Chapter 9
She found him at midnight because of course she did.
Five nights sharing his bed and learning the rhythms of his sleeplessness, Rebecca knew the pattern. He'd lie still until he thought she was asleep—twenty minutes, sometimes thirty—then slip out with the silent precision of a man trained to move through darkness without disturbing anything.
She always heard him leave. She just hadn't followed before.
Tonight, something pulled her out of bed. Some instinct that said the set of his shoulders at the bar had been wrong, that the way he'd watched her pour drinks for hours without speaking meant he was carrying weight he didn't know how to set down.
The armory was at the end of the compound's east wing, behind a steel door with a keypad lock she'd watched him punch enough times to memorize the code. She typed it in, heard the click, and pushed the door open.
Cargo sat on a bench in the middle of his kingdom, surrounded by weapons racked with obsessive precision, his hands disassembling a rifle that didn't need disassembling.
He didn't look up. "You should be sleeping."
"So should you." She stepped inside, pulling the door shut behind her. The room smelled like him—gun oil and solvent and that particular clean-metal scent that clung to everything he touched. "What are you doing?"
"Maintenance."
"At midnight. On weapons you cleaned this morning."
His hands kept moving. Precise, mechanical, stripping the rifle with the muscle memory of a man who'd done it ten thousand times. She watched his fingers work—steady as always, never fumbling, never hesitating.
But his jaw was locked tight enough to crack teeth.
"Talk to me," she said.
"Nothing to talk about."
"Cargo." She moved closer, stopping at the edge of the bench. Close enough to see the tension vibrating through him like a wire about to snap. "You've barely spoken all day. You sat at my bar for three hours and didn't say a word. And now you're down here taking apart rifles in the dark."
"The light's on."
"Don't deflect."
His hands stopped. The rifle sat in pieces on the bench between them, laid out in the exact order of reassembly, each component positioned with the kind of care that bordered on devotion.
"Anniversary," he said. The word came out rough, dragged from somewhere deep. "Five years ago today."
She didn't ask anniversary of what. She knew. Had known since the safehouse, when he'd told her about the cache in fragments and left the worst parts buried.
She sat down beside him on the bench. Not touching. Just present.
"How many?" she asked quietly.
"Three." He stared at the disassembled rifle like it held answers.
"Three operators walked into a resupply point using a route I'd established, accessing a cache I'd built, trusting equipment I'd sourced.
And someone on the other end of a signals intelligence breach knew exactly where they'd be and what they'd be carrying. "
"That wasn't your fault."
"I know that." His voice cracked on it—just barely, a hairline fracture in the armor he wore like a second skin.
"I know it was the signals breach. I know I followed every protocol.
I know the investigation cleared me." He looked at her, and she saw it then.
The thing he carried under all that control.
"But I built the cache. I chose the location.
I established the supply route they followed to their deaths.
My hands touched every weapon they were carrying when the ambush hit. "
Rebecca's chest ached. Not with pity—she'd learned young that pity was useless—but with recognition. The weight of being the one who did everything right and still watched it go wrong.
"You left Delta because of them," she said.
"I left because I couldn't trust the system anymore." He picked up a rifle component, turned it in his fingers. "Couldn't trust that information I provided wouldn't leak. Couldn't trust that equipment I sourced wouldn't be compromised. Couldn't trust anything I couldn't personally control."
"So you came here. Built an armory nobody could compromise."
"Built supply chains with no single point of failure. Varied my sources. Cached weapons in locations only I know about." His mouth twisted. "Paranoia as operating procedure."
"It's not paranoia if it keeps people alive."
"That's what I tell myself." He set the component down, his hand resting on the bench between them. "Most days I believe it."
"But not today."
"Not today."
She looked at his hand. Scarred across the knuckles, callused from years of handling metal and ammunition, steady enough to disassemble a rifle in the dark. The hand of a man who'd dedicated his life to making sure the people around him had what they needed to survive.
A hand that hadn't stopped shaking since she'd sat down.
He was trembling. Micro-tremors running through his fingers, visible only because she was close enough to see them. The most controlled man she'd ever met, and his hands were shaking on the anniversary of the day his control hadn't been enough.
Rebecca reached across the bench and took the rifle barrel from his grip. Set it down with the other components. Then she laced her fingers through his and held on.
His hand closed around hers so hard it hurt.
"You can't fix this," he said.
"I'm not trying to fix it." She shifted closer, turning on the bench until her knee pressed against his thigh. "I'm telling you that your hands have somewhere else to be tonight."
His eyes found hers. Dark, intense, stripped of every layer of professional detachment he usually wore. She'd never seen him this exposed. Never seen the raw grief underneath the paranoid efficiency, the man under the armorer, the wound under the scar.
"Rebecca." Her name in his mouth sounded like a warning.
"I'm right here." She lifted her free hand to his jaw. Felt the muscle clench under her palm, the coiled tension of a man fighting himself. "I'm right here, and I'm not going anywhere, and you don't have to hold this alone anymore."
"You don't know what you're—"
"I know exactly what I'm offering." She held his gaze.
Steady. Sure. More certain than she'd been about anything since she'd run through his door bleeding and terrified.
"I'm offering you something that isn't a weapon.
Something you don't have to inventory or secure or worry about being compromised. "
His breathing changed. Rougher. His eyes dropped to her mouth, and the look in them made her pulse hammer against her ribs.
"I break things," he said hoarsely. "I get too careful or not careful enough and things break."
"I don't break easy." She leaned in, closing the distance between them until her forehead rested against his. Breathing his air. Feeling the heat of him through the thin fabric of her shirt. "Foster care, remember? I'm built for things that don't work the way they're supposed to."
A sound came out of him—not quite a laugh, not quite a groan. Something between surrender and need.
She kissed him.
Not careful. Not cautious. Not the tentative press of two strangers testing boundaries. She kissed him like she'd wanted to since the safehouse, since the cellar, since he'd stood in a doorway watching her pour drinks and she'd realized she'd been saving his seat for days.
Cargo went rigid for one heartbeat. Two.
Then his hands were in her hair and his mouth opened under hers and every ounce of that ferocious control redirected into kissing her like she was the only weapon he'd ever need.
He tasted like whiskey and grief and the kind of want that comes from years of denying yourself anything soft.
His hands shook against her scalp, those steady armorer's hands trembling as they cradled her face, and the vulnerability of it—the most dangerous man she'd ever met, shaking because he was touching her—cracked something open in Rebecca's chest that she'd kept locked since her first foster home.
She pulled back just enough to breathe. His forehead against hers, his hands still in her hair, his eyes so dark they were almost black.
"Tell me to stop," he rasped. "Tell me this is a bad idea and we should—"
"Derek."
His whole body went still.
She'd never said it before. His real name, the one he'd promised to tell her when this was over, the one she'd heard Ghost use once in passing and filed away like the valuable intelligence it was.
"Derek," she said again, and watched something shatter behind his eyes. "Don't stop."
He lifted her off the bench like she weighed nothing. Her legs wrapped around his waist on instinct, her arms around his neck, and he carried her through the armory door and down the dark hallway to their room with the kind of focused urgency she'd only seen him give to operations.
The door barely closed before his mouth found hers again.
He pressed her against it, the length of his body pinning her there, and she felt every scar and hard edge of him through their clothes.
His hands slid from her hair to her waist to her hips, mapping her with the same methodical attention he gave to everything—but desperate now, shaking now, the precision dissolving into raw need.
"Mine," he said against her mouth. Not a question. A declaration. The word vibrating against her lips like a vow. "You're mine, Rebecca."
"Yours." She pulled at his shirt, needing skin, needing to feel the man under all that armor. "And you're mine. That's how this works."
He pulled back just enough to look at her, and what she saw in his face made her breath catch. Awe. Like she was something he'd found in his inventory that he hadn't known he was missing. Something irreplaceable.
"Yeah," he said roughly. "That's how this works."
He carried her to the bed and laid her down with a gentleness that contradicted everything else about him—the scars, the weapons, the violence he was capable of. His hands found the hem of her shirt and stopped, waiting, his eyes asking a question his mouth wouldn't form.
She answered by pulling the shirt over her head.
What followed was careful and thorough in a way that undid her completely.
Not hesitant—Cargo didn't do hesitant—but deliberate.
Attentive. He touched her like he was learning her, cataloguing every response, every sound, every place that made her arch against him.
His mouth followed his hands, slow and hot across her skin, and she realized he was doing exactly what she'd expected.
He was taking inventory.
Learning what she needed. Filing it away. Building a supply chain of knowledge about her body that he'd maintain with the same paranoid attention he gave everything else.
And God help her, it was the most erotic thing she'd ever experienced.
"Here?" His mouth against her collarbone. She gasped, and he lingered, committing the reaction to memory.
"Here." His thumb tracing a line down her ribcage. She shivered, and he mapped the path again, slower.
"Here." Lower now. His breath hot against skin that had never been treated with this kind of devastating focus.
"Derek—" His name broke apart in her throat.
His hands were still shaking. Every touch trembled with something she understood—the terror of holding something you couldn't afford to lose. The vulnerability of a man who'd spent years trusting nothing, choosing to trust her.
She pulled him up, needing his weight, needing to feel him solid and real against her. He settled over her with a groan that sounded like it had been building for days, and when he pressed his forehead to hers, she saw that his eyes were bright.
Not tears. Not quite. But something close. Something that said this man hadn't been touched with tenderness in longer than she wanted to think about.
"I've got you," she whispered. Her hands on his face, his jaw, the scars she could feel under her fingertips. "I've got you."
He came apart for her slowly, the way a man comes apart who's terrified of letting go—in pieces, in stages, each layer of control peeling back to reveal something raw and hungry and achingly human underneath.
She held him through every moment of it.
Matched him breath for breath, movement for movement, two people who'd spent their lives being careful finding the courage to be reckless with each other.
When it was over, he didn't pull away. Didn't retreat into the professional distance she'd expected. He gathered her against his chest like she was something precious he'd just acquired, his arms locked around her, his face buried in her hair.
She felt his heartbeat against her back. Still fast. Still shaking, just barely.
"Rebecca." Her name in his mouth sounded different now. Softer. Like something he was testing the weight of, deciding where it belonged in his internal inventory.
"Hmm?"
"I need you to know something." His arms tightened. "I haven't trusted anyone. Not since the cache. Not with anything that mattered."
"I know."
"You matter." The words came out rough, almost angry, like the admission cost him something vital. "I didn't plan for that. Didn't account for it. You walked into my shop and you mattered, and I don't have a contingency for that."
She turned in his arms, facing him. In the dark of their room, with the compound quiet around them and his body warm against hers, she could see the truth of it written on his face. No armor. No assessment. Just a man who'd finally found something worth more than his paranoia.
"You don't need a contingency," she said. "You need to sleep."
"I don't—"
"Sleep." She pressed her lips to his jaw, his throat, the scar below his ear. "I'll be here when you wake up. That's not a variable. That's a guarantee."
His arms tightened once more—fierce, possessive, the grip of a man who'd lost things he couldn't afford to lose and had just decided he was never losing anything again.
Then, for the first time since she'd known him, Cargo slept.
And Rebecca lay awake in the arms of a man who'd let her see every broken thing inside him, listening to his breathing slow, feeling his heartbeat steady against her skin.
She'd told Hannah she wasn't sure if staying was worth it.
She'd been wrong.
This—his breath in her hair, his hands on her skin, the weight of his trust settling around her like the safest thing she'd ever known—this was worth everything.