Chapter 6 #2
The words land in my body like sparks, igniting something deeper than the physical, and I arch against him, taking him deeper, and the angle shifts and he hits a place inside me that makes my vision go white and a sound tear out of me that I will never admit to making.
He releases my wrists. His hands grip my hips and he pulls me up, rearranges me like I weigh nothing, and I'm in his lap now, straddling him, sinking down onto him at an angle that is deeper and sharper and makes me cry out.
His hands are on my waist, guiding my movement, and from here I can see his face, the tendons in his neck standing out, the flush across his chest, the way his stomach muscles contract every time I roll my hips.
He is beautiful and completely undone, and the power of it, the power of reducing this controlled, dangerous man to gasps and need, is intoxicating.
I roll my hips and watch his head fall back against the sofa, his throat exposed, his hands gripping my waist hard enough to leave marks.
I do it again, slower, clenching around him as I rise, and the sound he makes is wrecked, almost pained.
I set my own pace now, riding him in slow, deep circles, and every downstroke seats him so deep inside me I can feel him in my throat.
"You feel incredible," he says, and his voice is ragged, barely a voice at all.
His thumb finds my clit, circling in time with the movement of my hips, and the dual sensation, him inside me and his hand on me, is too much and not enough simultaneously.
"I want to feel you come like this. Around me. "
"Then don't stop."
He doesn't stop. His thumb keeps its rhythm and his hips thrust upward, meeting me on every downstroke, and the pressure builds in layers this time, deeper and wider than the first orgasm.
I can feel it gathering low in my belly, radiating outward, tightening every muscle in my body, and when it breaks it breaks through my whole body, my thighs clamping around his hips, my nails raking down his chest, his name tearing out of me in a sound that is close to a scream and closer to surrender.
My body clenches around him in waves and he follows me over with a groan that starts in his chest and ends against my throat, his whole body going rigid, his arms locking around my waist, his hips driving up into me one last time as he comes inside me with a possessiveness that I feel in my teeth.
The heat of him spilling into me is intimate and raw, and I feel every pulse of it, and I hold him there with my thighs and my arms and my body and I don't let go.
His hand grips my hip hard enough to bruise, and I don't mind. I want the bruise. I want evidence that this happened, because tomorrow I might need to convince myself it was real.
We stay like that for a long moment, tangled together, his forehead pressed against my collarbone, my fingers in his hair, both of us breathing hard.
The rain has softened to a steady murmur against the windows.
The room smells like sex and sweat and bourbon and the old-wood smell of the house, and my thighs are trembling, and his hands are still on my hips, thumbs tracing slow circles on my skin, possessive even in the aftermath.
Eventually we rearrange ourselves on the too-narrow sofa, his arm under my head, my leg hooked over his. The light through the curtains has gone from gray to charcoal, and somewhere outside the storm is passing over the mountains and taking the last of the afternoon with it.
"The workers," I say, because even now, even here, the question doesn't stop. My hand rests on his chest, rising and falling with his breathing. "How did my mother know their names?"
His arm tightens around me. "She found them. Census records, immigration documents, the archives of a Chinese benevolent association in Denver. She spent years tracking down what she could."
"And the families?"
"Some. Not all. The records from that era are incomplete, especially for Chinese immigrants. But she found enough to know they were real people with real lives, and that matters. It mattered to her more than anything."
The words settle into the room like sediment.
My mother spent decades sitting on this knowledge.
The Aldriches spent over a century burying it, and buying the land around it, and maintaining the sealed entrance, and making sure nobody looked too closely at the founding myth of Wicked Falls: that Elias Aldrich built this town with hard work and silver and the kind of pioneer spirit that Americans love to celebrate.
He built it on a mass grave. He built it on stolen labor and stolen silver and men whose families never learned what happened to them.
"Your uncle's team," I say. "When they come. Once the remains are gone, there's no proof. The mine is just a mine. The land is just land."
"And the Aldrich legacy is preserved." His voice is flat, exhausted, emptied. "That's the plan. Remove the remains, seal the mine permanently, and make the whole thing unprovable."
"And you've been helping him plan this."
"Yes."
The honesty of it is brutal and clarifying. He's not pretending he's innocent. He's not performing remorse.
He's lying on my sofa with his body still warm against mine, telling me exactly what he is and what he's done, and the absence of any attempt to soften it is, paradoxically, the thing that makes me believe him.
"What did my mother want me to do?" I ask.
His arm tightens around my waist, possession, pure and simple. The grip of a man who has chosen a side and is holding onto the reason he chose it. "She wanted you to stop them," he says. "She wanted you to stop us."
"How do you know that?"
"She told me. The last time I saw her, a few weeks before she died. She was specific about it." He pauses. "She was specific about a lot of things in that last conversation. Like she was getting her affairs in order."
The words settle into me slowly. "She knew she was dying."
"I think so. She never said it outright, but the way she talked that day was different.
She wasn't planning for the future anymore.
She was handing things off." His thumb traces a slow line along my hip.
"She said you'd come back. I asked her how she could be so sure, and she said, 'Because I'm the only thing keeping her away.
Once I'm gone, the house will bring her home. '"
The knot in my throat is back. My mother knew.
She knew she was dying, and she spent her last weeks making sure the trail was laid, the journals were in order, the sheets were ironed, the Cather novel was on the nightstand.
She didn't call me. She didn't ask me to come.
She arranged the pieces and trusted that her death would do what her life couldn't: make me listen.
The rain eases. The house creaks. The grandfather clock stands in the hall at 3:47, marking the moment an Aldrich stood on this property and looked at a mine full of murdered men and decided the family name was worth more than the truth.
Callum's breathing has slowed beside me, steady and deep, and his arm is still locked around my waist, and the warmth of his body against mine is complicated in ways I'm not ready to sort through.
He told me everything tonight. He broke open the thing his family spent generations sealing shut, and then he broke open me, and now we're lying in the wreckage together, and I have no idea if the man holding me is my ally or the most dangerous mistake I've ever made.
Both, probably.
My mother's journals are on the shelf across the room. Her handwriting is in them, her evidence, her decades of patient, furious record-keeping. Tomorrow I start reading again, and this time I know what I'm looking for.
Outside, the storm has passed, and the silence it leaves behind is enormous, the whole mountain holding its breath, waiting to see what happens next.