Chapter 21
TWENTY-ONE
RIVER
The safehouse hums like a held breath.
Pipes tick. The fridge answers. The tiny red camera light blinks—one, two, three—like a heartbeat I keep pretending isn’t mine. I’m folded into the corner chair with my laptop open and nothing useful on the screen. My code sits there, polite and inert, while my brain reruns the same loop:
If Mask is Gage… would that make everything worse? Or right?
Footsteps in the hall. The keypad beeps and there’s a soft knock before the door unlocks. I stand before I decide to.
Mask steps in—hood up, mask on, black gloves, all shadow and intention. He shuts the door, engages the top latch, and scans the space like he’s cataloging exits and ghosts.
“Hi,” I say, because I’m a normal person who greets her anonymous vigilante at the door.
“River.” My name in that modulated voice skims across my skin. He sets a small hard case on the table, pops the latches, and pulls out a compact router like it’s a weapon. “We’re chasing a lead. It’s hot. I didn’t want you here alone without a clean line.”
“We?”
“Team,” he says, busy hands precise. “We’ve got a thread on the leak and on Regent’s moderator ring. For a few days, assume every hallway at NovaPlay has ears. No side conversations. No favors. Don’t trust anyone at work.”
My mouth moves before my caution does. “I can trust Gage, right?”
He stills.
It’s tiny—a pause sharp enough to cut. Then he straightens without looking at me, calm like stone. “No.”
The word lands heavy. Final. Like a door shutting somewhere else in the building.
I set my palms on the table, steadying the tremor I hate. “But he’s… been kind. And he’s not—”
“No.” Louder, threaded with something that sounds like it costs him. “Don’t trust him.”
My laugh comes out thinner than I intend. “That’s awkward, considering he’s standing in my kitchen right now.”
The silence after that sentence is a living thing.
Slowly, he turns. “River.”
“Yes?”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying,” I breathe, stepping closer, “that you shouldn’t warn me away from a man who smells like your hoodie and writes in my notebook with your left-handed slant and buys the exact peppermint tea you already stock here.”
He doesn’t move. Just watches me like he’s bracing for impact and praying I hit him straight.
“And when you correct my stance,” I add, another step, “you touch my hip exactly like he does when he reaches around me at the espresso machine. Same patience. Same heat. Same… everything.”
A muscle jumps in his arms. “Coincidence.”
“Oh?” I tilt my head. “It’s you.”
He flinches. Barely. But I feel it like the room tilts.
“River.”
“Gage,” I say softly, because we’re past pretending and also because my chest is too tight to say anything else.
He shakes his head once, as if he can push denial between us like furniture. “This isn’t safe.”
“You’re right.” I close the last inches of air between us until the hem of his hoodie brushes my stomach. “So stop lying.”
He’s very, very still. His breathing’s rapid which matches mine.
“Say it,” I whisper.
His throat works. “I can’t.”
“I know.” I lift my hands—slow, careful—and press my fingers to the edge of his mask. “I’ll say it for you.”
He doesn’t stop me.
He doesn’t help, either. He stands there and shakes like restraint is a physical thing and lets me remove the Ghostface mask.
There’s a balaclava underneath. He lets me curl the fabric down, past cheekbones I know too well, past the line of a mouth I’ve been dreaming about since the first time he kissed me.
Gage looks back at me.
The room rushes—the sound, the air, my pulse tripping over itself. It’s ridiculous, how fast relief floods in, how right my bones feel. I want to laugh and hit him and kiss him and demand he apologize in every language he knows.
“Hi,” he says, hoarse. No modulator. No mask. Just him.
“Hi,” I echo, and then a small, savage part of me adds, “You’re an idiot.”
His mouth tilts, wounded and fond. “I know.”
“For the record,” I say, because I need a tether, “part of me always wanted it to be you.”
Something breaks in his face—like a storm passing over water, like sun hitting glass.
“I told you not to trust me,” he says. “I meant it.”
“And I told you to stop deciding for me.” I take his wrist and place his palm flat against my sternum. My heart trips under his hand, unhelpfully obvious. “This is mine. You don’t get to pick who I give it to.”
“River,” he whispers, reverent and wrecked all at once.
“Say it again.”
“River.”
His hand flexes. My breath stutters. The hunger that’s been living under my fear raises its head, sleek and sure. “Kiss me,” I say, and I don’t care if it’s a bad idea, because every other idea hurts.
He hesitates for exactly one heartbeat—long enough to be a gentleman, short enough to be honest—then he moves.
He doesn’t brush or test. He takes—mouth on mine with a relief that feels like oxygen after a blackout, mouth open on a gasp that turns into a growl when I fist both hands in his hoodie and pull. He tastes like mint and heat and the hard edge of restraint snapping.
I open for him and he makes a sound I feel in my knees. His other hand comes up, cupping my jaw like it’s precious, like I’m something he’s been promising himself and finally allowed to touch. He kisses like hunger and apology and an argument he plans to win without speaking.
We stumble backward until my hips hit the table. He lifts me onto it like I weigh nothing, like I’m a problem he intends to solve with both hands. I wrap my legs around his waist and he hisses into my mouth, laugh-broken, like losing control is the first good mistake he’s made in years.
“Tell me to stop,” he says against my lips, the words shivering through the heat.
“I won’t.”
“Tell me anyway,” he insists, forehead pressed to mine, breathing hard, like consent is the only air he wants. “Say it so I know you can.”
“Stop,” I whisper. He freezes, every muscle held. Power hums through my skin.
“Start,” I whisper, and he does. God, he does.
His mouth maps my jaw, my throat, the soft place below my ear he seems to have known before he ever put his mouth there.
His stubble scrapes a burn I’ll wear like a secret tomorrow.
I tug his hoodie up and his shirt goes with it.
Skin meets my palms—hot, smooth over hard—and the noise he makes is helpless and grateful and filthy.
“River,” he says again, like he can’t stop saying it. His hands slide under my hoodie and find my waist, my ribs, the swell of breath I can’t steady. He doesn’t rush. He learns. He listens. He waits for the hitch that sounds like yes and when he hears it he answers with his mouth.
I drag his mask the rest of the way off and toss it somewhere stupid. “I hate this thing.”
“I know,” he laughs, and the laugh gets lost because I bite his lower lip, gentle, and he swears, gentle, and our gentles turn into something less and more.
“Tell me what you want,” he murmurs into my skin.
“You,” I say, too fast to be coy. “Just—you.”
He snakes a hand down my yoga pants, past the waistband of my panties, until he’s there. Right there. Yes.
“You’re soaked for me. I knew you would be,” Gage whispers.
“You’ve thought about this?” I ask him, eyes wide.
He gazes into my eyes, a pained expression there. “I always think about you, River. I have for years.”
Years?
He pushes his thumb against my clit, and my eyes close on instinct.
“Yes, there,” I moan out.
“I’ve wanted to feel your pussy for a long time.”
He finds a rhythm that feels inevitable. The table creaks. The router blinks like a voyeur. His thumb draws circles at my clit that make my vision go pure white noise. When I roll my hips, he curses again, softer, like he’s talking to God and losing.
“Slow,” he warns himself more than me. “I promised myself slow.”
“Then break a promise,” I say, because I’m losing, too.
He doesn’t. Not that one. He drags it out until heat is the only language I have, until the ache is a sweet problem I don’t want solved.
He keeps playing, exploring, as my body grows needy with desire.
He brings me to the edge. I’m so close, and he presses the heel of his hand against my clit and pushes two fingers inside me.
“Come for me,” he whispers like I can have an orgasm on demand. However, I do. Just for him, like my body obeys his every command. Heat rushes through me as my body explodes in bliss.
When he finally eases back, both of us are shaking. He presses his forehead to mine and laughs a little. Like he’s completely wrecked. “I’m going to need a new operating system.”
I’m smiling before I know it. “You say that like you didn’t write the last one.”
“I made a lot of compromises in version one,” he says, and the smile slips because the truth lives under every joke.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I ask, quieter. “Before. When it started.”
He exhales, hands still on my waist like he’s anchoring us both.
“Because we were getting close to people who don’t play by rules you can see.
Because if you knew it was me, you might let your guard down in rooms where I couldn’t protect you fast enough.
Because I wanted you breathing more than I wanted you to forgive me. ”
“Don’t make it pretty,” I say. “You decided for me.”
“I did.” His eyes hold mine, unflinching. “And I’m sorry. Not the kind that asks you to fix it for me. The kind that means I will spend as long as it takes giving you back choices I took.”
The room is warm. I run my fingers along his jaw because I can, because tonight I want softness to coexist with fury, because life never gave me the rule that it had to be one at a time.
“I’m still angry,” I tell him.
“I know.” He kisses the corner of my mouth—brief, obedient, wanting. “I can live under that.”
“Don’t,” I say. “Don’t live under anything. Stand next to me.”
His eyes shine, sudden and open. “Deal.”
He helps me off the table like I might shatter, which is ridiculous because we both know I’ve been glass and fire for months and somehow did not die. I tug his hoodie straight. He smooths my hair like I didn’t just wreck it with both hands.
“Team?” I ask, grounding us. “Lead?”
His face sobers. He nods toward the hard case. “We think the leak’s coming from someone close. We’ll move fast. Until then—no confidences at the office. Not even jokes you think are harmless. Not even with… people you used to trust.”
I think of Tasha’s muffin with the heart on the bag. A cold thread snakes through the heat we made. “Okay.”
“And River?” He hesitates, then says it anyway. “No heroics. If I say run—”
“I run,” I finish, mouth curving despite myself. “Rule one?”
“Rule one was obey me,” he says dry. “Rule one is now trust yourself.”
“That’s better,” I say, and mean it.
We clean up the evidence of our almost—a skewed chair, a dropped mask, a crooked table that has seen things. He shoulders the case and heads for the door. I catch his sleeve.
“Gage.”
He stops. Looks. That look is a whole conversation inside a single breath.
“Thank you.”
He nods and walks out the door, and after he leaves I remember the promise I swore to myself. No more dating men I work with. But Gage is different, right?