Epilogue
Tonio
Three weeks later
Morning came into the room a slow, grayish gold through the blinds.
Tessa’s hair spilled across my arm where she’d fallen asleep with my arms wrapped securely around her.
I’d been awake an hour already, just watching her breathe, one hand resting lightly against the place where our child slept with her.
Her eyes fluttered open, and she found mine with her gaze.
“Morning,” she said, voice rough with sleep, and stretched against me like a cat.
“Morning.” I brushed hair back from her face. “How’s my girl?”
“Which one?” She smiled, slow and sleepy, and pressed her palm flat over my hand where it rested on her belly. “We’re both good.”
I caught her gaze and scowled. “You could have at least gotten knocked up with a boy. I’ll have to run off every male over the age of ten in Nashville and that would be bad for tourism.”
She giggled and my heart soared. I gently rolled her to her back before leaning in to kiss her in unhurried slides of my tongue inside her mouth.
She made a soft, pleasurable sound against my mouth and rolled us so she straddled my hips, still kissing me lazily.
Contentedly. I wrapped my arms around her, holding her close as I dared.
I’d been careful for three weeks now, like she was made of something breakable when we both knew she wasn’t.
She let me have that small worry over her.
Likely because she knew I needed to care for her more than she needed the care.
But she’d suffer through it. She always let me have that, even when she rolled her eyes at me.
I slid my hand down her spine, over the curve of her ass, and she arched into my palm, sighing when I squeezed gently.
She sat and braced her hands on my chest. I looked at her for a long moment in the silvery morning light.
The small new swell of her stomach, the way her whole mindset had changed as she thought about being a mother.
All the energy she’d put into fighting her way back to Enclave éclipse, despite my wishes, she now put into readying herself for motherhood. And, I hoped, into being my wife.
“You’re staring,” she said.
“I like the view.” I grinned at her. “Very much indeed.”
She laughed, a low merry chuckle. With a sigh, she lay back on top of me as she found my cock with her clit so every stroke of her hips put friction on her clit and flooded her sweet pussy with moisture.
I kissed her throat, her collarbone. I rolled us slowly, taking my time to settle myself between her thighs. “Not too heavy?”
She gave me a startled look. “I cannot believe the shit that just came out of your mouth.”
I couldn’t help myself. I burst out laughing. “You’re gonna have to be more specific, honey.”
“You can seriously ask me that after what we did last night?” She grinned up at me. “I seem to remember you practically falling asleep still inside me.”
“Yeah. What do you expect, though? I’m an old man. You wore me out.”
Again, she laughed merrily. I caught her laughter with my kiss and savored every sweet stroke.
“Tonio.” She spoke my name so soft and full of want.
“I’m right here, baby. I’ll always be here.
With you.” I slid inside her pussy in a long, slow glide.
She gasped, her eyes widening slightly before settling into a contented, dreamy smile.
“There’s my girl. You like it when I fuck you.
” Deliberately, I spoke to her tenderly while saying filthy things to her. She loved it. So did I.
She rolled her hips to meet me, slow at first, her breath catching every time I slid in deep. I braced on one forearm to keep the rest of my weight off her and watched her face because I never got tired of watching her expressions when I was inside her.
“You’re doing that thing again,” she said, breathless, but she still smiled up at me.
“What thing?”
“Treating me like glass.”
“I’m treating you like the mother of my child.” I rolled my hips deep, slow, and she gasped, nails biting into my shoulders. “There’s a difference.”
“Feels the same to me.”
“Then let me show you the difference.” I picked up the pace, still controlled, still careful, but harder now, deep enough to make her cry out and grab a fistful of the sheet beside her head. Her pussy squeezed around me tight and wet, and I groaned low in my throat, buried my face against her neck.
She came apart quietly this morning, none of the desperate wildness of that first night after éclipse. A low moan and her pussy shuddered and tightened around my cock.
I still moved deliberately slowly, my hips rolling with hers in perfect rhythm. She wrapped her legs around my waist and met every thrust with one of her own, her nails dragging lightly down my back, her breath hot against my ear.
“I love you,” I said against her throat, and felt her go still under me for half a second before her whole body answered, clenching around me, drawing a groan out of my chest I didn’t try to hide.
“I love you too,” she breathed. “Tonio --”
She came with a shudder and a soft cry into my shoulder, and I followed her a few thrusts later, buried deep, my forehead pressed to hers while I emptied my balls deep inside her greedy little pussy.
We stayed tangled like that a long while after, both of us dozing lightly.
The city outside had stayed quiet these last three weeks.
Some small cold part of me that never fully slept kept turning that fact over in my mind.
I expected the biggest nest of vipers to swarm up from the ground and attack.
So far, though, all looked and sounded quiet.
Knight swept every fallback site we’d flagged the night of the raid, Rourke’s party house downtown, the warehouse spurs off the river road, and every single one of them came up scrubbed clean, stripped of paper and product before our men ever cleared the doors.
The handler I’d pulled out of that trunk had bought himself a hole in the head instead of a drawn-out death with the useless line about a Memphis contact, and Knight had filed it and moved on because there was nowhere else to take it.
That man was now dead and would never be seen again.
Darby had the éclipse women settled inside two weeks, moved through club channels and family money with no paper trail leading back to any of us.
She made sure everyone had housing and names and new lives, if they’d wanted or needed it, like she’d been doing this very thing her whole career instead of three weeks.
I watched her work a laptop at the kitchen table most mornings now, calling in favors, coordinating with Nadine on medical, and I saw something new in the way she looked up at me when I came into a room.
She genuinely gave me welcoming smiles now.
I thought maybe she’d needed to know I was killing for the right reasons and not just to salvage my honor so I didn’t show weakness or some shit.
Once she knew my reasons and my head was in the game, she’d followed me to the bitter end. Darby wasn’t a follower.
My phone vibrated against the nightstand.
Tessa stirred against my chest as I reached for it but settled easily enough.
The combination of natural pregnancy hormones and several orgasms a day helped her sleep longer and more easily.
Knight’s voice came through low and clipped, none of his usual ease in it.
“I’m done with the records, boss. You need to come see this. In person.”
Ten minutes later, having managed to slip out of our room without waking Tessa, I walked into Knight’s office.
Three monitors ran feeds and spreadsheets.
Knuckles leaned against the wall with his arms crossed, watching the door.
Seth already stood at Knight’s shoulder, which told me whatever waited on those screens was important enough that my father had gotten here before me.
“Sit down or don’t,” Knight said, not looking up from the keyboard. “This isn’t going to take long, and it isn’t going to feel good.”
I stayed on my feet. “Talk.”
He pulled up a spreadsheet, columns of numbers scrolling clean and organized.
“Every account, every route, every name on the client roster going back four years. I traced every dollar, every shell company, every wire transfer that ever touched éclipse.” He tapped the screen.
“All of it terminates in Denton. Every thread. No path up from him to anybody bigger.”
“That’s not possible,” I said. “A man doesn’t run a network that size alone.”
“No, he doesn’t.” Knight finally looked at me.
“I tore that server cage apart drive by drive. Four years of operations, every buyer, every route, every dollar, and all of it stops at Denton. The ledger that should’ve named all the names was missing from everywhere.
Whoever curated that cage knew exactly what a raid would find, and he made sure the one document that mattered never sat inside it.
That cage was a gift, Tonio. He wanted you to have every byte of it. ”
“What about his Memphis contact?” I asked. “The number he gave up?”
“Burned an hour after we hit the building. Dead number, dead SIM, no tower ping since.” Knight pulled up another window, a timeline with two flagged entries running side by side. “Here’s the part that’s going to sit wrong with you, boss.”
He zoomed in on the timestamps. Two lines, both red, both stamped within the same sixty-second window.