmares that haunt us.”
She swallows and lifts her bound hands like an offering. “Go, then,” she whispers. “End it.”
I drag the blanket up to her waist, press my mouth to the pulse in her wrist, then her sternum, then her lips. I step back and take one last look: my wife—flushed, cuffed, safe, fury banked to embers.
“Your uncle dies tonight,” I say, voice even. “And then this house will only ever know our happiness.”
I tuck a dagger and a gun, shoulder my coat, and leave the room with the quiet certainty of a man who is exactly what the world should fear.
Tiernan meets me at the back stairs with a dark expression and his phone in his hand.
“You sure,” he asks.
“Yes.”
“Rafferty’s already moving on the southside properties,” he says, and the way he avoids my eyes says he knows I told Raff to hold a piece back for me if anyone else got to him before I did.
“Good.”
We take the side door. The street air is November-clean. The car is running. I slide in; Tiernan drives. We don’t put music on. We don’t need any prayers for absolution.
Not for this. I’ve been haunted by the need for vengeance for years, and it’s finally come due. Absolution will ride hand in hand with that ghost until it’s laid to rest.
Halfway across town, my phone buzzes. Rafferty.
I have him. Call me when you’re clean.
Tiernan sees the name, sees my face. “Raff?”
“Yeah.”
The call routes through once and lands. “Where,” I say.
“Eastie,” Rafferty answers. No hello. His voice is wrong: quiet, stripped down to the wire. “Old cannery by the river. I’ll send the door code.”
“Who else?”
“No one,” he says. “Just me and him. Hurry.”
The pin lands. Tiernan turns our wheels toward it without being told. The cannery hulks against the water like a thing the city forgot to tear down.
Tiernan kills the lights two blocks out and parks where we can see the roofline. “Your call,” he says.
“Stay close,” I answer. “No one else walks in.”
He nods once and becomes nothing but a ghost. I cross the lot and slip through a man-sized gap in the fence. The door is exactly where Raff said it would be: side entrance, second bay, an old fire door with a panic bar you can fool if you know how it thinks. It huffs open like a cough.
Inside the river breathes through gaps in the boards. My boots know this floor; they avoid the boards that complain.
Rafferty is where the dark deepens around a pool of light he made from a single work lamp clipped to a pipe. It throws a hard circle on the concrete and leaves the blankness at the edges honest.
He’s standing with his back to me, shoulders square, hands at his sides. In the chair in the light’s burn is the man who once thought I’d never say his name in church. He’s duct taped to steel, clothes dark with sweat, face like dirty paper that’s been folded and unfolded too many times.
He looks up when my boots land in the light. The first thing I feel isn’t satisfaction. It’s maintenance—the quiet expectation that I’ll back down or undo what’s been done to him.
Rafferty turns, and the look on his face makes me stop the way a command wouldn’t. He’s steady. He’s something else, too. Stripped bare of any and all pretense.
“Had to be me,” he says.
“It didn’t,” I answer, because I came here to work and I don’t like being surprised.