Chapter 19 #2
His good hand finds my jaw and drags me down into a kiss that tastes like anger and cedar and generations of two families lying to their own children.
I bite his lower lip harder than I mean to.
He cusses into my mouth like he wanted it exactly that hard, then flips the balance of the kiss entirely, his hand fisting in my hair and pulling my head back just far enough that I feel it in my scalp, his teeth at my throat next, not soft at all, a man taking exactly as much as he’s giving.
“This isn’t gentle,” I say against his mouth, half warning, half confession.
“I didn’t ask for gentle.” His voice has gone deep and commanding, nothing reactive left in it. “Take off the shirt, Sage. I want to watch you do it.”
I pull it over my head, and his eyes go dark immediately, just unfiltered want with a hundred and fifty years of manufactured hatred sitting right underneath it.
I work his jeans open next, impatient, my knuckles brushing skin gone hot and tight, and he hisses out a breath through his teeth when I finally get my hand around him.
“Fuck, Sage.”
“I know.”
I don’t wait. I don’t tease. I line myself up and sink down onto him in one merciless drop, and the sound he makes, broken and entirely mine, is the only apology either dead man in that letter is ever going to get out of either of us.
I set the pace myself, hard and fast, my hands braced on both his shoulders, mindful of the bandaged forearm even now.
He watches me the whole time, jaw working, that maddening stillness cracking wide open, his good hand gripping my hip and pulling me down harder with every thrust, his cock hitting deep enough that I lose the rhythm and let him find it for both of us, all the leverage in his legs and none of it in the arm I’m protecting.
“Look at you.” His voice has gone wrecked, reverent, furious right alongside me. “Riding out somebody else’s lie like it’s the only thing that ever made sense to you.”
“Don’t talk. Just feel this.”
He doesn’t talk. He just lets me take every inch of him exactly how I need it, and I fuck him like I’m trying to burn something out of both of us, an inherited grief neither one of us asked to carry.
My release builds fast and mean, no patience left in either of us for slow, and when it hits I bite down on his shoulder to keep the sound contained.
He goes over the cliff right behind me, my name torn out of him, his hands fisting in my hair like he’s the one holding on instead of the other way around.
We stay tangled on the horsehair rug afterward, both of us spent in a way that has nothing to do with satisfaction. His breath slows against my temple. My heartbeat takes longer to follow.
“I keep thinking,” I tell him, into his collarbone. “Six generations. If I had a daughter of my own someday, she’d be the seventh. She’d grow up thinking she hated a name for a reason that was never real.”
“She won’t.” His voice comes out rougher than I expect, confidence in it that has nothing to do with comfort. “Whatever this turns into, whoever finds out what actually happened to that mountain, I promise you the story doesn’t survive us. It ends with our names on it, not hers.”
I lift my head enough to look at him. “You can’t promise that.”
“I can promise you I’ll spend the rest of my life trying.” He says it like a man signing something, not like a man offering ease. “That’s different from a guarantee. I know the difference. I’m making the promise anyway.”
Neither of us says anything else. There isn’t anything else that would fix it. Some things you just carry until the carrying gets easier, and this is one more thing riding shotgun with the rest of what we’ve been hauling around since the courthouse.
I’m reaching for my shirt when the door at the top of the stairs opens without a knock.
“Dawson.” Mackenzie’s voice, clipped, already moving before either of us can get decent. “The informant’s backup finished decrypting an hour ago. I’ve been trying both your phones since eight.”
“We were working,” Dawson says, entirely too calm for a man still lying on a horsehair rug with his jeans flayed open.
“Working.” Mackenzie doesn’t dignify that with anything more than a humph, already descending the stairs, tablet lit in one hand.
“Knox wants an answer on Cruz by tonight and I’ve got maybe six hours of actual analysis time left before that clock runs out, so I need both of you to be people who answer phones for the next few hours, not people who lock themselves in a records room. ”
“Understood,” Dawson says, tucking his boxers in and zipping his fly.
“There’s a name buried three folders deep that finally decoded clean. It’s not McKenna. It’s not the command layer we’ve been chasing.” She stops at the base of the stairs and looks at me instead of Dawson, which is somehow worse. “It’s Ashley Rourke. From eight years ago.”
I go still with one arm still caught in my shirt sleeve. The letter, the archive, the fury I just spent on Dawson’s body, all of it goes quiet under the sound of a name I have never once heard connected to anything that happened before this summer.
“Eight years ago,” I repeat, and my voice comes out steadier than anything in me feels right now. “What happened eight years ago that Ashley Rourke has anything to do with?”
Mackenzie doesn’t answer.
She looks at Dawson instead.
And Dawson, who hasn’t looked away from anything all morning, who took a jagged metal beam to his own forearm yesterday and a letter that rewrote his family history without blinking, looks at the stone floor like it’s the only thing in the room he can stand to face.