Chapter 7
Ava
Knox confirmed the CIA sedan left the motel last week. Bruiser cleared me for town visits with an escort—him or Rex, nobody else, until Heckland is confirmed out of the county. The brothers move freely. I move with a minotaur two steps behind me while I take notes.
I spent the morning at the festival with Bruiser parked at my shoulder.
Holly Summers at her photography station, repositioning a tripod for the fourth time while Lily angled reflector discs without being asked.
Diesel nearly electrocuting himself with string lights.
Betty arranging pies on a trestle table outside the diner while Gerald carried napkins behind her.
Monsters and humans sharing a sidewalk, sharing a holiday, sharing a town that fights over them and for them in the same breath.
The recorder in my bag captured three hours of usable audio. Enough to build the profile Harlow assigned me, if Harlow turns out to be real.
Now I'm back at Bruiser's desk with that thought sitting in my chest like a splinter.
I pull my phone from the nightstand and text Ellie. We've been talking since I wandered into the library my second week here looking for back issues of the local paper. She'd already pulled them. Two coffees later, the text doesn't need an introduction.
Can you run a background search for me? Public records only.
Then I turn my chair to face the wall behind the monitors.
My photograph hangs in the upper left corner of Bruiser's corkboard, pinned with two thumbtacks and a strip of red string connecting it to a name circled twice in red.
David Harlow. My editor. The man who bought me coffee at a Portland café, pitched the Nightfall Cove story like it would save my career, and set me on a road that ended in a minotaur's apartment because I needed this story more than I needed to ask why it fell into my lap.
My phone buzzes.
Ellie's reply comes in twelve minutes. A link to the state business registry, a second link to an archived LLC filing, and a note: The library database is better than Google.
Harlow's name pulls up in the registry. The digital footprint runs shallow enough to read in under a minute.
LinkedIn account created eighteen months ago.
No social media presence before 2024. An address in Arlington that traces to a P.O.
box, not a residence. Previous employer listed as Ridgeline Strategic Consulting, LLC.
The same firm Bruiser flagged on his boards. The same Virginia address. The same eighteen-month window.
Ridgeline Strategic exists. A website with stock photography of conference rooms and a mission statement that uses the word "solutions" four times without specifying a single one.
Incorporated in Virginia eighteen months ago.
Same quarter Harlow's LinkedIn appeared, six months after he took over the Pacific Northwest desk.
My editor existed at the magazine before his own digital footprint did.
No hard proof. What I have is the smell of a front, and I've covered enough shell organizations to recognize one when the paint's still wet.
The findings print on Bruiser's secondary terminal.
He finds me an hour later, standing at the corkboard with Harlow's background printout tacked beside his red circle.
"Your red circle was right." I tap the printout. "The editor's a shell. LinkedIn, eighteen months. Address, a P.O. box. Previous employer, a consulting firm with a stock-photo website and a founding date that matches his hiring window."
Bruiser crosses the room and reads the printout without touching it. His shoulders tighten as he gets to the bottom of the page.
"I've had his name on this board for three months," he says. "I didn't think to check the business registry."
"You checked agency databases. I checked public records." I pull the pen from behind my ear and draw a line connecting Harlow's name to Ridgeline Strategic on the board. "Turns out a library card catches what a government database misses."
He doesn't smile. But the corner of his mouth moves a fraction, and for a man who rations his expressions like emergency supplies, a fraction is a lot.
I study the corkboard. Eight years of cross-referenced surveillance, and beside it the smaller section he built on me. My byline photo, my publication history, the call logs, the red string.
He stands close enough that his scent wraps around me the way it's wrapped around this apartment for weeks, warm, sharp and thick enough to taste.
I've stopped pretending I don't notice it.
I've stopped pretending it doesn't settle into my chest and slow my breathing whenever he enters a room.
And I've stopped pretending that I don't know why I'm still in his apartment.
I reach for his horns.
His left hand lifts. The same reflex that's caught my wrist every time I've reached for them. His fingers close around my forearm and hold.
"Ben."
His grip loosens. Not because I used the name, but because I didn't pull away from it. My fingers hover an inch from the base of his right horn, and his eyes hold mine with a focus that leaves me nowhere to hide.
He lets go of my arm.
I touch the watchtower symbol at the base of his right horn.
The carving runs deep, the oldest mark, and the bone beneath my fingertips holds a warmth I didn't expect—alive, heated from within, dense as antler but smoother, worn from years of weather and a lifetime of reaching for things his body never flinched from before me.
The shudder starts where bone meets skull.
It rolls through his neck, his shoulders, his chest, and hits my palms before he can brace against it.
His knees almost buckle. Both hands slam flat on the desk behind him, his head bows, and the sound that erupts from his chest drops below anything I've heard from him before.
Not the purr. Not the growl against my throat. Deeper. A rumble that rattles the monitors on their brackets. His breathing comes in pulls, each one dragged through his teeth, and his forearms shake against the desk.
Both of my hands find the carved lines. The crossed marks, the closed circles, the symbols I've photographed and sketched in my notebook. His autobiography carved into the only part of his body nobody else has touched with anything other than force.
I understand now why he caught my wrist. Handlers grabbed minotaur horns to control them. Every touch his horns remember came with a command, a correction, a leash.
My fingers trace the closed eye he carved yesterday. Fresh, the edges still sharp. A sound breaks loose from his chest that I haven't heard in two weeks of listening to every noise this man makes. Beneath my palms his skull thrums, and the hum reaches my wrists, my forearms, the center of my chest.
He drops his forehead to my shoulder. His horns bracket my head, the curved bone warm on either side of my face, and his palms find my waist and pull me into him with hands that shake.
I hold his head against me. The purring floods through every point of contact. His mouth lands hot against my collarbone and his fingers dig into my hips, the tenderness of this cracks me open so hard my vision blurs.
His mouth drags across my throat. My hands stay on his horns, thumbs running the ridgelines, and the combination of what we're doing to each other pulls the air from my lungs. I'm touching the most vulnerable part of his body and he's letting me.
He lifts me one-armed, the other hand bracing the back of my head, and carries me to the bed.
My shirt goes over my head. His follows.
I reach for his horns the second he leans over me, and the groan that rips from his chest when my palms close around them drops him onto his forearms, his face buried against my neck, his whole body shaking against the mattress beneath us.
"Fuck," he says against my throat. His mouth moves lower.
Across my collarbone, the swell of my breast, and when his lips close around my nipple and the purring pulses against the sensitive skin, my back arches off the bed and a moan I don't recognize leaves my mouth.
He stays there, tongue circling, pulling, the resonance turning every nerve into a live wire while my fingers map the carved lines on his horns.
Every stroke of my thumbs along the ridgelines makes his hips roll against the mattress and his breath stutter between my breasts.
His hands span my ribs, his mouth moves across my body with the same attention he pays to everything, but each time my fingers find a new groove on his horns, his composure cracks wider. The sounds he makes against my skin get rougher, deeper, closer to the animal he keeps buried.
He hooks his fingers into my shorts and underwear and pulls them down my legs.
His mouth follows the path his hands cleared, dragging across my hip, the inside of my thigh.
I tighten my hold on his horns and his head drops between my legs, his breath hot against my pussy before his tongue drags through me, slow and flat.
My thighs shake. The purring hits my clit at the same time his tongue does, and every thought I had five seconds ago is gone.
"Benjamin—" My grip tightens on his horns and his whole body shudders, a rolling tremor from his skull through his spine.
He groans against me and the vibration pulses through my clit and I'm already close, I'm already soaked, and his tongue circles in tight strokes while his hands pin my hips to the mattress and hold me still.
I pull his horns and his mouth seals over my clit and the sound he makes—wrecked, raw, dragged from the bottom of his chest—sends me over the edge so hard my thighs clamp around his head and my hips grind against his face and I come with his name tangled in a moan I couldn't stop if I wanted to.
He kisses the inside of my thigh. His breath comes ragged, his lips slick, and when he rises over me the control he wears like a second skin is gone. Whatever he's holding back, he stopped trying.
His jeans hit the floor. His cock stands thick and hard against his stomach and I reach for him, wrapping my hand around his shaft.
He's hot in my hand, rigid, and the girth fills my palm.
I stroke him once, my thumb dragging across the head, and his hips buck into my fist while a growl rumbles from his chest into the air between us.
"I need you inside me."
He nudges my thighs wider. The head of his cock presses against my entrance, and he pushes in, slower than the first time, his eyes on my face, reading every shift in my expression.
The stretch fills me inch by inch, and my hands find his horns and hold.
His composure shatters. The slow push turns ragged, his arms shake on either side of my head, and what tears from his throat when he bottoms out fills the room.
Low, broken and desperate. My pussy clenches around him and his forehead drops to mine and the purring erupts so deep it vibrates through his cock, into my body in waves that make my eyes roll back.
"Fuck." My nails dig into the base of his horns. "Move."
He moves. Deep, rolling thrusts that drag his cock against every nerve I have, and each time my fingers tighten on his horns the rhythm stutters, his breath catches, his hips drive harder.
The man who watches everything, controls everything, measures every response—gone.
My hands on his horns strip every layer of discipline and leave the animal underneath, and the animal fucks me with a tenderness that hurts worse than the roughness ever could.
His hand slides between us. His thumb finds my clit and presses, circling in time with his thrusts, and the second orgasm builds from the base of my spine outward.
I hold his horns tighter. His hips rolling deep, his cock buried in me while the purring turns to a roar that rattles the monitors and the lamplight flickers from the force of it.
I come with both hands locked around his horns and his cock buried so deep I feel him everywhere.
My pussy grips him in waves that make my vision blur, and the clench pulls him over with me.
He buries himself to the hilt and comes with a sound that starts as my name and breaks apart into a word from a language I don't speak, his body shaking from the horns down, the purring so loud the bed frame hums against the wall.
His head rests on my stomach. My fingers follow the horn symbols while the purring runs under my ear like a second heartbeat winding down from a sprint.
"The watchtower." My fingertip follows the carved groove at the base. "I've had my own theory since day two. Tell me yours."
"It was my first mark. Carved it at twenty-two, the week I went rogue." His voice comes low against my skin. "It means I see everything."
My fingertip finds the next symbol. Crossed lines, cut shallow, several of them. "These?"
"Threat neutralized."
My finger moves to the closed circles, one for each year, evenly spaced. "And the circles?"
"A year survived."
I find the closed eye. Fresh, the edges still sharp enough to catch my fingertip. He carved it yesterday while I sat on the bed and watched. "This one?"
He doesn't answer right away. His arm tightens across my hips.
"They found me."
He stays quiet. His breath warms my skin and the purring softens to a hum. I don't push. Some answers you hear louder in the silence than you would in the words.
I run my thumb across the watchtower one more time. Then I press my lips to the base of his horn, where the first mark lives, and his whole body shudders beneath the kiss.
He gets dressed without turning on the overhead light. Jeans, boots, radio off the nightstand. He presses his lips to the top of my head on the way out.
The monitors cycle feeds while he runs a perimeter check. I sit at the desk in his t-shirt with my notebook open and the corkboard filling my peripheral vision.
My pen finds the paper.
Ridgeline Strategic appears twice on this board. Once connected to my editor. Once connected to Humans First.
Two investigations on one wall, overlapping where a Virginia consulting firm paid a magazine editor and funded a hate group in the same zip code. I cap the pen and pull my phone from the desk and send a message to Ellie.
Can you check one more thing? Any county-level filings tied to Ridgeline Strategic in the past eighteen months. Donations, contracts, grants.
Her reply comes in nine minutes.
Already on it. Colt asked the same question yesterday.