Chapter Fifteen #2
He stripped the shirt and she pulled him down.
The workbench was narrow—barely wide enough for her body, let alone both of them—but the constraint made everything more intense.
Closer. Every inch of contact deliberate because there was nowhere to drift.
His body over hers, the oak solid beneath her back, the yellow light turning his skin golden-dark and catching the edges of scars she now knew by heart.
This was different from the other times.
The first night had been discovery—careful, reverent, two people learning each other's architecture for the first time. The assault aftermath had been collision—desperate, consuming, adrenaline burning itself out through skin and sound. This was neither.
This was two people who knew each other. Who'd traded their worst stories across this very bench at five in the morning. Who'd mapped each other's damage and decided it was worth building around.
She ran her hands up his arms—the arms she was going to tattoo, the skin she'd been designing for in her sleep—and felt him shudder. Not from cold. Not from the nerves of something new. From the specific, devastating intimacy of being touched by someone who'd seen everything and was still reaching.
"I know where your scars are," she said. "All of them."
"I know where yours are too." His mouth found her collarbone. "The ones you can see and the ones you can't."
"You saying I'm damaged goods?"
"I'm saying you're a building that took a lot of hits and is still standing." He kissed the ink above her heart—a small compass she'd gotten in Memphis, her first piece, the one that said find your own direction. "I'm saying I've never seen a stronger structure."
She arched into him and felt the workbench hold.
Oak and iron, solid as the man above her.
The armory hummed with the particular resonance of a space that had absorbed years of careful, focused work—the cleaning and maintenance and quiet attention that made the difference between a weapon that fired true and one that failed.
He knew her the way he knew this room. Every mechanism. Every caliber. What needed gentle handling and what could take force.
And she knew him. The quiet places. The spots where the armor was thinnest. The way he came undone when she said his name—his real name, the one she'd earned—against the skin of his throat.
"Wyatt." She said it into the hollow below his ear, where his pulse hammered. "I'm yours."
Not a revelation. Not a desperate claim made in the heat of survival. A statement of fact, delivered with the same certainty she brought to every line she put in skin.
Permanent.
He answered with his body—not words, because words were her territory and this was his. The language of hands and weight and the slow, devastating attention of a man who built things to withstand the worst the world could throw at them.
The workbench held.
They moved together with the particular rhythm of people who'd stopped performing and started living in the same space.
No urgency. No desperation. Just the deep, rolling wave of two bodies that knew each other's timing, each other's needs, the exact pressure and pace that turned sensation into something structural.
She was loud. She was always loud. But the sounds she made tonight were different—not the sharp, shattered cries of the assault aftermath, not the surprised gasps of their first time.
These were low and steady, pulled from somewhere deep, the kind of sounds you make when what you're feeling is too big for words and the only honest response is to let your body speak.
He matched her. Sound for sound, breath for breath.
The man who never raised his voice making noise against her neck like it was the most natural thing in the world.
Like she'd unlocked something in him that had been waiting for years—not the passion, he'd always had that—but the willingness to be heard.
When they broke, it was together. Not a collision but a convergence—two forces meeting at the exact same point, the exact same moment, with the precision of something engineered to fit.
She held onto him.
He held onto her.
And the armory held them both.
The celebration upstairs had gone quiet by the time they caught their breath.
Megan lay on the workbench with Levee's jacket beneath her and Levee's weight beside her—not on top of her, they'd shifted sometime during the aftermath, and now they lay side by side on the narrow oak surface with their legs tangled and her head on his shoulder.
"The bench held," she said.
"I built it."
"Of course you did." She traced the scar on his palm—the line of healed skin with her ink running alongside it. "I want to start the full piece tomorrow."
"The forearm?"
"The whole story. Cable to levee to the club. Everything that brought you here." She lifted his arm, examining the unmarked skin in the yellow light. "It's going to be my best work."
"Everything you do is your best work."
"Flattery won't get you a discount."
His chest shook with a silent laugh. She felt it more than heard it—the rare, precious vibration of Levee finding something funny enough to let his body respond.
"Monday," he said after a moment.
She knew what he meant. Brandt. The endgame. The last strike.
"Monday," she agreed.
"And then we build."
She propped herself up on one elbow and looked down at him.
In the yellow light, with his guard completely down and his body loose and his eyes soft, he looked like a different man.
Not softer—Levee would never be soft. But open.
Unlocked. The version of himself that existed only here, in this basement, with her.
"We build," she said. "The shop. This. Whatever comes next."
He reached up and tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. His hand lingered on her cheek—the left hand, the scarred palm, her permanent line pressed against her skin.
"Whatever comes next," he repeated.
She kissed his palm. Tasted ink and iron and the salt of a man who'd finally stopped building walls between himself and the only woman stubborn enough to climb them.
Monday, they'd finish this.
Tonight, the armory was theirs, and the workbench held, and the most permanent thing Megan Trask had ever made was lying beside her in the yellow light, breathing slow and steady and looking at her like she was the blueprint for everything that came next.