Chapter 15
The bar closed at one. Rebecca locked the bottles, wiped down the counter, flipped the lights.
Cargo wasn't in their room.
She'd known he wouldn't be. The debrief with Legion had ended an hour ago, brothers dispersing to their quarters with the quiet purposefulness of men who knew a bigger fight was coming.
Cargo had sat at his stool through all of it, drinking whiskey he wasn't tasting, answering questions in clipped sentences, his body present while his mind was somewhere she couldn't reach.
She found him in the armory. Not cleaning weapons this time — just standing in the center of the room with his hands at his sides, staring at racks of rifles like they were supposed to tell him something and weren't cooperating.
She didn't ask what happened. She'd heard enough through the bar's walls and the brothers' careful non-descriptions to piece together the shape of it. Graves was dead. The method had been personal. Cargo had stood in the road and made the man see him before the end.
That kind of violence left marks that didn't bleed.
"Come to bed," she said from the doorway.
He didn't turn. "Not tired."
"I didn't say sleep."
Now he turned. His eyes found hers in the low light, and she saw it — the weight pressing him flat.
Not guilt, exactly. Cargo didn't feel guilty about killing men who burned buildings with people inside them.
But the act itself had a gravity, a density that settled into the bones, and he was standing in this room full of weapons because weapons were the only language he'd trusted for six years and they couldn't help him now.
"I keep seeing his face," he said. "When he reached for the cache and it was empty. That look."
"What kind of look?"
"The look of a man who realizes his supply line has been cut." He swallowed. "Same look those operators probably had. When they walked into the resupply point and the enemy was waiting."
She crossed the armory in four steps and took his hand.
"That's not the same thing," she said.
"I know."
"Do you?"
He looked at their joined hands. His scarred, hers callused, both of them built for work that wore people down. "I know it intellectually. But the look is the same. The moment someone realizes they're out of options and nobody's coming to help."
"Graves killed Danny and Marie."
"I know that too."
"Then stop making his face into something it isn't." She squeezed his hand. "He wasn't a confused operator walking into an ambush. He was a man who set fire to a building with people inside, and you made sure he couldn't do it again. Those are different things."
His eyes searched her face. Looking for judgment, maybe. Or absolution. She offered neither — just held his hand and held his gaze and let him see that she was still here, still standing beside him, still choosing this.
"Come to bed," she said again. Softer this time. "Not because you need fixing. Because I want you there."
Something shifted behind his eyes. The weight didn't leave — she didn't think it ever fully left — but it redistributed. Made room for something else.
He let her lead him out of the armory.
Their room was dark except for the lamp on his desk, the one he kept on low because total darkness made him reach for weapons in his sleep.
Rebecca had learned that in the first week — had learned all his night architecture, the small rituals that let a man who'd spent twelve years in war zones close his eyes without drowning.
She closed the door and turned to face him.
He stood just inside the threshold, watching her with an expression she'd come to understand as his version of surrender.
Not weak — Cargo would never be weak. But open.
Willing to let her see past the armorer and the operator and the man who controlled everything because the one time he hadn't, people died.
She reached for the hem of her shirt and pulled it over her head.
Not rushed. Not performing. Just a woman undressing in front of a man she trusted, letting him see her in the lamplight — the bruises finally faded, the small scars from a life that hadn't been gentle, the body she'd spent twenty-nine years surviving in.
Cargo's breath caught.
Not the first time he'd seen her. Not even the third. But each time she undressed for him, he looked at her like he was cataloguing something precious. Adding detail to an inventory he'd never stop maintaining.
"Your turn," she said.
He pulled his shirt over his head. She watched the scars map his torso — the ones she knew now, each with its own geography and story.
The burn on his left side from a weapons malfunction in year three.
The shrapnel puckering along his ribs from a cache that detonated when it shouldn't have.
The thin white line across his collarbone that he'd never explained and she'd never pushed on.
She stepped forward and pressed her mouth to the collarbone scar.
His hands found her waist. Settled there like they'd been designed for exactly that spot — thumbs against her hip bones, fingers spread across the small of her back, holding her against him with a steadiness that had nothing to do with adrenaline and everything to do with choice.
"I want to tell you something," she said against his skin.
"Okay."
"After this is over." She kissed the scar again, then the hollow of his throat, then the place where his pulse beat hard and steady. "After Slade. I want to enroll for fall semester."
His hands tightened on her waist. "Nursing school."
"I've got enough saved. Barely. But the roadhouse insurance settlement will cover what the tips couldn't." She pulled back enough to look at him. "I want to do it. I want to be something more than a bartender who noticed the wrong thing in the wrong apartment."
"You're already more than that."
"I know. But I want credentials to prove it." She smiled. "And I want to be useful around here for something besides pouring drinks and running ammunition."
His thumb traced circles on her hip bone. Slow. Thoughtful. "There's a program at Fayetteville State. Two years for the BSN. Caroline could help — she's connected to the medical community."
"You've looked into it."
"I look into everything that affects my inventory." His mouth found the curve of her neck, and she felt him smile against her skin — rare, precious, the smile of a man who didn't give them away for free. "Nursing school. Compound medic. Someone who can patch up brothers without a hospital visit."
"You're already planning how I'm useful to the club."
"I'm planning how you're useful to yourself.
" He lifted his head, and his eyes were clear.
Present. The armory weight pushed back enough to let this through.
"You want nursing school, you get nursing school.
I'll drive you to campus every morning and pick you up every afternoon and nobody will touch you in between. "
"That's excessive."
"That's non-negotiable."
She laughed. Couldn't help it — the absolute certainty in his voice, the possessiveness dressed up as logistics, the man who couldn't say I love you but could plan an entire security protocol around her class schedule.
"And you?" she asked, running her hands up his chest. "What happens to you after Slade?"
"The armory. The club. Same as before."
"Not the same." She shook her head. "You had the armory and the club before I showed up. Now you have me. What does that change?"
He was quiet for a long moment. His hands on her waist, her hands on his chest, the two of them standing in lamplight in a room that smelled like gun oil and the lavender soap she'd started keeping in his bathroom.
"I maintained the armory because it was the only thing I trusted," he said slowly. "Weapons don't leak intelligence. Weapons don't betray you. They do exactly what they're supposed to do if you take care of them."
"And now?"
"Now I've got something in my life that isn't a weapon.
" His hand came up to her face, cupping her jaw with a gentleness that still surprised her every time.
"Something I can't control or predict or lock in a safe when I'm not using it.
Something that argues with me about bar tabs and reorganizes my inventory without asking and runs ammunition through firefights when I specifically told her to stay in the bunker. "
"I never agreed to the bunker."
"I know." His thumb brushed her lower lip. "That's my point. You don't follow my protocols. You don't fit in my systems. And somehow that's the best thing that's ever happened to my supply chain."
She turned her head and kissed his palm. The same gesture he'd given her that first night outside the cellar — lips to skin, promise without words.
"Take me to bed, Derek."
His name settled over them both. Not desperate this time. Not broken with need or torn from her throat in the dark. Just his name, spoken with the quiet certainty of a woman who knew exactly who she was asking and exactly what she wanted.
He lifted her. She wrapped herself around him — legs around his waist, arms around his neck, her mouth finding his in a kiss that tasted like whiskey and tomorrow and the life they were building between gunfights.
He laid her on the bed and followed her down, and what came next was nothing like the armory or the hallway.
No trembling hands. No frantic collision. This was slow. Deliberate. The careful, thorough attention of a man who'd spent weeks learning exactly what she needed and intended to prove he'd memorized every lesson.
His mouth moved down her body with devastating patience. Throat. Collarbone. The space between her breasts where her heart hammered against his lips. Each rib, each curve, each place that made her breath hitch — revisited, confirmed, maintained.
She let him. Let herself be known at this pace, this depth. No urgency driving them, no adrenaline demanding speed. Just his hands and his mouth and the absolute focus of a man giving his full attention to the only thing in his life he couldn't catalog on paper.
"Here," he murmured against her stomach. "You tense here when you're scared."
"I'm not scared."
"I know." He kissed the spot. "That's why I'm learning what it feels like when you're not."
She pulled him up because she needed his mouth. Kissed him long and deep, her fingers tracing the scars on his back, memorizing the topography of a body she planned to know for years.
"I'm not going anywhere," she said between kisses. "You know that."
"I know."
"Say it back."
He pulled away just enough to look at her. Lamplight caught his eyes, and she saw everything — the man who'd lost operators, the man who'd built walls, the man who was lying in her arms choosing to let every one of those walls stay down.
"I'm not going anywhere," he said. "This is permanent. You're permanent. I will be here every morning when you wake up and every night when you come home and every minute in between that you'll let me."
"That's a lot of minutes."
"I'll fill them." He kissed her jaw. Her ear. The spot below it that made her arch against him. "I'll drive you to school and pick you up and sit at your bar every night and watch you pour drinks for my brothers and I will never, not once, get tired of any of it."
She believed him. Not because the words were pretty — they weren't, they were blunt and fierce and delivered with the grace of a man reading a supply requisition.
But because every promise Cargo had ever made to her, he'd kept.
Every assurance of safety, fulfilled. Every declaration of protection, honored.
He didn't make promises he couldn't maintain. That wasn't how his system worked.
"Then maintain me," she whispered. "Right now. Just like this."
He did.
Slow and thorough and devastating, both of them taking their time, building something between their bodies that matched what they'd been building with words — steady, permanent, unbreakable.
She moved with him like breathing, like the easiest thing she'd ever done, and when the wave finally broke it was quiet and deep and shook her all the way to her foundations.
He followed her with his face pressed to her throat and her name on his lips — Bec, the short version, the intimate version, the one that belonged only to moments like this.
Afterward, she lay against his chest and listened to his heartbeat slow.
"Fall semester," she said.
"Fall semester."
"You're really going to drive me to campus every day?"
"I'm really going to drive you to campus every day." His arm tightened around her. "And if anyone in a parking lot looks at you sideways, I'm going to have a conversation with them about respecting other people's inventory."
"You can't threaten college students."
"Watch me."
She smiled against his chest. Felt his breathing deepen, his body relaxing in increments, the post-operation weight dissolving into the warmth of shared skin and shared plans and the quiet certainty of two people who'd found each other through violence and chosen to build something gentle from the wreckage.
Two days until Slade.
Two days until the end of the threat that had started with stolen manifests and a split lip and a midnight knock on a stranger's door.
But tonight wasn't about Slade. Tonight was about a man who'd learned to love through logistics and a woman who'd learned to stay through survival, lying together in a room that smelled like gun oil and lavender, planning a future that didn't require paranoia.
Cargo slept first. She watched him go, the way she always did — the slow loosening of his jaw, the unclenching of his fists, the gradual surrender of a body that still expected ambush even in safety.
She pressed her lips to his shoulder and closed her eyes.
Two more days.
Then the war would end, and the life would begin.
She was ready for both.