CHAPTER 13
Sloane
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The fog came up off the flooded tarmac sometime after the watcher disappeared, and by midmorning it had swallowed the world.
That's not weather watching us, Grant had said at dawn. Weather doesn't blink.
It had unsettled the whole hangar in the way bad news does when there's nothing to be done about it yet. Grant had gone grim and tactical and kept counting exits under his breath. Julian had locked himself in his glass box with the sat phone and a face like a man pricing a funeral.
And I had stood here for an hour with the dread climbing my spine, building the case against my own happiness, because that is what I do, and the case wrote itself today around one cruel finding: everyone I let through the door ends up with a target painted on their back.
"You're doing the thing," Omar said.
He came across the bike floor with a wrench in one hand and grease on his knuckles and that walk of his, loose, unbothered, like the fog was a thing he'd already negotiated with. Sandy hair falling forward. He shoved it back. The chipped tooth caught the work-light when he grinned.
"I'm not doing a thing," I said.
"You're doing the lawyer thing. The one where you stand very still and litigate a feeling until it loses on a technicality.
" He set the wrench down on the workbench, a long steel bench scarred with decades of oil and torque, and leaned a hip against it.
"I can smell it on you, Sloane. You've got that scent of fear gone patient, the kind that's already drafting its own obituary in a tidy hand. "
"That's a disturbing thing to be able to smell."
"It's a gift. " He tilted his head, studying me.
The fog behind him glowed featureless and white, sealing the two of us into a box of light, and I felt the size of the world shrink to the length of that bench.
"Here's what I think. A man we couldn't catch stood at our fence last night and looked at this place like he held the deed, you've already filed that under your own fault, and somewhere in there you decided the smart move is to stop letting yourself want anything in this hangar so it hurts less when somebody takes it away.
" He plucked the pen out of my fingers, gentle, before I knew he was going to. "How'm I doing."
"Give that back."
"In a minute. " He turned it slow between two grease-dark fingers, watching my face go tight when his thumb found the cap.
"See, that's a tell. You hate anyone else near this pen, because it was Ruth's before it was yours and it's the one thing in the world nobody else gets to touch.
" He set it on the bench, deliberate, in the pool of light, out of my reach but in plain sight, yours, safe, here, and the precision of that small mercy did something to my throat.
"I'm not gonna take the pen, trouble. I just wanted you to notice you let me. "
"That's manipulative."
"That's tracking, it's the whole job description.
Finding the way through is the only thing I'm good at.
" He stepped closer, and the heat rolled off him the way it always did off all three of them, warmer than any human had a right to be, banked coals under a man's skin, while the fog pressed white and blind against the glass behind us.
"Want to know what I think the way through is right now? "
"I have a feeling you'll tell me regardless."
"I think," he said, "you laughed exactly zero times today, and that's a structural problem, and I'm qualified to fix it."
"You're a route tracker."
"I contain multitudes."
And the absurd, impossible thing was that the corner of my mouth went, a flicker I couldn't litigate away in time.
After Grant, who had taken me apart last night with the seriousness of a man defusing ordnance, who had said I will always have you like a vow carved into stone, the warmth of Omar standing here making jokes at the fog felt like coming inside from weather. Grant had been gravity. Omar was air.
"There," he said softly, and the joke dropped out from under his voice and left something true. "There it is. I've been waiting all day for that. You have no idea what you look like when you stop guarding it."
"Omar."
"Yeah."
I looked at him, and the careful sentence I'd built in my head, we should be focusing on the plan, on the ledger, on Sable, dissolved, because under his easy grin I could see the thing he never said out loud, the thing Cady had hinted and the lore kept dancing around.
He wanted me, and not as a move against the others or a bid to win some contest over me.
He stood there wanting me with both hands open and no fear in his scent at all, and I, who had spent my whole life pricing everything, could not find the hidden cost.
"Kiss me," I said. "And don't make it a joke."
His breath went out of him. "Counselor," he said, and his hands came up to my jaw, careful of his strength the way they all were, "I would never."
He made it a joke for exactly one second, smiling against my mouth, and then he didn't.
It was different from Grant. Everything about Omar was different.
Grant kissed like a man who'd decided to allow himself one thing before the world ended.
Omar kissed like the world wasn't ending, like there was all the time there'd ever been, like this was a place we were going to live.
He hummed low against my lips, that tuneless thing he did, and I felt it travel through my teeth, and I laughed into his mouth, and he caught the laugh and grinned and kissed it deeper, and the bench was at the small of my back, and his hands had found my hips.
"Up you go," he murmured, and lifted me onto the workbench like I weighed nothing, settling me on the cold steel scarred with forty years of other people's work, and stepped in between my knees.
"Omar. " I put a hand flat on his chest, a steadying touch more for me than for him. His heart was going fast under my palm, faster than the grin let on. "I want to be clear about something."
"Always," he said, immediately, hands going still on my thighs. "Clear is my favorite. Say it."
"Last night. Grant. " I watched his face for some flinch of jealousy, for the hidden cost I'd been trained all my life to find.
None of it surfaced. What was there instead was patience warmed through with something tender, and underneath it the smallest ache, like he was bracing to be the one not chosen.
"I'm not choosing between you. I don't even know how to say what I'm doing.
But I'm not going to pretend it didn't happen, and if that's a problem, you tell me now, on the record, before this goes anywhere. "
For a second he just looked at me. Hazel-green eyes, warm asphalt and citrus, the fog behind him gone solid white.
"It's not a problem," he said, and his voice had gone quiet and true.
"It's the least problem there's ever been.
I'll explain why later, when it won't ruin the mood, because the why is a whole conversation and right now I'd rather use my mouth for other things.
" The grin came back, but his eyes stayed serious.
"What I need from you is the same thing I always need. You run this. You say go, we go. You say slow, we slow. You say red, everything stops, no questions, ever, I don't even ask why, I just get you water and a blanket and we play chess like nothing happened. You remember the word?"
"Red," I said.
"Red. " He kissed me once, soft, a seal on a contract. "Now. Tell me yes."
"Yes," I said. "Omar. Yes."
"Yeah," he breathed, like I'd answered a question he'd been carrying for days, and went to his knees.
He took his time getting there, hands sliding down my thighs, mouth on the inside of one knee, the crease of it, working up, and he talked the whole way, of course he did, look at you, look how good you are at this, at letting somebody, you have no idea how long I've wanted to do this, since the gas station, since you ate that terrible sandwich and pretended you hated it, and I was laughing, actually laughing, breathless and undone, my fingers in his hair, and then he had my slacks off and my underwear after and his shoulders had pushed my knees wide and the laugh broke apart into something else entirely.
His mouth was hot. Everything about him ran hot. He pressed an open kiss to me and hummed against it, and I felt the vibration of it climb straight up my spine, and my hand fisted in his hair hard enough that I should have apologized and didn't.
"That's it," he said against me, "pull, I can take it, I'm built for it," and then his tongue was on my clit, slow, broad, reverent, and he stopped joking with his words and started worshipping with them.
There's my girl. God, the way you taste.
You're soaking, you know that, you're so wet for me, that's not fear, that's the opposite of fear.
He drew back an inch, just enough to drag in a breath, and I felt him do it, felt him scent me, and his eyes came up to mine, glassy and amazed.
"You smell like you finally trust me," he said.
I'd been about to say something cutting.
I always have something cutting loaded. It died in my chest. Because he wasn't wrong, and worse, I hadn't known it until he said it, and the truth of it went through me like the first warm thing after a long cold, and my eyes stung, and I said, "Don't stop talking. If you stop talking I'll think."
"Can't have that," he said, and went back down, and didn't stop.
Not the mouth, not the words. You're so close, I can feel it, you're shaking, you're allowed, nobody's grading this, let go for me, you're safe, you're safe, you're so safe here you couldn't fall if you tried.
Two fingers slid into me, careful, curling, his strength leashed down to tenderness, and his tongue worked me in slow circles, and the steel of the bench was cold under my palms and his shoulders were hot between my thighs and the fog was a white wall against the windows sealing the whole world down to this, to him, to the bench, to the word yes.