Chapter 10
CHAPTER TEN
Sutton
After Vivi’s office, after the Coke and the Costco couch, Sutton had gone back to her room, intending to sketch. She needed to silence the carousel of awful memories circling in her head.
The sketchbook was on the nightstand. Her pens were lined up beside it. Sebastian settled at the desk with a borrowed laptop from Jaster, his face lit blue-white by the screen, scrolling through something he told her was research into covert networks and their historical structures.
“Secret societies?” she asked, kicking off her boots.
“Organizational patterns. How cells operate, how they recruit, how they communicate. There are parallels to groups I studied during my time in the Service. If Inkwell follows similar models—”
“You’re reading about cults and spy rings on a Friday night.”
“It’s Monday.”
“Is it?” The days had blurred. She’d lost track somewhere between the parlor and the compound, between the blood on the sidewalk and the blood on his lip. Monday. She’d been at the compound for three days. It felt like three weeks. Three months.
She needed to sketch, but first she stretched out on the bed.
Just to rest her eyes for a minute. The pillow was cool against her cheek.
The sound of his quiet typing was rhythmic, steady.
The safest sound in her current world—proof that he was there, three feet away, between her and anything that still might want to hurt her.
She fell asleep.
When she opened her eyes, the room was dim. The desk lamp was on, casting a warm circle across the laptop, which sat open, its screen darkened to sleep mode. The chair was empty.
Sebastian wasn’t there.
She sat up, pulse spiking before her brain caught up. She scanned the room. The blanket he’d been using on the floor was still folded. His jacket hung on the back of the chair. His sidearm was on the desk beside the laptop—he never left that unattended.
He was still here. Had to be.
Then she heard it—a sharp intake of breath from the bathroom. The door was cracked open a few inches, light spilling through the gap in a narrow stripe across the floor.
Her socks were silent on the cool tile as she crossed the room. Through the crack, she could see a sliver of the room—the edge of the sink, the mirror, the fluorescent light that gave everything a clinical cast.
Sebastian stood in front of the mirror with his shirt off.
His back was to her. Her eyes slid over him, the broad shoulders, the defined muscles along his spine, the lean architecture of a body maintained through discipline rather than vanity.
He was probing his left side with careful fingers, pressing along the ribs.
She saw him wince when he hit a spot. The bruising was already a bloom of purple-black spreading across his lower side where Axe Booker’s knee had connected during the fight.
Along with the bruising, she saw something else on his back. A circle of raised tissue, pale against his skin. It had healed into a permanent ridge just below his ribs on the left side.
Penn’s bullet.
The air left her lungs. She must have made a sound because Sebastian’s gaze snapped to her in the mirror. His body tensed, and he rotated to face her, one hand dropping to the counter in an instinctive reach for his shirt.
The entry wound was a starburst of scar tissue, smaller than the exit wound but more brutal in its precision.
A tight, puckered circle where the bullet had torn through skin and muscle.
Centimeters from organs. The surgeons had said as much on the news.
Agent Whitaker is lucky to be alive. Another inch to the right…
Lucky. They’d called him lucky.
“Sutton.” His voice was low, controlled. The voice of a man caught unguarded, trying to reconstruct his armor in real time. He snagged at the shirt. It fell to the floor. He bent. “I was just checking the—”
“Don’t.”
The word stopped him. His hand hovered over the shirt, fingers an inch from the fabric.
She stepped into the bathroom. The space was small—five feet between the door and the sink, barely room for two people. She was close enough to see the texture of the scar.
“Don’t cover it up,” she said, quieter now. “Please.”
His jaw tightened. She could see the resistance—the instinct to hide, to deflect, to make a dry comment about threat assessments and walk past her into the room.
This scar had to be the most private thing about him. More private than his family, his grief, his carefully maintained isolation. This was the evidence written on his body that the worst day of his life had been real.
And her brother had put it there.
She reached out. He drew back. A small movement, reflexive—his abs tightening, his torso angling away from her hand. It was the same flinch she recognized in herself when someone got too close to the things she’d buried. He didn’t show this to anyone—she was sure of it.
She didn’t withdraw her hand. She held it there, palm open, an inch from the scar. A question.
His blue eyes locked on that hand. She searched his face, not sure what she was looking for—permission, refusal, acceptance?
She lowered her hand but didn’t move away. His chest was well defined, his biceps, too. Everything was sculpted, almost brutally so, as if he punished himself daily with extreme exercise to keep the demons in his head at bay.
She knew those demons, had named a few of them. What she couldn’t name was the emotion rising in her chest like a tide.
He blew out a sigh through his lips. “I should get back to my research.”
“Yes,” she said, but she didn’t mean it. “Research.” She picked up his shirt and cradled it to her chest. It smelled like him. Like safety. “Thank you.”
His eyes lifted. “For what?”
He knew what; it was just an automatic response. “For not turning your back on me when I needed your help. You could have. I’m the sister of the man who nearly killed you. I hated you, and I made no bones about it. You should have left me in the cold to handle my problem.”
He held her gaze for a long moment. “That’s not who I am.”
“I know that now.” The words felt thick in her throat. Her pulse was racing. “I’m grateful for who you are. That you didn’t turn me away.”
“Me, too,” he said softly.
She handed him his shirt. He took it but didn’t put it on. She inched even closer, never breaking eye contact. Her fingertips slowly, carefully rose to his arm, stopping to rest there for a moment. “You’re incredible,” she said. “You should never hide who you are, scars and all.”
He sucked in a breath. His gaze dropped to her lips.
She licked them, and he pressed his eyes closed, as if the sight was too much. Her hand trailed up to his biceps, across his collarbone. He opened his eyes and tracked it, his breathing coming faster.
Her fingers skimmed his hard pecs, his ribs. She paused before she touched the scar.
He didn’t flinch away this time. Didn’t tell her to stop.
The skin was warm beneath her fingers. She expected it to feel different—damaged, fragile, the way scar tissue should feel.
But it was just skin, raised and ridged, rougher than the surrounding area, but warm.
Alive. The body beneath it expanded with each breath, his chest rising and falling under her touch.
She traced the entry wound first. The starburst pattern, no bigger than a quarter. Then the lines radiating outward from the center where the bullet had entered.
Her index finger followed the ridge of the largest ray. Sebastian’s stomach muscles contracted. A shiver ran through him. She circled to his side, her hand moving with her. She touched the exit wound. The complete journey of the round Penn had fired.
For six years, she’d carried Penn’s legacy like a stone in her chest—the anger, the grief, the shame of sharing blood with someone who’d done this.
But standing here touching Sebastian’s scar, she wasn’t touching the wound her brother had caused. She was touching the man who’d survived it. The man who’d come through the other side of that bullet, through the hospital bed, through the congressional hearings, through the media circus.
He’d lost everything—his career, his anonymity, his family’s respect—and he’d rebuilt himself into someone who stood in doorways and slept on floors and put his body between danger and the people behind him.
He’d done it for Ginger. Today, he’d done it for her.
Returning to face him, she flattened her hand against the scar, palm resting on the raised tissue.
“Sutton.” His voice was rough. Raw. “I don’t let—”
“I know.”
She raised her eyes to his. They were standing too close, her hand on his bare skin, his breath warm on her forehead, the fluorescent light turning everything stark and honest. No shadows to hide in. No distance to maintain.
He was looking at her the way he’d been looking at her since the previous night on the floor when she’d traced a lynx on his arm. With attention. With hunger he kept leashed.
She rose on her toes and kissed him.
His lips were warm. The split lip was rough under hers, another wound. She kissed him carefully there, feeling him hold very still as if he were afraid that moving would end this.
Then his hand came up. His fingers slid into her hair, cradling the back of her head, and the stillness broke. He kissed her back.
The kiss turned hot and hungry. She dropped his shirt. He backed her against the bathroom wall. She pulled him close, needing to feel all of him.
They moved from the bathroom to the bed in a series of steps with his arm around her waist, her hand on his chest, the narrow doorway they navigated without breaking contact because neither of them was willing to create space between their bodies.