Chapter Twenty-Two #2
Blast turned to face her, and the manic energy shifted. Slowed. Like a river reaching a wide bend — still moving, still powerful, but deeper.
"Hi," he said.
"Hi."
"We just did that."
"We just did that."
He crossed to her in two steps and kissed her, and this time there was no audience. No brothers pounding tables, no old ladies watching, no party waiting outside. Just them in the dim light of their room, his hands framing her face, her fingers curling into the leather of his cut.
She pushed the cut off his shoulders. It fell to the floor — heavy, significant, the weight of everything it represented landing on the hardwood with a sound that meant here, in this room, you're just mine.
"Say my name," he murmured against her mouth.
"Blast."
"The other one."
"Keith." She said it soft. Reverent. The name she'd earned, the one nobody else used, the one that belonged to this room and these moments and the man who lived underneath the noise. "Keith. My Keith."
He made a sound — low, rough, pulled from the same place where he kept Danny's memory and the silence he was learning not to fear. His hands found the zipper at the back of her dress, and the green fabric whispered down her body and pooled at her feet.
"Mine," he said, and it wasn't a question anymore. It was a fact of the world — spoken by a man who'd killed for it and bled for it and stood in front of his brothers and claimed it.
She answered by pulling him toward the bed.
They undressed each other with the unhurried confidence of people who knew what came next and wanted every second of the getting there.
His shirt. Her bra. His jeans. Each layer peeled away revealing skin they'd already memorized — his scars, her freckles, the map of two bodies that had learned each other through fire and silence and the stubborn refusal to let go.
She pushed him onto the mattress and climbed over him, and the look on his face — raw, stunned, completely undone — made her feel more powerful than any ceremony ever could.
"Being claimed doesn't mean being passive," she said, settling her hips against his.
"I'm getting that." His voice was wrecked already. His hands gripped her thighs, scarred fingers pressing into soft skin. "Becca—"
She took him inside her on her own terms. Slow, deliberate, sinking down inch by inch while his head tipped back and his jaw clenched and his hands tightened on her hips hard enough to leave marks she'd find tomorrow.
"Yours," she said, and rolled her hips.
He surged up — caught her waist, flipped her onto her back, drove into her with everything he had.
Not rough, not gentle. Total. The weight of his body pinning her, his mouth on her throat, his hips setting a rhythm that made the headboard crack against the wall in time with the bass still thumping from the party below.
She locked her legs around him and matched every thrust, her hands fisting in the sheets, then finding his back, his shoulders, the scars she'd kissed a hundred times.
He growled something against her neck that sounded like her name and something possessive and something that might have been a prayer.
"Look at me," she demanded.
He raised his head. His eyes were black, blown wide, every mask gone.
The joker. The demolition man. The manic energy that kept the world at arm's length.
All of it stripped away until what remained was just a man — scarred and shaking and so completely hers that the sight of it made her chest split open.
"Not broken," she said, cupping his face. "Never broken. Just scarred. There's a difference."
His rhythm faltered. His eyes went wet. And for one breath he was completely still — not fighting it, not forcing it, just letting the stillness exist because she'd taught him it was safe.
Then he moved again, and the stillness broke into something that felt like joy.
She felt the crest building — heat coiling tighter with every thrust, every grind of his hips against hers.
She pulled him closer, deeper, her body arching up to meet his, and the sounds she was making weren't words anymore.
His hand slid between them, found her exactly where she needed him, and the touch detonated something at her core.
She shattered with his name on her lips — both names, the one the world knew and the one that belonged only to her — and her body clenched around him in waves that pulled him over the edge with her.
He drove deep one final time and came apart with a shudder that ran through him like something letting go, his forehead pressed against hers, her name torn from his throat in a voice she'd never heard from him before.
Quiet. Wrecked. Completely his.
Completely hers.
They lay in the tangle of sheets while the party's bass line thumped through the floor and Stockyard's laugh carried up through the walls.
"You know what the best explosion is?" Blast said. His voice was drowsy, his arm heavy across her waist, his face pressed into her hair.
"If you say a metaphor about sex, I'm moving back to Bridgeport."
He laughed — quiet, warm, the one that belonged only to her. "I was going to say the kind that builds something instead of destroying it."
She shifted, looking at him. His eyes were half-closed, his expression softer than she'd ever seen it. The man underneath the blast radius, resting on the surface for once.
"That's surprisingly poetic for a demolition man," she said.
"I have my moments."
She kissed the scar below his jaw and settled against his chest. His heartbeat was slow and steady under her ear. His breathing evened out within minutes — the deep, easy rhythm of a man who'd stopped running.
The rose on the nightstand caught the lamplight. Wilted but holding on. One flower from the wreckage, still alive after everything.
Becca closed her eyes and listened to the sounds of the compound celebrating around them.
Her compound now.
Her family.
Her man — loud and scarred and finally, perfectly still.