Chapter 9 #2
"Girls. This is your mother. She's in Morgantown for a while.
She's going to be around, but she's not living here and she's not part of our daily life.
" I look at Wrenleigh, then Sadie Jo. "If and when you want to talk to her, spend time with her, ask questions—that's your call.
Not hers. Not mine. Yours. But nobody is going to force you. "
Wrenleigh's jaw is so tight I'm afraid she's going to crack a tooth. "I don't want to talk to her."
"Okay. That's your right."
"I don't want her in this house."
"She won't be. Not after tonight."
Wrenleigh nods once—sharp, like Ruger. Then she turns to Sadie Jo. "Come on," she says quietly. "Let's go upstairs."
Sadie Jo doesn't move right away.
She's still looking at Angelica with that quiet, searching gaze—not angry like Wrenleigh, not cold like me.
Something else. Something that looks like trying to connect a face to a hole she's carried her whole life and finding that they don't quite match.
Then she looks at me. Asking permission. Asking what to feel.
I nod. "Go ahead, baby."
She goes. Following Wrenleigh up the stairs, her hand trailing along the wall the way it has since she was small enough that the wall was the only thing keeping her upright.
Garrett appears in the kitchen doorway after they've gone.
He looks at Angelica the way a bouncer looks at someone who's about to be escorted out—not cruel but final, like he's urging her to leave.
"I'll put her at the Super 8 on University," he says to me. Not to her. To me. "Rookie can check on her in the morning."
"Fine."
Angelica starts to speak—to protest, to plead, to do something—and Garrett turns those cold eyes on her and she stops.
Because Bloodhound doesn't have to say a word.
Bloodhound just has to look at you, and the conversation is over.
She stands. Picks up her purse—designer, worn at the corners, a prop from a life she can't afford anymore. She looks at me one more time.
"I am sorry, Colton. I know you don't believe me. But I am."
"I believe you're sorry you got caught," I say.
She leaves. Garrett follows.
The front door closes, and the silence rushes in like water filling a hole.
Leah finds me on the back porch.
I don't know how long I've been out here.
Long enough that the cold has gotten into my joints and my coffee is untouched and the coin has been flipped so many times my thumb has gone numb.
The backyard is dark. No stars tonight—clouds have rolled in from the west, thick and low, the kind that mean rain by morning.
She doesn't say anything at first. Just sits down next to me in the chair where Bloodhound usually keeps watch, pulls her knees up, and waits.
She's still in her scrubs. Still wearing the badge on the lanyard. Still smelling like the hospital and something underneath that's just her.
"The girls?" I ask.
"Asleep. Both of them. Wrenleigh's door is shut, which means she's angry and processing. Sadie Jo's is cracked open with the light on."
She knows which one sleeps which way.
She's been here enough to know that.
The fact that she checked on them—went upstairs, looked in on my daughters, made sure they were okay before she came to find me—does something to the already cracked-open thing in my chest.
"I need to tell you something," I say.
"Okay."
"You're not going to like it."
"Okay."
I tell her everything.
The men on the porch.
The debt—two hundred thousand dollars, Angelica's gambling, my name and the girls' names as collateral.
The photographs of Wrenleigh and Sadie Jo.
The car with Nevada plates.
The home invasion—the chairs, the glass of water, the violation of the only safe space my daughters have.
Victor Solis. The back-channel play. The protection details. All of it.
Every piece of information I've been holding back since the day those suits knocked on my door, I lay at her feet like a confession.
She doesn't interrupt. Doesn't gasp. Doesn't flinch.
She sits beside me in the cold dark and she listens the way she listens to everything—completely, with her whole body, her eyes on my face and her hands still and her breathing even.
When I'm done, the silence sits between us for a long time.
"The night at the hospital," she says finally. "When you looked different. The new weight. That was this."
"Yeah."
"And Garrett on your porch. The new locks. The prospects—the patches—at the schools."
"Yeah."
"And you didn't tell me because—"
"Because I was trying to keep you out of the radius."
She's quiet for another beat. Then she says, very evenly, "That's stupid."
I almost laugh. "Yeah."
"I mean it, Coin. It's stupid. I've been in this house almost every day for weeks. I've been helping your daughters, eating at your table, sleeping in your bed. I was already in the radius. You just didn't tell me about the bomb."
She's right. She's so completely right that I don't have a defense for it, and I don't try to build one.
I just sit there and let her be right, the way I should have let her in weeks ago instead of holding it at arm's length the way I hold everything.
"I'm sorry," I say.
"Don't be sorry. Just don't do it again.
" She reaches over and takes the coin out of my hand.
Holds it up in the dim light. Turns it between her fingers the way I do—slower, less practiced, learning the weight of it.
"You don't have to carry everything alone anymore.
You know that, right? That's not the deal. That was never the deal."
"I don't know what the deal is, Leah. I've been doing it alone so long I don't know how to do it any other way."
"I know." She puts the coin back in my palm and closes my fingers around it. "That's okay. We'll figure it out."
We.
One word. Two letters. The smallest word in the English language that changes everything.
She leans into me. Her head against my shoulder, her body warm against my side in the cold.
I put my arm around her and pull her closer. We sit on the back porch in the dark, and I hold her, and she holds the pieces of me together the same way I've been holding my daughters together for their whole lives.
It's terrifying. It's the most terrifying thing I've ever felt.
More than the loan sharks, more than the pipeline, more than Angelica walking through my door like a ghost with a designer purse. Because the threats have an end point. They can be fought, eliminated, neutralized.
But this, this woman, this feeling, this need for something I've been telling myself I don't deserve—this doesn't have an end point.
This just keeps going, and going, and going, and I don't know where it leads, and I can't control it, and for a man who's spent his entire adult life controlling everything that's the scariest thing of all.
"Come inside," she says. "It's cold."
I let her pull me to my feet, lead me through the back door and into the kitchen and down the hallway, past the girls' closed doors, past the photos on the wall and the packed lunches on the counter and all the evidence of a life I built by myself and am now—terrifyingly, wonderfully, completely—letting someone else into.
She stops in the hallway outside my bedroom, turns to face me, and her hands find the front of my shirt.
"You don't have to be gentle tonight," she says.
She sees it. The anger I'm holding. The fear. The helpless fury of a man who's been invaded and threatened and confronted with the ghost of his worst mistake, all in the same week.
She sees all of it, and she's not asking me to lock it down.
She's not asking me to be the controlled, deliberate, careful version of myself.
She's asking for the rest of it.
"Leah—"
"I can take it. Whatever you're holding. I can take it. Give it to me."
Something snaps. Not breaks—snaps.
Like a rubber band that's been stretched too far for too long, and the release is sudden and violent and it takes my breath with it.
I push her against the wall. Not gently.
My mouth finds hers and the kiss isn't soft, isn't careful, isn't the tender worship of our first time.
This is teeth and tongue and ten years of rage with nowhere to go, and she doesn't flinch.
She grabs my hair and pulls me closer and kisses me back just as hard, and the sound she makes against my mouth.
God. That sound.
I lift her.
She wraps her legs around me and I carry her into the bedroom. We don't make it to the bed.
Her back hits the dresser and the framed photo of the girls rattles.
I catch it with one hand without looking and set it face-down because my daughters don't need to witness this.
My hands are everywhere. Not careful, not deliberate—hungry.
Pulling at her scrub top, dragging it over her head, my mouth on her neck before the fabric hits the floor.
She's already working my belt, her fingers fast and impatient, and the fact that she's not asking me to slow down, not trying to soothe me, not handling me with kid gloves—it's the hottest thing I've ever experienced.
"Off," she says, yanking my shirt up. "Now."
I pull it over my head.
She runs her hands down my chest and her nails drag—not scratch, drag—and the sensation sends a jolt straight through me that makes my hips pin her harder against the dresser.
"There he is," she breathes. "Let go, Coin."
I unhook her bra and my mouth finds her breast. I'm not gentle about it.
I suck hard enough that she gasps and her back arches off the dresser. Her hand grabs the back of my head and holds me there.
"Yes—like that—don't stop—"
I push her scrub pants down with one hand while my mouth works.
She kicks them off.
I slide my hand between her thighs and find her already wet—hot and slick and ready—and the sound I make against her skin is something between a groan and a prayer.
Two fingers inside her. No build-up. She cries out and her thighs clench around my hand. I press my forehead against hers to watch her face while I work her.
Nothing like the first time. Nothing gentle about it.
This is fast and rough and exactly what both of us need—the anger and the fear and the helplessness channeled into something that makes us both feel alive instead of hunted.
"More," she says. "Coin—more—"
I pull my hand away and she makes a sound of protest that I swallow with my mouth.
Kiss her hard while I shove my jeans down.
Condom—nightstand—she wraps her hand around me and strokes once and I nearly lose my mind.
"Now," she says. "Right now."
I lift her hips and push into her in one stroke.
She screams.
Not in pain, but in something that sounds like relief.
Like she's been waiting for this since the second she walked through my door and told me I didn't have to be gentle.
I set a pace that has nothing to do with patience.
Hard. Deep.
Her back against the dresser, her legs locked around me, her nails raking down my shoulders.
The dresser rocks against the wall with every thrust and I don't care.
The whole goddamn house could come down around us right now and I wouldn't stop.
"Harder," she says, and her voice is wrecked. "God, Coin. Harder!"
I give her harder.
I give her everything. Every ounce of anger and fear and want that I've been locking down for weeks.
I fuck her like I'm trying to burn it out of me, and she takes it.
All of it.
She doesn't try to gentle me, doesn't tell me to slow down, doesn't treat me like something fragile.
She matches me, thrust for thrust, her body rising to meet mine, her mouth hot against my neck, my shoulder, my jaw.
"I'm—Coin, I'm going to—"
"Give it to me." My hand slides between us, finds her clit, and works it with the same relentless pressure. "Come on. Give it to me, Leah."
She comes apart with my name in her mouth and her whole body convulsing around me, and the feel of her—God, the feel of her tightening and shaking and trusting me with this, trusting me with the messy, ugly, desperate parts of both of us—drags me right over the edge.
I come so hard my knees buckle.
I press her against the dresser and hold us both up with nothing but willpower and shaking arms, and I breathe her name into the curve of her neck like it's the only word I know.
We make it to the bed eventually.
Collapsed on top of the sheets, breathing hard, covered in sweat.
Her legs are tangled with mine and her head is on my chest.
Neither of us speaks for a long time because speaking requires brain function and I'm not sure either of us have any left.
"That was different," she says finally.
"Yeah."
"Different good?"
"Yeah."
She lifts her head. Her hair is a disaster. Her lips are swollen. There are marks on her neck that I put there, and she's wearing them like they belong on her.
"Both," she says. "I want both. The gentle and the—" She gestures vaguely at the dresser, which has moved approximately four inches from the wall. "that."
"I think I can manage that."
"I think you can manage a lot of things, Colton Adkins."
My real name.
Not Coin—Colton.
Angelica said it a dozen times tonight and it sounded like a weapon.
Coming from Leah, in this bed, after everything… it sounds sweet.
A man. Not just a father, not just a brother, not just a Secretary.
A man, with a name, in a bed, with a woman who sees all of him—the controlled parts and the dangerous parts and the desperate, lonely parts underneath—and isn't running.
"Stay," I say.
"You keep saying that."
"I'm going to keep saying it."
"Then I'm going to keep staying." She puts her head back on my chest. Her fingers find the coin on the nightstand. I don't remember putting it there, but it's there, and she picks it up and holds it above us, turning it in the dim light.
"Three generations," she murmurs.
"Three generations."
"Think they'd approve?"
I think about my grandfather. Steady hands. Kitchen table. Figure out what you're actually angry about before you swing.
"Yeah," I say. "I think they would."
She sets the coin on my chest, right over my heart.
The cool metal against my skin.
Three generations of Adkins men, and now a Mercer woman holding the weight of it in her hands like she was always meant to.
The girls are asleep upstairs.
Angelica is at the Super 8.
Garrett is somewhere between furious and accepting.
The loan sharks are circling, and the club rides tomorrow.
And Leah is in my bed with my coin on my chest and her scar pressed against my shoulder, and she knows everything now.
Every ugly, dangerous, terrifying piece of it.
Yet, she's still here.
That's the thing. That's the whole thing. She knows, and she's still here.
I close my eyes and pull her closer.
I sleep—not well, not deeply, but I sleep—with the weight of the coin on my heart and the warmth of her against my side and the sound of my daughters breathing down the hall.
Tomorrow, we ride. Tomorrow, the world comes back.
But tonight, just for tonight, I'm not alone.