8. Justice
JUSTICE
One inch.
One inch of dead air between my mouth and hers, and the last functioning thread of discipline in my skull is screaming to pull back. She is scared. She is fragile. She is a woman running from men who used their hands as weapons and I am a man with hands big enough to wrap around her entire throat.
Pull back.
Her lips part.
Not much. A fraction. The smallest separation of soft pink skin, and her breath slips out warm and shaking against my mouth, and the sound that comes with it is so quiet I almost miss it.
A whimper. Thin. Needy. Buried in the back of her throat like she's ashamed of it, like she's been trained to swallow every sound her body wants to make.
The thread snaps.
I close the inch.
My lips press to hers and the contact is careful.
Slow. I hold myself on the knife's blade of restraint, barely touching, giving her every possible second to shove me away.
My hand stays in her hair but loose, fingers splayed, not gripping.
My other hand stays fisted at my side because if I put both hands on her right now I will not be gentle and she needs gentle.
She needs gentle.
Her mouth is impossibly soft. Warm. She tastes like the chamomile tea she made an hour ago and something underneath that is just her, sweet and clean, and the taste hits the back of my brain like a slug of whiskey. Raw heat spreading down my spine, pooling low.
I yank back a fraction. Check. Her eyes are closed. Lashes dark against those pale cheeks. Her hands are frozen in her lap, fingers curled into the warm blanket, and she is trembling.
I start to withdraw.
Her hand shoots up and fists the front of my flannel.
The fabric twists in her grip and she hauls herself toward me with a strength that has no business living in a body that small.
Her mouth finds mine again and this kiss is different.
This one has teeth. Her lips crush against mine and the whimper comes again, louder now, a desperate, fractured sound.
My fisted hand opens.
It finds her waist. Spans the entire width of it. My fingers sink into the soft fabric of my flannel shirt hanging off her frame and beneath it I feel the warm, living curve of her body, impossibly small, impossibly delicate. I could snap her in half without trying.
She pulls harder on my shirt.
My hand slides from her waist to her lower back and I bring her to me.
Carefully. Firmly. Her body leaves the couch cushion and comes flush against my torso and the contact is an explosion.
Every point where her softness meets my density lights up.
Her breasts compressed against my ribs. Her stomach against my abs.
Her small fist still twisted in my flannel, knuckles digging into my sternum.
I angle my head and deepen the kiss.
My tongue traces the seam of her lips. She opens for me instantly. No hesitation. Her mouth parts and I taste her fully for the first time and the sound I make is not human. Guttural. Wrecked.
But not now.
Now her tongue slides against mine. Tentative.
Exploring. Like she's never done this before, or like she's only ever done it under duress and this is the first time she's choosing it.
Her hand releases my shirt and both her palms flatten on me.
Not pushing. Mapping. Her fingers spread over my pectorals and I feel the tremor in them, the vibration of fear and want battling each other in her small body.
I slow the kiss.
Ease back from the consuming desperation.
Let my lips drag against hers, soft, wet.
I catch her lower lip between mine and hold it.
Release. Kiss the corner of her mouth. The bow of her upper lip.
The faint scar at her jaw that I have been staring at for two days and wanting to burn someone alive over.
"Justice."
My name in her mouth. Barely a whisper. Wrecked and raw and wondering, like she's testing whether this is real.
Our foreheads touch. Our breathing is ragged. Uneven.
My thumb traces the line of her jaw.
"Nobody touches you again. Not unless you want them to."
Her eyes open. Those enormous brown eyes, glassy with unshed tears, locked onto mine from three inches away. Searching. Waiting for the catch. Waiting for the price.
She finds what she's looking for. Her fingers release my shirt and slide up my body and over my collarbones and wrap around the back of my neck.
Her touch is feather-light. Barely there. Like she's handling something explosive and knows it.
She's not wrong.
"I want you to."
Three words. Quiet. Steady. No tremor in them this time and that steadiness undoes me more than the trembling ever did. This is her choosing. Deliberate. Eyes wide open.
I don't ask if she's sure. She's been doubted and overridden and second-guessed by every man who's ever stood over her and I won't add my name to that list. She said what she said. I heard her.
I lower her to the rug.
Slow. One hand cradling the back of her skull, the other braced on the floor beside her hip, controlling the descent so she feels nothing but warmth and intention.
The fire crackles three feet away and the heat rolls over us in waves, painting her skin gold and amber, and when her back meets the thick wool rug her hair fans out around her face and she looks up at me with an expression so open it physically hurts.
I kneel over her. My knees bracket her hips. I am above her and I know it. I know what this looks like from her angle. A wall of muscle and scar tissue and rough hands blocking out the ceiling. So I hold still. Let her breathe. Let her adjust to my shadow.
"Stay with me. Don't go somewhere else."
"I'm right here."
My fingers find the top button of the flannel she's wearing.
My flannel. The one that hangs to her mid-thigh and makes her look like a child playing dress-up.
I undo the first button. Wait. She nods.
Second button. The fabric parts and firelight spills across her collarbone.
Third button. Fourth. Each one a question and each nod an answer and I will undo a thousand buttons this way, one at a time, if that's what she needs.
The shirt falls open.
She's wearing nothing underneath.
My brain goes white. Absolute static. She is small and perfect and her skin is luminous in the firelight and her breasts are soft and full and rising with each rapid breath and there are bruises.
More bruises. Faded yellow and green along her ribs, ghost-marks of fingers that gripped too hard, and the static in my skull sharpens to a single screaming frequency of violence.
Later.
I will find them later and I will make it biblical.
Now I lower my mouth to the bruise on her left rib and I kiss it.
Gentle. Open-lipped. Reverent. She sucks in air and her stomach contracts beneath my chin and I feel the muscles jump.
I kiss the next bruise. And the next. Tracing the map of her suffering with my mouth and replacing each mark with heat and softness and the scrape of my beard against her skin.
"Oh." A tiny, shattered syllable.
I work upward. My lips drag along the curve beneath her breast and she arches off the rug and her fingers spear into my hair and grip.
I close my mouth over her nipple and her entire body bows.
The sound she makes is not a whimper this time.
It's full-throated and broken and beautiful and I want to hear it again for the rest of my life.
I release her to look at her face.
Flushed. Lips parted. Eyes half-closed and glazed and locked on me with something that looks dangerously close to worship and she should not be looking at me like that. I am a grease-stained mechanic who lives on a mountain because he hates people.
Mine. This woman is mine.
I sit back on my heels. Pull my shirt over my head and toss it. Her gaze drops and tracks over my torso and she regards the scars, the bulk, the dark hair trailing from my navel down. Her hand reaches out and her fingertips trace the long scar on my left side. Old. From a different life.
"Does it hurt?"
"No."
She leans up and presses her lips to it.
I grab her face in both hands and kiss her hard. Consuming. My tongue sweeps into her mouth and she meets it and her legs wrap around my waist and her hotness through my jeans makes my vision tunnel.
I move back. Breathing ragged.
"Tell me to stop and I stop. Any second. Any reason. You hear me?"
"I hear you." Her thumb strokes my jaw. "Don't stop."
I hook my fingers into the waistband of the sweatpants she's wearing. My sweatpants. I drag them down her hips and over her thighs, guiding them off each foot, and her legs are bare in the firelight. Slim and pale and trembling.
Her eyes flutter closed.
"Eyes on me, Emilia."
They snap open.
She comes apart beneath my hand with her eyes locked on mine like I ordered.
The way her lips form a soundless O and her back lifts off the rug and her thighs clamp around my wrist. The way her fingers dig into my forearm hard enough to leave marks of her own, half-moon crescents from those bitten-down nails, and I welcome every single one. Brand me.
I work her through it. Slow. Steady. Until her body stops shaking and her grip loosens and she melts into the wool rug like every bone in her body dissolved at once.
Her breathing comes in short, hitching gasps that gradually lengthen and deepen and the firelight play across her flushed skin and count each breath like a miser counting gold.
After, she reaches for me. Both hands. Fingers curling, beckoning, and the gesture is so simple and so trusting that it hits me harder than anything that came before.
I lower myself over her and she pulls me down and I give her some of my heaviness.
Not all. Never all. But enough that she feels covered.
Sheltered. Her face buries into the crook of my neck and her breath is hot against my pulse point and she says something so quiet I have to stop breathing to hear it.
"Thank you."
Two words. Sincere. Devastating. Because no one should have to thank another person for being touched with care and the fact that she does tells me everything about what came before me.
I gather her up.
One arm under her knees, the other behind her back, and she is feather light. A hundred and ten pounds of warm, spent woman curling into me like she was engineered to fit there. Her head drops to my shoulder and her hand rests over my heart and I carry her down the dark hallway to my bedroom.
The room is cold. I left the window cracked this morning out of habit and the mountain air has turned the space into a vault of pine-scented ice.
I lower her onto the bed and she hisses at the chill of the sheets.
I strip the heavy quilt from the cedar chest at the foot of the frame and pile it over her, then pull the blanket on that, then cross to the window and seal it shut.
I strip my jeans. Climb in behind her. Pull her back against me and wrap my arm across her stomach and her body slots against mine with a precision that borders on structural.
Every curve filling every hollow. Her cold feet tuck between my calves and I don't flinch.
Her fingers lace through mine over her stomach and squeeze once.
She's asleep in under a minute.
I am not.
I lie in the dark with this woman wrapped in my body and I listen.
To the fire dying in the other room. To the wind scraping branches across the roof.
To the distant, groaning settle of snow packed three feet deep on the north slope.
To her breathing, deep and slow and even for the first time since I found her on that frozen pass yesterday.
Something has shifted.
Not in the cabin. Not on the mountain. In me. Somewhere behind my sternum, in that armored space where I locked everything down years ago, a wall has collapsed. Rubble and dust and beneath it something raw and beating and alive that I haven't felt since I was too young to know what it meant.
She moves in her sleep. Pushes back against me. Murmurs something shapeless and buries deeper into my body and my arm tightens around her on pure instinct. The protective response is automatic. Cellular. Written into the same base code that makes my heart pump and my lungs pull air.
This is permanent.
I have bone-deep certainty that requires no deliberation and permits no debate. Emilia Virgie is mine and I am hers and there is no version of the future where I let her go.
The men in town. The black SUVs. The controlling father with enough money to hire private soldiers.
I catalog the threat landscape with cold, mechanical focus while she sleeps against me.
Two investigators at the diner. Armed. Professional.
The kind of men who work for people with limitless budgets and zero ethical boundaries.
They will canvas every road, every motel, every gas station within a hundred-mile radius.
They will find the sedan eventually, even stripped and hidden in my lower barn.
So I will be ready.
I have guns. I have the high ground. I have a mountain that I know the way a surgeon knows anatomy, every ridge and gully and game trail, every choke point where a single man with a rifle can hold off a dozen. And I have something those hired suits don't.
A reason to kill.
Not a paycheck. Not a contract. Not loyalty to some rich man's ego.
Her.
The warmth of her against my ribs. The faded bruises I kissed. The way she said my name like it was the first safe word she'd ever learned.
That is worth any amount of blood.
I kiss the back of her neck. Breathe her in. Close my eyes.
Sleep takes me eventually. Deep. Dreamless. The kind of black unconscious that only comes from total physical expenditure and the animal satisfaction of having your mate safe in your den.
My eyes open at 3:17 AM.
Not groggy. Instant. Full combat awareness, adrenaline flooding my bloodstream before my conscious mind catches up, because my ears have already identified the sound and classified it as a threat.
Tires.
Heavy ones. Moving slow. The low, deliberate crunch of rubber on frozen gravel, the sound distinct from wind, distinct from wildlife, distinct from anything that belongs on my access road at three in the morning.
They're at the gate.