Chapter 13
Nicole couldn't stop shaking.
Not the visible kind—her hands were steady, her voice was steady, she'd cleaned the prospect's graze and handed out water bottles and helped pack the first-aid kits back into Parkway's truck with the outward calm of a woman who had her shit together.
But underneath all of that, down in the wiring, something was vibrating at a frequency she couldn't control.
The ride back to the compound was a blur of headlights and engine noise.
She sat in the cab of Parkway's truck with Debbie beside her, and Debbie talked about nothing—the diner, a supplier who kept shorting her on napkins, whether the Pirates would ever stop being terrible—and Nicole understood that the talking was intentional, a lifeline of normalcy thrown to a woman who'd just watched her first real firefight.
She showered at the compound. Hot water, soap, the mechanical process of washing gunpowder residue and someone else's blood off her hands. She stood under the spray until the water ran clear and her skin was red and the shaking still hadn't stopped.
It was almost midnight when she went to Shiv's door.
She didn't knock this time. Just opened it, because the distance between knocking and entering felt like a gap she couldn't afford, not tonight, not with her blood still running hot and her body screaming for something to anchor it to the fact that she was alive and he was alive and the world hadn't ended on a waterfront loading dock.
Shiv stood at his window, looking out at the compound's courtyard.
Still dressed. Still armed—the KA-BAR in its sheath on his hip, which meant he hadn't come down yet either, hadn't crossed the line between combat and everything after.
His shoulders were rigid under his T-shirt, the muscles locked, his whole body carrying a tension she could see from across the room.
He turned when the door opened.
His eyes were different. Darker. The calm was there—it was always there—but tonight it was pulled taut as a wire, and underneath it she could see what the calm was holding back.
Not violence. Need. The desperate, animal need of a man who'd spent the evening killing and was now standing in his room with nowhere to put the fire still burning through him.
Nicole closed the door. Locked it.
"Don't ask me if I'm okay," she said.
"Wasn't going to."
"Good."
She crossed the room, and he met her halfway.
The collision was nothing like their first time.
No patience. No careful exploration, no slow unwinding of control.
His mouth hit hers and her back hit the wall and his hands were on her hips, lifting, pinning, his body pressing the length of hers with a force that drove the air from her lungs.
She grabbed his cut and hauled him closer—not close enough, never close enough—and kissed him with every volt of adrenaline that had been building since she'd climbed out of Parkway's truck and seen him standing in the floodlights without a scratch on him.
"I watched you walk into that warehouse," she said against his mouth, between kisses that were more teeth than tenderness. "I didn't know if you were—"
"I'm here."
"I know you're here. I need to feel it."
His hands tightened on her hips. He lifted her like she weighed nothing—mechanics' arms and all—and she wrapped her legs around him, and his mouth found her throat, her jaw, the spot below her ear that made her dig her nails into his shoulders hard enough to leave marks.
"Mine," he said against her skin, and the word wasn't a whisper this time. It was a growl. Low and rough and vibrating against her pulse point, possession spoken like a fact of physics, and the sound of it hit her somewhere deep and liquid and set everything on fire.
"Prove it," she said.
He carried her to the bed. Not gently—dropped her onto the mattress and followed her down, and the springs protested and neither of them cared.
His hands found the hem of her shirt and pulled it over her head in one motion, and she returned the favor, stripping his T-shirt off and throwing it somewhere that didn't matter because the only thing that mattered was skin against skin, his weight on her, the heat of him burning through every point of contact.
This wasn't the first time's careful discovery.
This was a claiming. His mouth moved down her body with an urgency that left marks—not rough enough to hurt, but hard enough that she'd feel him tomorrow, and tomorrow she'd press her fingers against those spots and remember exactly what alive felt like.
She fought him for control because she needed to—hooked her leg around his and rolled them, pinning him on his back, her hands flat on his chest. His eyes went wide, then hot, the surprise melting into something fierce and admiring.
She bent and kissed his chest, his ribs, the scar tissue she'd memorized the first time, tasting salt and adrenaline on his skin.
"Nicole." Her name through gritted teeth. His hands found her thighs and his fingers dug in, not guiding, just holding—anchoring himself to her while the last of his restraint burned away.
She sat up and looked down at him. This man.
This lethal, silent, terrifying man, flat on his back beneath her, looking up at her like she was the only thing that had ever breached his walls, and the power of it was intoxicating.
She had him. All of him. The parts he showed the world and the parts he kept locked in the dark, and he'd given them to her not because she'd demanded them but because she was the only person who'd ever made him want to be found.
"Tyler," she said, and watched him break.
His control didn't dissolve this time—it detonated.
He surged up and caught her mouth and flipped them again, and what followed was fierce and desperate and exactly what they both needed.
She matched him—every demand answered, every intensity returned, her body meeting his with a hunger that refused to apologize for itself.
They moved together like a fight, like a fire, like two people pouring everything they had into the only act that could contain the fury of being alive after a night when they might not have been.
She gasped his name. He buried his face in her neck and said hers like it was the only word he knew.
The bed frame hit the wall and the sound was percussive, rhythmic, and she didn't care who heard it because the compound was full of people who'd chosen loud, dangerous lives and if they couldn't handle the noise of two people burning down the walls between them, that was their problem.
He said mine again. And again. Against her throat, her collarbone, the curve of her shoulder, the word becoming a rhythm that matched the rest of them.
She said yours because she meant it, because the claiming wasn't one-sided and never had been, because she'd walked into this room and locked the door and chosen him with the same deliberate ferocity he used for everything.
The breaking point came like a wave cresting—inevitable, enormous, sweeping everything else away.
She held onto him and let it take her, felt him follow a breath later, his whole body going rigid and then releasing in a shudder she felt in her bones.
The sound he made was quiet even now—always quiet, even when everything else was loud—but she heard it, and it was her name.
The silence afterward was the loudest thing in the room.
They lay tangled together, breathing hard, sweat cooling on skin that was still too hot.
Shiv's weight rested half on her and half on the mattress, his face pressed against her shoulder, his heartbeat hammering against her ribs in a counterpoint to her own.
Neither of them moved. Moving would break the seal of it, let the world back in, and Nicole wasn't ready for the world yet.
"That was—" she started.
"Yeah."
"Different from before."
"Yeah."
She ran her fingers through his hair, damp at the temples, shorter than she expected up close. He made a sound at her touch—not a word, just a vibration, deep in his chest, the sound a man makes when something feels so good it bypasses language entirely.
"I was scared tonight," she said. "At the warehouse."
His arm tightened across her waist. "You didn't show it."
"I'm showing it now."
He raised his head and looked at her. The fierceness had drained, replaced by something quieter, something that looked like it might be awe.
He touched her face—his thumb tracing the line of her cheekbone, the same gesture from their first time, but softer now, the aggression burned out and tenderness rushing in to fill the space.
"You walked into a firefight to patch up a prospect you'd met twice," he said.
"Someone had to."
"You didn't have to. You chose to."
"So did you. Every day. That's what this is, isn't it? Choosing the fight."
He studied her face for a long time, his thumb still moving along her cheekbone, and she watched him turn the words over the way he turned everything over—slowly, completely, giving them the weight they deserved.
"I never thought I'd want someone in the middle of it with me," he said. "The work. The life. I figured I'd always be the one moving through the dark alone."
"You're not alone."
"No." He kissed her forehead, soft, the contrast to everything that had come before making it land harder. "I'm not."
She pulled the blanket over them and settled against his chest, her ear finding the spot over his heart where the beat had finally slowed to something human.
His arm wrapped around her shoulders—automatic now, the reflex of a man whose body had learned where she belonged and put her there without consulting his brain.
The compound's nighttime sounds filtered through the walls. Music from somewhere below. The faint rumble of a bike pulling into the lot. Voices she'd started to recognize, brothers she'd started to trust, a life she'd started to want.
She fell asleep with his heartbeat steady under her ear, and the last thing she understood before sleep took her was that his stillness didn't push her away anymore.
She was inside it now. The only person who'd ever gotten close enough to find what lived behind the quiet, and what lived there was hers.