Chapter 4 Talia
FOUR
Talia
EXTRACTION
The motorcycle tears through Chicago streets, the engine growling between my thighs, every vibration crawling up my spine. My arms wrap around Jackson’s waist, uncertain how close is too close, how much of him I’m allowed to feel.
We hit a pothole. The world jolts. My grip slips—just for a heartbeat—until his hand leaves the handlebars, finds my wrists, and yanks them tight around him.
“Hold on!” he shouts over the roar. “Tight. Lean when I lean.”
He presses my palms flat against his abdomen, trapping them there. Muscle, solid and unyielding, flexes beneath my touch. Heat burns through cotton and leather, through logic and fear. Every inhale fills my lungs with the scent of him—metal, smoke, rain, and man.
My chest molds to his back, each shift of his body sending a rush of motion through mine. He moves like the bike is an extension of him—fluid, precise, powerful. I can feel it in the way his muscles coil and release, in the steady control beneath the chaos.
He’s all motion and command, danger and safety in the same breath.
And I can’t tell if my pulse is racing from the ride—or from him.
We bank right. Instinct makes me want to stay upright, but his hand drops back, finds my thigh, pulls me into the turn with him.
The contact is electric. My body molds against his, thighs bracketing his hips, chest sealed to his back, arms locked around his waist like he’s the only solid thing in a tilting world.
This is necessary. Purely functional. Motorcycle safety.
But my body doesn’t understand that. Every point of contact burns. His back muscles shift under my palms as he navigates traffic. The bike vibrates between my legs, and I’m pressed so tight against him I can feel his heartbeat. Steady. Controlled. Nothing like the rapid flutter of mine.
He takes another corner, sharp enough that my thigh presses hard against his hip. This time I lean with him, bodies moving in sync, and his hand briefly covers mine on his stomach—approval, maybe, or just making sure I won’t let go.
The intimacy is overwhelming. Nathan never wanted me this close except during sex, and even then, it felt like distance. This is different—a necessary contact that feels unnecessarily intense.
My ribs scream with every breath. Blood from my palms has soaked through his jacket, leaving rust-colored patches I hope he won’t notice. The wind whips my hair into a tangle, carrying the taste of exhaust and distant rain.
Something catches my eye in the side mirror. I turn, looking over my shoulder to catch a better view—a black SUV, three cars back. The bike wobbles dangerously.
“Don’t!” Jackson’s hand shoots back, grabs my hip, and yanks me forward. The bike straightens. “Never look back. You’ll dump us.”
But I already saw enough. The SUV is maintaining perfect distance. Too perfect.
Jackson revs the engine and takes a sudden right without signaling. I risk a glance in the mirror. The SUV follows.
A second black vehicle emerges from a side street ahead, timing too convenient to be a coincidence. Jackson sees it. His muscles coil beneath my arms.
“Hold tight!” he shouts.
He banks hard left into an alley, barely wide enough for the bike. The vehicles can’t follow—too narrow. But they’ll circle around and try to cut us off.
The alley spits us onto a side street. Jackson doesn’t hesitate, engine screaming as he races toward the next intersection. Another vehicle appears, speeding to intercept.
Jackson cuts right again, tires protesting. We’re hidden between dumpsters and loading docks before they round the corner. He kills the engine, the sudden silence deafening.
“Off.”
One word, but I understand. My legs shake as I dismount. He swings off, already scanning exits.
“Can you run?”
I nod, though my ribs protest.
“Stay close. Silent.”
He guides me deeper into the alley system, hand on my elbow, pace punishing. Every footfall feels too loud. Every shadow could hide the men who killed Victor. The organization behind Morrison’s death. Whoever they are.
Jackson moves like smoke in the dark—quiet, purposeful, every step absorbed by the night.
The alley’s narrow, slick with rain, dumpsters hulking like shadows within shadows, and he slips between them without sound.
His head tilts, tracking movement I can’t hear, eyes cutting through the gloom as if he can read the city’s pulse.
One hand ghosts toward the weapon at his hip, the other steady, relaxed, deliberate.
He doesn’t just move through danger; he studies it, feels it. Every shift of his shoulders, every pause, is precision. Controlled violence waiting for permission.
I try to follow, but gravel crunches under my boots, loud as gunfire in the hush. My breath scrapes my throat, ragged and too human. He glances back once, eyes catching the dim streetlight—cold, assessing, a silent command to keep up—and then he melts forward again, a phantom drawn by purpose.
The alley swallows him whole. I hurry after, chasing the echo of a man who seems carved from the night itself.
We emerge onto a side street. Normal foot traffic, people heading home from bars, oblivious.
Jackson pulls me against him, arm around my shoulders instead of my waist, and suddenly I’m pressed along his entire side.
He has to lean down to accommodate our height difference, his breath warm against my ear.
“Just a couple walking,” he murmurs, lips barely moving. “Relax.”
Relax. His body heat burns through my torn shirt. Every step presses me against him—hip to hip, ribs to ribs. His arm is heavy across my shoulders, hand hanging down to rest against my upper arm. When he turns his head to scan the street, his stubble brushes my temple.
The forced intimacy makes my head spin. Where is he taking me? What’s the plan? The not knowing gnaws at me, but my voice still won’t work.
Jackson stops abruptly. His arm tightens, pulling me into a doorway.
Across the street, a nondescript sedan idles where it shouldn’t. Two men stand near it, postures all wrong for casual conversation. One keeps checking his phone in that way that screams surveillance.
“Shit.” Jackson’s voice cuts the air, low and sharp against my ear.
He pivots fast, dragging me deeper into the alley’s labyrinth. Boots splash through oily puddles. Echoes chase us—multiple footsteps, closing in, too coordinated to be random.
Jackson’s pace doubles. My ribs scream; black edges claw at my vision. The world narrows to motion, breath, and the relentless slap of pursuit.
We turn a corner—dead end. Brick on three sides. Dumpster. Trash. No escape.
He assesses in a heartbeat.
“Behind the dumpster,” he orders, shoving me toward it. “Down. Cover your ears.”
The metal reeks of rot and rain. I crouch, trembling, peering through rusted gaps as Jackson kneels in the open, coat flaring, every move efficient, precise. He pulls a small black device from his jacket—compact, lethal. His fingers fly across it like he’s done this a thousand times.
My mind races. Explosive. In a boxed alley. The pressure will—
Stop thinking. Footsteps close in. Muffled voices coordinate.
Jackson plants the charge low on the wall, angled down. He’s calculating airflow, debris patterns—survival odds.
Three men appear at the mouth of the alley, weapons raised.
“Drop it!”
“If you insist.”
He presses the trigger.
The world erupts.
The blast hits before sound catches up—pressure slamming the air from my lungs. The dumpster wails like struck metal. Debris explodes into shrapnel.
But Jackson is already moving—launching toward me, pinning me against the wall as the wave crashes through us. His body cages mine, absorbing the hits: brick fragments, glass, grit. Each impact reverberates through him into me.
Heat. Smoke. Silence ringing like aftermath.
He doesn’t move, just braces there—solid, breathing hard, shielding every inch of me. His heartbeat hammers against my spine. My chest can’t rise. Not from fear, but from him.
I’m wrapped in his scent—gunpowder, sweat, adrenaline. The weight of his protection. The violence he meted out for me.
Something fundamental shifts.
Not the ground. Not the air.
Me.
This isn’t Nathan’s controlling grip, meant to diminish. This is pure protection, Jackson literally putting himself between me and harm’s way. The difference hits like another explosion, breaking something open in my chest.
My body responds without permission. Heat floods through me, pooling low. Every point where he touches burns. His breath against my neck, harsh from exertion. His chest pressed to my back, heart hammering. His hips pinning mine against the wall.
Safe. Protected. Held.
The ringing in my ears fades. The debris stops falling. But Jackson doesn’t move. For three heartbeats, we stay frozen—him shielding me from a danger that’s passed, me trembling from something that has nothing to do with fear.
“You hurt?” His voice rumbles against my ear.
I shake my head, not trusting what sound might escape.
He pulls back slowly, checking me for injuries his body might have missed. He runs his hands over my arms, my ribs, clinical but thorough. Each touch leaves trails of heat.
The three operatives are on the ground, clutching their heads, disoriented. One tries to stand, falls. Another has blood running from his ears. The third is crawling, lost.
“Move.” Jackson grabs my hand, pulling me over the downed men.
We run. My legs barely work, still shaking from him. From the memory of his weight, his protection.
Two blocks over, an older Honda sits in a residents-only lot. Jackson works the lock with something from his pocket. Thirty seconds and the engine turns over.
“Get in.”
I collapse into the passenger seat. My whole body trembles. The phantom weight of him presses against my back. I can still feel everywhere he touched, protected, shielded.
Jackson drives with controlled speed, checking mirrors and making random turns. Professional. Calm. Like he didn’t just use his body as my personal shield.
“Safe house in ten minutes,” he says, glancing at me. “You’re shaking.”
I nod, wrapping my arms around myself. But it’s not fear making me shake.
“You didn’t have to shield me.” The words scrape out of a throat still dust-rough.
“Yes, I did.” His eyes stay on the road, hands steady on the wheel. “It’s my job.”
Job.
The word lands like a weight in my ribs. Principal. Package. Objective.
My body refuses the demotion.
It remembers his weight pinning me to brick, the hard cage of muscle that turned the blast into pressure and heat instead of shrapnel and death. Remembers the way he absorbed every hit meant for me—shoulders taking it, back taking it—breath harsh against my ear while mine stuttered and caught.
The car hums now, low and even, but I’m still wrapped in the echo of him: smoke on my skin, salt on my lips, the imprint of his hands where he checked for blood and found only shaking.
I tell myself it was professional. A tactic. Physics and training.
But my pulse argues. It surges every time his forearm flexes on the wheel. My palms itch to press where his chest crushed the panic flat, to borrow that steadiness and pin it inside me.
This is insane. He’s doing a job.
And then the comparison I don’t want hits—Nathan. Nathan, who never stepped in, never took a hit for me, never noticed my breathing go thin at the edges. Nathan, who measured everything—time, effort, affection—and always came up criticizing my existence.
Jackson doesn’t measure. He moves. He covers. He takes the impact and doesn’t flinch.
My body remembers that difference and it wants—God, it wants—the way his protection felt. The way safety felt when it wore his shape. I try to name it: adrenaline, shock, anything clinical enough to survive.
But when his gaze flicks to me in the cracked windshield’s reflection—one quick, cutting glance that checks I’m still here—something inside me gives, quiet and terrifying.
A line blurs.
And what’s left between us isn’t just aftermath. It’s hunger wearing a reason.
Stop. You’re doing it again. Analyzing, dissecting. Nathan was right, you can’t just experience things, you have to—
But I can’t stop. Because the memory of Jackson’s body covering mine is the first time I’ve felt truly safe in years. And that safety came with heat, with want, with my body responding to his protection in ways that have nothing to do with professionalism.
“Still shaking,” Jackson observes, glancing at me again. “Shock?”
I nod, because what else can I do? Tell him that his body covering mine rewired something fundamental in my brain? That I’m shaking because I want him to do it again, minus the explosion? That every protective touch made me want to crawl inside his skin?
He’d think you’re insane—or worse, a liability.
“This is a safe house.” Jackson parks in the underground garage, still checking for surveillance. He exits and walks around to open my door. “Can you walk?”
I nod, though my legs feel like liquid. I climb out of the vehicle, take one step, and my knees buckle.
He catches me, one arm sliding around my waist, taking my weight without effort. “Those ribs—I have field medical training. Will you let me look?”
Another nod.
“You need to find your voice,” he says, half-carrying me to an elevator. “I can’t protect you if you can’t communicate. Understand?”
I understand. But understanding and doing are different things. Nathan’s voice still echoes: “Your constant need to verbalize everything is exhausting.”
The words are there, crowding my throat. But they won’t come.
Jackson’s arm tightens slightly as the elevator rises, taking more of my weight. His competence is overwhelming—the kind of man who kills three people and doesn’t break a sweat.
The kind who might keep me alive.
“We’re going to figure out who wants you dead,” he says as the doors open. “But first, you need to tell me everything. Can you do that?”
I want to. Need to.
All I can do is nod and hope it’s enough.