5. Melissa
FIVE
MELISSA
I woke up in his bed with his arm across my waist and the morning light coming through the window.
His breathing was slow against the back of my neck, even and deep, the breathing of a man who was asleep and trusted the room he was sleeping in.
His chest was warm against my back, his arm heavy, his knuckles rough where his hand rested against my stomach.
I didn't move. I lay there and let the quiet sit around us. Here, in this bed, with this man's arm around me, I wasn’t running, I wasn’t hiding, and I wasn’t counting locks or listening for footsteps.
I was just a woman lying next to someone she wanted to be next to, and the simplicity of it made my throat tight.
But even despite this, something still just sat with me.
The fact that the men had tracked me here, they knew where I was and I felt certain that they wouldn’t rest while I was still alive and could identify them all.
Razor stirred. His arm tightened, pulling me closer, and His mouth pressed against my shoulder. Warm, unhurried. He kissed the curve of my neck, slow, like he had all the time in the world, and last night had just been desperate, furious, and necessary. This was something else entirely.
I turned in his arms and faced him. His eyes were open, watching me with a focus that made my stomach drop. The same eyes that had been wild last night, dark with rage and want, were calm now. Present. Looking at me like he was trying to memorize every detail before it changed.
"I'm scared," I said.
I hadn't planned to say it. The words came out on their own, quiet, honest, pulled from somewhere I'd been keeping sealed since the road.
Scared of the men in the truck driving away with coordinates.
Scared of whoever they were planning to do to get me back.
Scared that the safety I'd let myself feel in this compound and in this bed was temporary, because every safety in my life had turned out to be temporary.
He didn't flinch. Didn't look away. His hand came up and rested on my jaw, his thumb against my cheekbone, and his eyes were so certain it was hard to breathe.
“Trust me, they have to come through me," he said. "They won't."
He said it the way he’d say anything. Like a fact.
I believed him. Not the way I'd believed Tyler, with hope and need filling in the gaps. I believed him because his body was between me and the door and his eyes hadn't left mine.
His thumb moved. Traced my cheekbone, the line of my face, the edge of my hairline. Slow. The hands that had pinned my hips to the mattress hours ago were touching me like I was worth being careful with, and the contrast between last night and this morning made my throat ache.
He kissed me. Soft, his mouth barely open, his hand still on my face.
I kissed him back and the slowness of it was its own kind of heat, different from last night, deeper, the kind that spreads instead of detonating.
His tongue found mine and I sighed against his mouth and his hand slid from my face to my neck to my shoulder and down my arm, tracing the shape of me with his fingertips.
He rolled me onto my back and settled over me, his weight on his forearms, his body warm and heavy above mine.
He looked down at me and I looked up at him and there was nowhere to hide.
Last night we'd been tangled, urgent, too fast to see each other clearly.
This was face to face with the morning light on both of us and every expression visible.
His mouth moved down my neck. My collarbone.
The space between my breasts. He kissed across my stomach, slow, unhurried, his hands shaping my waist, my hips.
He was learning me. I could feel it in his pauses, his mouth returning to the skin above my hip bone when my breath caught, his attention registering every response and storing it without rushing past a single one.
He was paying attention to me with a focus that felt like being studied, and the care in it, the patience, was the most intimate thing anyone had ever done to my body.
He came back up my body. Kissed my mouth. Settled between my legs and I opened for him, my knees falling apart, my hands on his shoulders.
He pushed into me slowly. So slowly I registered every inch, the stretch of him, the fullness, my body adjusting, welcoming, pulling him deeper.
He held there, fully inside me, and looked at my face.
His arms were shaking with the effort of keeping still and his eyes were on mine and He was waiting.
Letting me feel him. Letting this be different from everything that had come before.
I put my hand on his face. He turned into it and pressed his mouth against my palm and then he moved.
Slow. Long strokes that drew almost all the way out before sinking back in, each one precise, each one deep.
Every ridge of him, every shift of angle, his body fitting against mine with a precision that stole my breath.
He kept his eyes on me and I kept mine on him and the intimacy of it was almost too much, the rawness of being seen this completely while someone was inside me.
He said my name. Quiet, against my mouth, and it sounded different from him than it had from anyone else.
"Melissa."
I pulled him closer. Wrapped my arms around his back, felt the muscles moving under my hands as he rocked into me.
The pace stayed slow, the rhythm unhurried, and the pleasure built in long waves instead of the sharp spikes of last night.
He brushed his lips across my temple, my jaw, the corner of my mouth, and every touch was tender in a way that made my eyes sting.
He shifted his hips. The angle changed. I gasped.
He held it, repeating the same slow stroke at the same depth, and the consistency was maddening and perfect.
The tension gathered inside me, tightening with every thrust, and he must have felt it because he didn't change a thing.
Same pace. Same angle. Same relentless, devastating attention.
I came slowly. It rolled through me instead of crashing, starting deep and radiating outward, my body tightening around him in waves.
I kept my eyes on his because I wanted him to see it, wanted him to know what his care had done, and the look on his face while he watched me fall apart was something I was going to carry with me for the rest of my life.
Like he couldn’t believe he was allowed to be here.
He followed me over a few strokes later, his eyes closing for the first time, his whole body shuddering, a low sound pressed against my neck.
I held him through it, my hands in his hair, my legs around his waist, and he came inside me with a gentleness that matched everything else about this morning.
We lay there tangled together, breathing, the morning light moving across the bed. His head was on my chest and my fingers were in his hair and neither of us spoke because there was nothing to say that the last twenty minutes hadn't already said.
The compound was different today.
The gate was manned like normal but brothers I hadn't seen carrying weapons were carrying them openly, holsters visible under jackets, a rifle leaning against the workshop door. The easy rhythm of the last four days was gone, replaced by something tight and operational.
Rook had been working through the night.
I could see it in the papers spread across the lodge table, the laptop open, the coffee mugs lined up in a row.
Whatever he'd found had weight. The low conversations between brothers had a different tone now, clipped, focused, the conversations of men making plans they expected to execute.
From the porch, my coffee going cold, I watched the compound shift, and what was building in me wasn’t fear.
It was the feeling of being the reason.
I'd been the problem in every room since Tyler.
He'd made me the problem and the trafficking operation made me the problem when I ran.
And now the compound was locked down, the shop closed, brothers armed and grim, because I'd brought a tracker through their gates and the men who'd tagged me with it knew exactly where I was.
If I left, the trouble followed me. The compound went back to normal. The brothers went back to their lives, their shop and their bar. The simplest solution to every problem I'd caused since I ran was the one where I wasn't here.
I was in the room packing the bag before I'd even made a conscious decision to do it. The same canvas duffel, the same clothes, the lining ripped open where Razor had torn out the tracker. I was folding a shirt when the door opened behind me.
“Melissa, what are you doing?”
My hands stopped momentarily, before I carried on.
He was in the doorway, looking at the bag on the bed, looking at me. I couldn't turn around because if I turned around I'd see his face and whatever was on it would break me and I needed to hold it together long enough to explain.
"I'm the reason this is happening." My voice held and I hated it. "I brought them here. The tracker, the men in the bar, all of it. Every brother out there with a gun on his hip is carrying it because of me. And the longer I stay, the worse it gets."
He walked to the bed. Picked up the bag. Set it aside and took my hands.
I looked at him.
"You didn't build that trafficking operation," he said.
"You didn’t put that tag the bag. You didn't send those men to the bar.
The men who did that caused this, they did it the moment they did this to you.
You ran, you survived, and you ended up on a road where I happened to be riding, and every brother at that table chose this work.
We protect the people who need it, and we punish the people who hurt them.
They chose it before you got here and they'll choose it long after.
You don't get to take that from them, this is who they are, and this is who I am.”
I tried to say his name and he kept going.
"You're not a problem. You're the reason we exist."
Everything I'd been holding since the road, since the ranch, and since Tyler's car pulling off the highway and the blindfold for the secret romantic getaway that turned out to be my own personal hell. The locked doors and the sound of the deadbolt every morning and every night, landed on me at once. The weight of it drove the air out of my lungs, He caught me as I crumpled and I cried like I hadn’t managed to before now.
It was ugly crying. Loud, messy, and the kind of crying that comes from a place below language.
I cried into his chest, his arms were around me, and he didn’t say anything because there was nothing to say.
He just held me while two months of terror, the road, the tracker, the porch, his hands on my body, his voice saying my name, all of it broke loose and poured out of me.
He held me until it passed.
Church was called an hour later. I sat at the table because Angel asked me to, and I sat there with red eyes, swollen hands, and the steadiest voice I could manage.
Every brother was present. Angel at the head, where he always sat, the whole room orienting around him. The mood was cold and decided before anyone spoke. These men had been preparing for something since last night, and the something had arrived.
"The operation knows where Melissa is, and who she is with.” Angel said.
"They sent two men to confirm. More are probably coming, and they won't be scouting. We can wait here and let them choose the terms. We take control, we decide those terms and we go to the source. Hit them when they don’t expect it and we end this shit. "
The table was unanimous. I saw it in their faces before the vote. These weren't men who waited.
Angel looked at me. "What can you tell us?"
I told them. A ranch at the end of a dirt road in the hills.
Main house, two outbuildings connected by covered walkways.
Side door by the kitchen with a deadbolt that stuck.
Front door, back door. The boss drove a dark truck, came by on Tuesdays and Fridays.
Three or four men on the property at any given time, sometimes more when women were being moved.
The boss was ordinary looking. Brown hair, medium build, forgettable face.
The kind of man who'd built a career on not being remembered.
I described it how you describe a place you've been held.
Through sound and routine and the geography of survival.
I told them about the locks on the outside of doors, the boarded windows, the mattresses on the floor.
I told them how many women I'd seen come through and how fast they moved.
Two months of paying attention because paying attention was the only power I had.
Rook listened. Took notes, talked to Razor about where in the road he found me and between the brothers, they worked out what ranch was being used for the trafficking operation.
When I finished, the room was quiet. Angel nodded once, everyone knew that meant they had enough to go with.
The brothers prepared to ride.