Chapter 20 #2
Cold air. A streetlamp buzzing. A body cooling at my feet. And at the mouth of that alley: light catching a woman’s hair like a halo.
“The streetlamp,” I say, softer than I ever speak. “You.”
Her breath stutters. Mine does too. The same realization settles in both our chests. Inevitability. I wasn’t walking toward a stranger that night. I was walking toward my wife. Neither of us was ever lost. We were steered.
“Of course it was you.” She steps into me.
Her bound wrists press my chest, chin tipping up.
I slide the blade flat into my palm so I don’t cut her, hook the tip under the zip tie, and pop it.
Plastic snaps. She lifts the angry grooves to my mouth and I kiss them once, twice, again, but the red, raw, marks don’t disappear.
Her hands climb my shirt and drag me down.
The kiss is careful and feral. Copper at the corner of her split lip, salt on her skin, the kind of relief that is oxygen after drowning.
My marked knuckles frame her jaw; her fingers fist in my collar.
Somewhere to my left, Sava turns away and gives us the room.
The warehouse, the corpse, the blood, all drop away until there’s only her breath against mine and the fact that she’s here. Safe.
There was never anyone else. That night under the lamp, all that charge was ours.
Something ugly in me goes quiet. I blink.
Shake off the Machine. Really look at her.
Find the mercy I wasn’t born with but became a piece of me the day I saw her, a sliver of glass lodged in the thin skin over my sternum.
“Say it,” she whispers against my mouth.
“You’re mine,” I answer, and feel her smile wrecked and holy against my lips. “Only mine.”
“And?” She brushes open-mouthed kisses up my jaw and behind my ear.
“And,” I take a half step back so I can look her in the eyes. “I’m yours. Only ever yours.”
Her breath catches, a prayer swallowed too fast. I reach into my pocket and pull out her ring, lost in that goddamn parking garage. Her eyes go wide when she sees it.
“Cassius—”
“I don’t lose things that matter to me,” I murmur, sliding it back onto her finger. The metal’s warm from my skin and remembers her. “You understand?”
She nods, a tear breaking loose, caught between a smile and a sob.
“Good,” I say, my voice rough. “Now it’s where it belongs. And, you’re right, darling,” I murmur against her mouth. “You shouldn’t still be standing here. Let’s go home.”
Over the next two days, I don’t let Lindy out of my sight. We don’t leave the house. We don’t let anyone in who isn’t blood. My stomach is a knot with teeth. I almost lost her. She can’t stay defenseless. If a dumbfuck with no real skills could get to her, imagine what a leg of Spiderweb could do.
That first night, after we get home, I carry her upstairs, sit her on the closed toilet lid, and start the water. I run it hot and add Epsom. Two drops of the strawberry soap she likes. Steam fogs the mirrors.
“Bath?” I ask.
She nods.
I climb in behind her and pull her back to my chest, my thighs bracketing hers, the porcelain a cold ring around scalding water.
I wash her hair slow enough to reset the axis of the earth.
L I N D Y /// G I R L moves careful over scalp and nape, down the line of her shoulders.
My palms map every bruise, every smudge of purple blooming under skin, and I mark each one with my mouth.
Temple, cheekbone, hollow beneath her ear, each one an apology I don’t say out loud.
“Look at me,” I tell her when she’s rinsed clean. She tips her face up. I don’t kiss her mouth first. I kiss her marks again. Her temples. Her cheeks. The spot under her ear that makes her breath go thin.
“You’re safe,” I say into her wet skin.
“Take me to bed, Cassius,” she whispers.
I stand, wrap her in a towel fresh from the warmer, carry her, and lay her on the sheets.
I dry her slow. Fluffy fabric kissing her throat, shoulders, the delicate inside of her elbows, the curve of her waist, the backs of her knees.
My mouth presses to every place that hurts.
When her skin is warm and dry, I bring the kit to the bedside: saline, gauze, liquid adhesive, arnica, butterfly strips.
“I want you.”
“Let me fix what I can first,” I say, giving her mind time to catch up with what she’s asking because shock isn’t consent.
I clean the split in her lip with saline, dab her wrists where the plastic bit deep.
I clean her like she’s something holy, because to me she’s the holiest thing I’ve ever known.
I glue the cuts deep enough for closing, lay thin strips where they’ll hold, smear arnica with the pads of my fingers over the bruises she’ll feel tomorrow, she’ll feel for days.
Each time I start a spot, I kiss it, light, again, again, praying the repetition will drag the pain out of her, undo this night, take the marks from her and give them to me, but all it does is stop my hands from shaking.
I set the kit aside and kiss her mouth, careful around the split. My hands find her waist, her thigh, the small of her back where she fits my palm like it was carved there.
“Say yes,” I murmur against her mouth.
“Yes,” she breathes, and it wrecks me.
I don’t rush. I palm the drawer of the nightstand, pause long enough to keep my head, and grab a condom.
“No,” she whispers, and drags me back to her mouth. “I’m on birth control,” she says. “There hasn’t been anyone else. Not for a long time.”
“Same,” I tell her. “No one else. Not for a long time.” I search her eyes. “No one else. Not ever again.”
I help her lie back on the bed and situate myself above her, careful to hold my own weight.
I rub my palms together, warming them before rubbing them down the length of her body.
Her breasts are full, nipples hard, and I haven’t even touched them.
I lean down to take one in my mouth, massaging the other with my palm.
Two fingers tug and pull hard. She doesn’t squirm so I yank again and then move my other hand to her already drenched pussy.
“You like the pain.” It surprises me, but there’s no denying the look in her eyes as I close my mouth over her peaked nipple and bite hard enough to hurt, not enough to draw blood. “Use me,” I tell her. “Whatever it takes to feel better, Lindy girl. Take it.”
Something in her loosens. She rolls me to my back, swings a knee over my hips, and settles like she’s been practicing in dreams. She sets the pace—slow grind, deeper slide, testing angles.
My hands fit her waist, then climb to her ribs, then lace with hers above my head.
She pins my knuckles to the pillow, reads the letters there with her fingertips like scripture. L I N D Y /// G I R L.
“Good girl,” I rasp, and she breaks prettier than anything I’ve ever ruined.
By the time the sun climbs the second day, the worst of the shaking is gone. The need to talk is not. But I can’t turn her into steel without giving her the truth. I owe her at least that much before I put a knife in her hand and force her to breathe through terror.
We’re at the kitchen island. Afternoon light dances in her hair. Her ring clicks against the mug she’s warming with both palms. Her book lies open, spine unbroken.
“Darling.”
She looks up. “You’re leaving again.” Her breath hitches but she doesn’t flinch.
“No.” I circle her wrist with two fingers, careful not to irritate her still-healing marks, and pull her in. I kiss the crown of her head. “I’m not leaving, Lindy girl.”
Her entire body lets go all at once, and I know I could end my career for that exhale.
“This is more of a cards-on-the-table type of talk,” I say, resting my knuckles on the marble. L I N D Y /// G I R L, the skin scabbed over again.
“You know that Leven is my uncle,” I start.
“What you don’t know is that I killed my father when I was twelve.
” I stop, give her a chance to process the words I’ll never be able to unsay.
That new thing—fear—sits on my chest like weight.
I could lose her in this conversation as easily as I could’ve the night she disappeared.
“After that, Leven took us in, made sure we ate, had clothes, and played sports. He was a single man, Lindy, raising eight kids on his own.”
“What about your mother?”
“She died when I was ten. That broke my father. He was always a mean bastard, but when Mom was alive, he was mean by ignoring us. Literally acted like he had no children, only ever had eyes for her. When she died, any humanity in him died too. He was insufferable those next two years. Adrian and I took the brunt of it, we’re the oldest. But when he hung Atlas out the window of our moving car by his ankles, screaming he was going to drop him, I knew we couldn’t keep living that way. ”
She looks at my marked hands. And then back at my face. “You saved your brothers.”
“We never told Atlas that. We’ve never told anyone that.”
“I’ll share the weight with you,” she answers.
I nudge the mug away. “Come here.”
We leave the kitchen. She pads ahead of me into the living room, curls into the corner of the couch. I sit beside her and she pulls my marked hand to her chest, under the fall of her hair, over the steady thud of her heart.
“Spiderweb is the reason Travis can call me at all hours of the fucking night. It isn’t a man,” I say into the hush.
“One center, eight legs. Intelligence, Finance, Operations, Enforcement, Cover, Weapons, Drugs, International. They rotate leadership on purpose so we can’t pin them down.
Until we expose the center, it won’t die. That’s why men like me exist.”
I tap my fingers against the coffee table, three, then five, for her, and make myself say the next part. “It isn’t abstract to me. It’s proof that men aren’t always born evil. Some men grow it like a second skin. Spiderweb is why my family looks the way it does. Why Leven did what he did.”
“You said Leven raised eight kids,” she whispers.