Chapter 13
Dana found him in the stable at midnight, and he was shaking.
Not the visible kind—not teeth chattering or knees buckling. The deep kind. The kind that lived under the skin and radiated outward through every muscle, turning steady hands into something that fumbled with a halter buckle three times before giving up.
Turnbuckle stood in Duchess's stall with his back to the door, one hand on the mare's neck, the other hanging at his side, opening and closing around nothing.
He'd checked the horses twice already since the assault.
This was the third time, and Duchess was watching him with the patient concern of an animal that understood damage even when humans tried to hide it.
Dana leaned against the stall door.
"She's fine," she said. "Jackpot's fine. You secured them six hours ago."
"I know."
"Then come inside."
"I can't—" He stopped. His hand pressed flat against Duchess's shoulder, and she could see the tremor running through his forearm. "I left. I was forty miles away playing security guard while they came for your horses. If Hoist hadn't been here—if you hadn't—"
"But you were. And I was."
"Ten minutes later and they'd have had Duchess loaded.
" He turned, and in the lantern light she saw what the adrenaline was doing to him.
Pupils blown wide. Jaw locked so tight the muscle jumped.
Every line of his body strung taut, vibrating at a frequency that had nowhere to go because the fight was over and his body hadn't gotten the message.
She knew the feeling. Had been living inside it for hours—the combat high that burned and burned and wouldn't burn out, turning every nerve ending into a live wire, making her skin feel too tight for her body.
She'd tried to sleep. Lasted ten minutes before the sheets felt like a cage and the dark felt like a threat and the only thing she could think about was the sound of Duchess screaming in the yard and the weight of the shovel in her hands when she'd swung it into a man's face.
She'd come here for the same reason he had. To check. To confirm. To put her hands on the horses and feel them breathing.
But the horses were breathing. Had been breathing for hours.
It wasn't the horses she needed her hands on.
"Come here," she said.
He didn't move. The shaking intensified—she could see it in his shoulders now, in the set of his jaw, in the way his hands clenched and released at his sides.
He was fighting himself. Holding back the flood of adrenaline and want and the primal need to confirm that the person he'd raced twenty miles to protect was alive and whole and his.
Dana stepped into the stall.
She crossed to him and put both hands flat on his chest. His heart was hammering—not the steady drum she'd fallen asleep to five nights ago but a war rhythm, fast and furious, the engine of a body that had been in combat mode for six hours and couldn't downshift.
"I said come here."
"Dana, I'm not—" He caught her wrists. His grip was too tight. He knew it was too tight. She watched him try to gentle it and fail. "I can't be careful right now."
"Did I ask you to be careful?"
His breath caught.
She rose on her toes and kissed him.
Nothing gentle about it. Nothing slow. She kissed him the way she'd swung that shovel—with everything she had, full commitment, the kind of force that came from deciding and not looking back.
Her hands fisted in his shirt and she pulled him down to her and poured every ounce of the adrenaline that was eating her alive into his mouth.
He made a sound against her lips—raw, animal, the noise of a man whose leash just snapped. His hands released her wrists and found her hips instead, gripping hard enough to bruise, lifting her off her feet like she weighed nothing.
Her back hit the stall wall. The wood creaked.
"Here," she gasped.
"Here?"
"Now."
His mouth found her throat. Not kissing—claiming.
Teeth and tongue and the ragged heat of his breathing against her pulse point while his hands mapped her body with a desperation that had nothing to do with discovery and everything to do with proof.
She was here. She was alive. She was his, and the men who'd tried to take what was his were broken or dead or running.
Dana locked her legs around his waist and pulled him closer.
The first time had been slow. A conversation. Two people learning a language they'd speak for the rest of their lives. This was different. This was two people screaming in a language they already knew—urgent, profane, stripped of everything except the raw need to be as close as physics allowed.
He was everywhere. Hands rough and shaking and relentless, mouth hot against every inch of skin he could reach, his body pinning hers to the wall with a weight that should have felt like trapped and instead felt like anchored.
She clawed at his shirt and he ripped it off over his head without breaking contact, and the feel of his skin against hers—sweat and heat and the ridges of scars she was beginning to know by touch—sent a current through her that was close to violent.
"Mine." The word tore out of him against her collarbone. Not a whisper. A declaration—fierce, absolute, spoken with the same intensity he'd used walking toward men who wanted to hurt her. "You're mine, Dana."
"Prove it."
He did.
They sank into the hay together—urgent, graceless, magnificent in the way that real need was always magnificent because it didn't care about elegance. She pulled him down and he followed, and what happened between them was nothing like the careful tenderness of his room five nights ago.
This was collision.
This was two bodies running on combat adrenaline and the intoxicating relief of survival, channeling hours of fear and fury into something that felt like worship performed at gunpoint.
She bit his shoulder and he growled against her neck and they moved together with a ferocity that shook the stall walls and made Duchess snort and retreat to the far corner.
Dana didn't notice. Didn't care. The world had narrowed to his hands and his mouth and the devastating rhythm of his body against hers—proof of life, proof of strength, proof that the man who'd killed for her horses could come apart under her hands and still feel like the most powerful thing she'd ever touched.
"Keegan—" His real name on her lips, gasped between breaths, and she felt the effect ripple through him like a shockwave. His hips stuttered. His grip tightened. He pressed his forehead against hers and looked at her with eyes that were wrecked—wide open, stripped bare, every wall demolished.
"Say it again."
She said it again. And again. His name became the rhythm they moved to—a pulse, a prayer, the word that broke him apart and put him back together in the same breath.
When the wave crested, it took them both.
Not gentle. Not quiet. The release hit like the fight had—sudden, explosive, total—and Dana heard herself make a sound she'd never made before, something between a cry and a laugh, the noise of a body letting go of everything it had been carrying.
He collapsed against her. Heavy. Breathing hard. His face buried in her neck, his arms still wrapped around her like letting go wasn't something his body was capable of yet.
She held him.
Hay prickled against her bare back. The lantern threw warm shadows across the stall walls. Duchess, having decided the humans were done being alarming, returned to her hay net and began eating with pointed nonchalance.
Minutes passed. Their breathing slowed. The adrenaline finally—finally—began to ebb, replaced by the heavy, boneless warmth of two bodies that had found their way through violence and fear and come out tangled together on the other side.
Turnbuckle lifted his head. His eyes were softer now. The shaking had stopped.
"Your horse is judging us."
Dana laughed. It came out watery, surprised, the release of tension she'd been carrying since the moment Fathom's call had sent him racing back to the compound. "Duchess judges everyone. Don't take it personally."
He shifted his weight, settling beside her in the hay, and pulled her against his chest with an arm that was no longer trembling. She fit against him the way she always did—perfectly, inevitably, like a horse finding its stride.
"I thought they had you," he said into her hair. "The whole ride back. Twenty minutes of imagining what I'd find."
"You found me fighting."
"I found you standing between your horse and men with guns, holding a shovel like it was a sword." His voice roughened. "Bravest thing I've ever seen. Stupidest too."
"Says the man who fought five guys with a hay hook."
"That was different."
"How?"
"Because I don't matter the same way."
She pulled back to look at him. His face in the lantern light—the scar, the bruises, the eyes that tracked threats before faces—was the most important thing she'd ever seen.
"You matter," she said. "To me. To this compound. To every person you've stepped in for since you stopped looking away." She pressed her palm flat against his chest, over his heart. "Don't you dare tell me you don't matter."
His hand covered hers. Held it there.
"I'm done pretending this is temporary," she said. "Protection. Arrangement. Whatever word we've been using to avoid the real one." She held his gaze. "This isn't temporary. You're not temporary. And I'm not going to act like what I feel for you is just gratitude or adrenaline or—"
He kissed her. Slow this time. Tender, the way the first time had been tender, and the contrast with what they'd just done—the ferocity, the need, the desperation—made her eyes sting.
"It's not temporary," he said against her mouth.
"Good."
"It was never temporary."
She closed her eyes and let him hold her in the hay, in the stable she'd rebuilt, in the stall next to the horse that was alive because they'd both been willing to fight.
Outside, the compound settled into the quiet of a place that had been defended and held. Brothers on watch. Fences being repaired. The steady hum of a community that absorbed violence the way it absorbed everything else—by facing it together.
Dana pressed closer. Turnbuckle's arms tightened.
Done pretending. Done hedging. Done treating this like something that would end when Fogarty did.
Whatever came next, they'd face it the same way they'd faced the assault—side by side, shovel and fists, two people who'd built themselves from nothing and refused to lose what they'd found.