Chapter 25 #2
“Leave it,” he says, rough and wicked. “I want to see it on you. I want my name still in your mouth and my cum still on your skin when you fall asleep, so there’s no version of tomorrow morning where you talk yourself into thinking this didn’t happen.”
“That’s deeply unhygienic, Dawson.”
“That’s deeply mine, Sage.” He kisses my shoulder, gentle now, tender in a way that doesn’t match a single word he just said.
I curl into him careful of his stitched arm, finding the soft spot between his shoulder and his chest that’s always fit me better than any pillow in this house.
He adjusts around my own bruises without either of us saying a word about either injury.
I fall asleep there, his mouth against my hair and for the first time since Cornell I don’t dream about a porch step or the fairgrounds or a summer that ended too early.
I don’t dream about anything at all. I just sleep, whole, claimed, and completely unashamed of it.
The good sleep doesn’t survive contact with morning. It never does anymore, not in this house.
The whiteboard takes up the whole wall of my office, and I’m the one holding the marker, still sore in places that have nothing to do with the ambush and everything to do with the man currently reading over my shoulder like the board owes him money.
Holt’s already posted at the window with the blinds cracked two inches, the exact habit he’s kept since the ambush, eyes moving over the yard every few minutes whether anyone’s watching him do it or not.
“You brought a legislative strategy board to a mafia problem,” Finn says, delighted, from his perch on the windowsill.
“I brought the only tool I’ve ever had that works.
” I draw a line from the grey Silverado to the fundraiser, another from the fundraiser to the cove camera, a third from the camera straight through to Erin’s name, already circled twice from Holt’s own notes.
“You want to beat a bill, you don’t chase every amendment somebody throws at you.
You map who benefits from each one landing, and you find out they’re all coming from the same donor. ”
“Erin,” Knox says. Not a question anymore. Nobody in this room says it like a question.
“Erin’s the mechanism. I’m not saying she’s the reason.
” I tap the board, right at the center where every line converges.
“Look at the pattern instead of the pieces. The truck at the wedding. The fence splice on our side. The camera at the cove, tagged to Sullivan equipment. The warrant routed through legitimate counsel. None of that reads like somebody trying to catch us doing something. It reads like somebody trying to move us somewhere.”
The room goes quiet, the kind that means I’ve said something nobody wants to have missed.
“They aren’t chasing us,” I say. “They’re herding us.”
Dawson’s already leaning forward, elbows on his knees, reading the board like a man rereading a contract for the clause he missed the first time. “Toward what?”
“I don’t know yet. But every incident’s moved us physically. The boundary house. The Corridor. The cove. The stables road. Somebody’s been drawing a map with our own reactions, and I’d bet good money the last stop on it isn’t random.”
Holt doesn’t say anything, which from Holt means I’ve landed on something he already suspected and hadn’t said out loud either.
Mackenzie catches my eye from across the room, a small, approving nod, the same one she gave me the day I read a hostile timestamp back to a diner full of gossips.
Gideon arrives twenty minutes later, unannounced, like he always arrives when he wants the advantage of nobody expecting him. He takes one look at the board, one look at me standing in front of it with a marker, and I watch him recalculate.
“You’ve been busy,” he says.
“I’ve been working. There’s a difference.” I set the marker down and cross the room to stand in front of him instead of behind Dawson, and I think that surprises him more than the board did. “The condition’s over, Dad.”
“Sage—”
“You put a Blackwater in his house.” I don’t raise my voice.
I’ve never needed to, and I’m not starting with him now.
“You wanted paper only, feelings forbidden, information brought home like a hostage exchange. That woman doesn’t exist anymore.
She’s staying where she is, doing what she wants, and if you need intelligence on the Sullivans going forward, you can ask your daughter directly instead of running her like an asset. ”
He studies me a long moment, the same assessing look he’s given every ledger of his life, and I let him look.
“Understood,” he says finally, his shoulders dropping on the way out, the closest thing to a concession he’s given me in years.
I catch the empty chair beside Dawson before I’ve fully turned back around, and I take it without thinking twice, dropping into the seat like it’s always been mine, my shoulder settling against his.
Finn’s eyebrows go up so fast and I hear him mutter something that sounds a lot like called it under his breath.
Maren, halfway through pouring coffee, turns her whole face toward the window to keep from grinning outright.
West pulls a twenty out of his wallet without a word and hands it straight to Finn, who accepts it with the smug, wordless dignity of a man who’s been running a betting pool on his own family for years and finally cashed one in.
Nobody says anything about it. Nobody has to.
Mackenzie’s phone buzzes in her hand, and whatever’s on the screen kills the last of the room’s good mood in one second flat.
“Tate cross-referenced the Highline shell account for anything more recent,” she says, already turning her laptop toward the table. “There’s a second wire. Same account, same routing pattern as the first payment to Ashley Rourke, eight summers back.”
“How old?” Dawson asks, though something in his voice already knows the answer is going to be wrong.
Mackenzie doesn’t soften it.
“Dated last week.”