CHAPTER 21
Sloane
◆
The turboprop had a heartbeat, and once I'd noticed it I couldn't stop.
It came up through the bunk frame as a low industrial shudder, the engine drone vibrating into the steel rails and traveling from there along my spine until I could feel it settle in my back teeth and hum in the bones of my hands, which I'd laced over my sternum like a woman laid out for viewing.
The whole cabin was lit the color of a wound.
Julian had killed the white lights an hour out and left only the instrument glow leaking back from the cockpit curtain, red as the inside of an eyelid, red enough that everyone's skin looked burned and everyone's eyes looked like holes.
Sleep had abandoned the whole cabin hours ago, and I'd long since quit pretending I'd ever planned to let it find me.
Every time I closed my eyes I was back on the runway with Wren's blood going to slush in the cold and the copper-ozone reek of the hex wound climbing up the back of my throat, and Grant to the elbow in it, saying I got there, kid, this time I got there, and the wrongness of it, the almost, the ninety-second margin between a boy who breathed and a boy who didn't. That margin was the whole world now.
I'd built a career standing in it. I read the fine print everyone skips because the fine print is where the ninety seconds live.
"You're doing the thing," Omar said from the dark.
He was on the bench across the narrow aisle, sandy hair shoved back, the chipped tooth catching red when he almost-smiled. He hadn't slept either. None of them had. Adrenaline doesn't drain on a schedule. It just sits in you, a current with nowhere to ground.
"What thing," I said.
"The lawyer thing. Where you go very still and start drafting. " He tapped his own chest. "I can smell it. Smells like ozone and percolator and somebody about to bill the universe."
"I don't smell like a percolator."
"You smell like fear that's decided to be useful," he said, gentler, and that one landed somewhere under the ribs because it was exactly true and I hated him a little for the accuracy. "Wren's gonna make it. Cady said. Dane's got him. That's a fact now. You can put it down."
"I don't put things down. Ask anyone who ever shared an office with me; it runs in the family and it doesn't come out in the wash."
Grant moved.
He'd been a shape at the back of the cabin, near the cargo netting, where he could see the curtain and the rear door both, because Grant Holloway didn't sit anywhere he couldn't count the exits, and there were only two on a turboprop and one of them was a lie at thirty thousand feet.
Now he came forward into the red, slow, careful with his weight the way big men learn to be in small spaces, and he crouched in the aisle so his gray eyes were level with mine.
His pupils were blown wide. The wolf was close to the surface tonight, riding the adrenaline same as the rest of us, and the heat came off him in a wave I felt before he touched me, that few-degrees-too-warm shifter heat that made the cabin feel suddenly like a body.
"Sloane," he said, in the flat measured tone he used for reading off a range card. "You've been bleeding tension into this cabin for three hours and the whole place is wound tight as a trigger. Tell me what you need."
Of course, I thought. He skips straight past how I feel and goes for what I need, like it's a requisition, like I'm a problem with a solution and he's the man who carries the solution.
And the worst, most disqualifying thing was that I knew exactly what I needed, and it had nothing to do with sleep or with a single billable hour of legal work.
I sat up.
The blanket slid off. One wool blanket, of course, because the universe had a sense of humor and the Chrome Sanctuary MC apparently provisioned its aircraft the way it stocked its hangar — a single bunk barely wide enough for a person and a half, exactly enough of everything that mattered to force you into sharing it.
I'd spent five days inside that joke. I was done laughing at it from the outside.
"I need," I said, and my voice came out steadier than the rest of me, the courtroom voice, the one I used when a deposition mattered, "to not be afraid for twenty minutes.
I need to feel something that isn't that runway.
" I looked from Grant's blown-wide eyes to Omar's, which had gone still and dark and very awake.
"I need both of you. At the same time. That's the ask. Tell me if it's not on the menu."
Omar exhaled like I'd hit him. "Sweetheart."
"That's not a yes."
"That's a thank God," he said, "in a foreign language. Yeah. It's on the menu. It's the whole menu."
Grant didn't say anything. Grant went quiet and still, which on any other man means hesitation and on him means the opposite — it means he's gone all the way down to the bottom of himself to check the footing before he commits weight.
Then he looked at Omar. One look, across me, level and brief, the kind of look that's a whole conversation between two people who've done dangerous things together for years.
A question and an answer in under a second.
I'd read a thousand negotiations. I knew the exact shape of two parties agreeing to terms.
"Then I'll say it plainly," I said, because I needed it spoken, because I do not sign things I can't survive and I was about to sign something I'd refused my entire life.
"You two coordinate. You touch me. Not each other.
I run it. If I say red, everything stops, no questions, no wounded feelings, the whole thing's over and we go back to being terrified about the border. Yes?"
"Yes," Grant said, and the word landed final as a door swinging shut on the right side of a man.
"Yes," Omar said, already moving, already grinning, "and just so you know, the no-touching-each-other rule is the easiest thing I've ever agreed to, because the only thing in this cabin I want my hands on is you."
"Capacity check," I said, dry as I could manage with my pulse doing what it was doing. "Are you two adrenaline-drunk enough that I should worry about consent running the other direction."
That stopped them both. Grant's mouth did the thing that wasn't quite a smile.
"No, ma'am," he said. "I'm scared, not impaired. Those aren't the same."
"They're not," I agreed. He'd know. He's built his whole life on the difference. "Then come here. Both of you. Slowly. I want to see it coming."
---
They came slow.
Omar first, up onto the bunk, folding his lean frame around mine from the side, his mouth finding the hinge of my jaw, breathing me in with a sound that was half hum and half something lower, that tuneless thing he did when he was tracking, except now the thing he was tracking was me.
Grant came up at the foot, hands closing around my ankles, my calves, mapping me upward with a deliberateness that was almost unbearable, every touch a man checking that the structure would bear load.
"Something's changed in you up here," Omar murmured against my throat.
"All these days you've carried the scent of a woman braced for a hard landing.
Tonight you've let the wheels touch down.
" He pulled back just far enough to look at me, red light on the chip in his tooth.
"You know what that does to me? Knowing you trust us enough to crash? "
"That's a terrible metaphor for a man flying me across a border."
He laughed into my neck, and I felt it everywhere, and then his hand was under my shirt and the laugh dissolved into something with teeth in it.
Grant got my pants off with the patient economy of a man field-stripping a weapon, and when his thumbs pressed into the muscle of my inner thighs and pushed them apart, I heard it — the growl pitched below hearing, too low for ears, the kind you feel in the sternum like a second pulse.
And then Omar's chest answered it, the same frequency, the two of them harmonizing without a word, a sound the wolves made that the men maybe didn't even choose, and it rolled through me from two directions at once and I made a noise I would absolutely have struck from the record if there'd been one.
"That's it," Omar breathed against me. "Let me hear you."
"Eyes on me," Grant said, from down between my legs, and waited. He waited until I looked. He always waited until I looked. "Tell me yes."
"Yes," I said. "God. Yes. Grant."
I'd used his given name where the surname usually went, and I'd done it on purpose, and I watched the word land in him like a hand on the chest.
Then his mouth was on me and the negotiation was over.
---
I had thought, in my arrogant and armored way, that I understood what I'd asked for: two men, more hands and more mouths and a doubling of the thing I'd spent five days letting them teach me. I had filed the whole request under quantity.
Quantity had nothing to do with it. What I'd actually walked into was orchestration.
Grant worked me with his tongue and his fingers in that ruthless, focused, controlled way of his, his free hand splayed flat and hot across my belly, the pressure of it less a cage than a mooring, his strength leashed so carefully I could feel the cost of the leash, the tremor of all that power held to a thread. He didn't talk. Grant doesn't talk.
Grant confesses, eventually, when it's torn out of him, and the rest of the time he communicates in pressure and patience and the relentless, devastating focus of a man who has decided your pleasure is the mission and he does not fail missions twice.
And Omar — Omar narrated.
"Look at you," he said against my mouth, my throat, my breast, his thumb and fingers rolling my nipple in time to whatever Grant was doing lower, the two of them somehow on the same beat, "look how good you are at this, at letting go, you stubborn beautiful disaster, you spent your whole life reading the fine print and you missed the one line that said you were allowed this, did you, here, here, let me read it to you, it says Sloane Mercer gets to fall apart and nobody bills her for it. "