Chapter 13
Dana's hands wouldn't stop shaking.
She sat in the truck on the drive back to the compound with her fingers locked around the steering wheel and her arms vibrating from the elbows down, a fine constant tremor that had nothing to do with cold and everything to do with the fact that forty minutes ago she'd swung a steel bar into a man's arm hard enough to hear the bone give.
The sound was still in her head. The crack, the way his arm had folded, the look on his face when his certainty broke. She'd replayed it nine times since she got in the truck and it hadn't faded. It sat in her chest like a second heartbeat, loud and bright and terrible.
Squall rode ahead of her. She could see the shape of him on the Dyna, cutting through the gray pre-dawn light, and even from fifty feet back she could read the tension in his body — the set of his shoulders, the way he held his head, the coiled energy of a man who'd killed someone an hour ago and was riding the edge of whatever came after.
They pulled into the compound lot. Brothers scattered to the building, moving fast, voices low. Someone was already on the phone. Someone else was pulling medical supplies from the van for Talley's ribs.
Squall parked the bike and sat on it, the same way he'd sat on it last night before she'd told him to take her upstairs. But this was different. Last night he'd been still. Now he was vibrating — the same tremor she had, the same voltage running through his body with no outlet.
She got out of the truck and crossed the lot to him.
He looked at her. His eyes were wild in a way she hadn't seen — not uncontrolled, not scattered, but lit from the inside with something that was looking for somewhere to go. Blood on his temple. Plaster dust in his hair. His knuckles raw and split.
"Inside," she said.
He stood up.
They made it to the stairwell. That was as far as the distance lasted.
He had her against the wall before they reached the first landing — his hands on her hips, his mouth on her neck, his body pressing her into the brick with a force that drove the air out of her lungs.
She didn't gasp. She grabbed the front of his shirt with both fists and hauled him closer, and the sound he made against her throat was something between a growl and a prayer.
"Upstairs," she managed.
"No."
"Someone will—"
"I don't care."
She cared. Barely. Enough to shove him back a step and drag him up the stairs by his belt, both of them moving fast, hands pulling at each other on the landing, her back hitting his door before he got it open. He reached past her, turned the handle, and they fell through it together.
The door slammed behind them and he pinned her against it.
Full weight. His forearms braced on either side of her head, his hips against hers, his face inches away.
She could feel every part of him — the heat, the tension, the raw need pouring off him like engine exhaust. His breath came hard and fast, and his eyes burned into hers with the specific intensity of a man who'd almost lost something and needed to prove it was still there.
"You hit him," he said.
"Yes."
"You walked into my fight and you hit him."
"He was going for a gun."
"I know. I know." His forehead dropped against hers. "And I can't stop seeing it. You with that bar. The sound it made. The way you didn't flinch."
"I'm not going to flinch."
"I know that too." His hands came off the door and found her waist, her ribs, pulling her shirt up with a roughness that last night's version of him wouldn't have used. "And it's making me insane."
She pulled his shirt over his head. No buttons this time — no patience for them.
She wanted skin and she wanted it now, the proof of him alive and solid under her hands.
Her palms hit his chest and felt the heat and the hammer of his heart and the raised line of the cut on his forearm, and she dug her fingers in and held on.
He lifted her off the door. Not gently — he gripped her thighs and hauled her up and she locked her legs around him, and the momentum carried them across the room.
They didn't make the bed. They hit the edge of the dresser first, her hip catching the corner, and she didn't feel it — or she felt it and didn't care, because the pain was nothing compared to the fire climbing through her blood.
He set her on the dresser and stood between her legs and kissed her like he was trying to consume her.
His hands were everywhere — her hair, her throat, the clasp of her bra that he fought for two seconds before she reached back and did it herself.
When his mouth found her collarbone she dropped her head back against the mirror and her reflection shook behind her.
"Mine," he said into her skin. Not the way he'd said it last night — quiet, certain, a man planting a flag.
This was different. This was the word torn out of him by something primal, spoken against her body like a brand, like if he said it hard enough it would burn into her and nothing could take it back.
"Prove it," she said.
He proved it.
His hands gripped her hips and pulled her to the edge of the dresser and she wrapped herself around him and they crashed together with a force that knocked something off the surface behind her — she heard it hit the floor and shatter and neither of them stopped.
This wasn't the slow tide of last night, the deliberate exploration, the careful unveiling.
This was a storm surge. This was two people who'd been standing in gunfire an hour ago and needed the only thing that made the shaking stop.
She bit his shoulder. He groaned — a low, guttural sound that vibrated through his whole chest and into hers.
His grip on her tightened until she felt the bruises forming in real time and she wanted them, wanted every mark, wanted to walk out of this room wearing the evidence of what they'd survived and what they'd done about it.
"Harder," she said.
He obliged. She met him. Every collision was a statement — I'm alive, you're alive, this is real, don't stop.
She matched his intensity the way she'd matched it from the beginning — in the shop, in the fire, in every argument and every silence.
She was not a woman who got handled. She was a woman who fought, and this was a fight they were both winning.
He said her name. Just her name — Dana — but the way he said it carried everything underneath it, all the fear he hadn't shown in the warehouse, all the rage when her truck pulled into the lot, all the relief when she'd walked out of it swinging.
She heard it all in two syllables and it broke through the adrenaline and hit something deeper.
She said his. "Brian." Quiet enough that only he could hear, even though they were alone. His name in her mouth was the most intimate thing she could give him — more than her body, more than the marks she was leaving on his skin. The name under the road name. The man under the patch.
He came apart. She felt it happen — the control he wore like armor cracking from the inside, his whole body shuddering against hers.
She held him through it and then followed, her back arching against the mirror, her hands fisted in his hair, a sound leaving her throat that she'd never made before and would never make for anyone else.
The silence after was enormous.
They stayed tangled on the dresser for a long time, breathing hard, foreheads pressed together, her legs still locked around his waist. The tremor in her hands was gone. In its place was a bone-deep stillness, like the quiet after a wave breaks and the water goes flat.
"The mirror's cracked," she said.
He turned his head. Behind her, a thin line ran diagonally across the glass, splitting their reflection in two.
"I'll fix it."
"Don't. I like it."
He laughed. Short, exhausted, surprised out of him the same way it always was — like joy was a reflex he kept forgetting he had. He picked her up off the dresser and carried her to the bed, and this time they made it.
They lay on their sides facing each other, and the energy in the room shifted — the fire banking, the heat settling into something that could sustain instead of consume.
He traced the cut on her forearm from the debris.
She touched the bruise darkening on his temple.
An inventory of damage, taken in silence, each wound acknowledged with fingers instead of words.
"My shop is gone," she said.
She hadn't said it until now. Hadn't let the words form, because forming them made it real and she'd needed to not be real for a little while. But lying here, in the wreckage of his dresser mirror with his hand on her face, she could say it.
"Both bays. Both lifts. The bench. Everything I rebuilt after the fire." Her voice was steady. The steadiness cost her something. "Meer sent ten men to destroy what I spent six years building, and it took them twenty minutes."
Squall's thumb moved across her cheekbone. "We'll rebuild it."
"I'll rebuild it. You'll hand me tools."
The corner of his mouth lifted. "Deal."
She closed her eyes. The exhaustion hit like a dropped anchor — sudden, total, pulling her down into the dark warm space behind her eyelids where the shop wasn't destroyed and nobody was dead and her hands had never swung a steel bar into a man's body.
"Stay with me," she murmured.
"Where else would I be?"
His arm came around her and pulled her in, and she pressed her face into his chest and let the steady drum of his heartbeat replace the crack that had been echoing in her head since the fight. Slower now. Quieter. A rhythm she could sleep to.
She slept.