24. Cassie
Cassie
They move the wedding up. Two days instead of a week, and I don't know if that means somebody spooked Rafael or if he simply doesn't want to give me long enough to plan anything, but either way I've got less time than I thought I did.
I use every hour of it anyway. I know these men.
I know how they think, how they plan, how they underestimate a woman who's spent her whole life being underestimated on purpose.
Marisol's hour-on-the-hour patrol detail turns out to be exactly right, and by my second night I've timed it three times running, the front guard's footsteps fading toward the back of the property like clockwork, thirty seconds of dead air before he circles back.
Thirty seconds isn't an escape. But it's enough time to work the lock with a bent wire hanger without anyone hearing the scrape of metal against metal, and by the morning of the wedding I've got the mechanism half stripped, one clean twist away from giving entirely.
On the morning of the wedding, dressed in white that isn't mine, in a house that isn't mine, standing in front of a mirror that shows me a woman I refuse to become again, I hear it. Engines, distant at first, then closer, more of them than any wedding party should account for.
Marisol's eyes go wide. "Get down. Away from the window."
I don't get down. I go to the window, and there they are: a line of bikes tearing up the gravel drive like a storm that finally found where I've been hiding, and at the front of it, unmistakable even from this distance, is Ethan.
Gunfire starts almost immediately, shouts, chaos breaking loose downstairs, and Marisol grabs my arm, pulling me back from the glass. "Stay away from the window, they'll come for you, just stay down."
I do get down, but not out of fear, out of the same cold, practiced instinct that's kept me alive for two years. After all my efforts to open the door with the wire hanger, I don’t need it because the door is already open and Marisol is on the floor with me.
I can hear boots pounding up the stairs outside.
Downstairs I can hear it, glass breaking, furniture overturned, a voice I recognize as Cash's shouting something to Ramsay about the east hallway, both of them moving through this house like they've studied its floor plan a hundred times over even though I know for a fact they only saw it from a distance three days ago.
This club doesn't do anything halfway, not even a rescue.
The door bursts open from the other side, Shadow's boot arriving in the same half second as me opening the door. He's standing there, gun raised, sweeping the room before he lowers it.
"Found her." His voice carries down the hall, flat as ever, but there's something underneath it today, something almost like relief. "Cassie's clear."
I don't wait for an escort. I run.
I find Ethan in the hallway downstairs, blood on his knuckles that isn't his, chest heaving, and the second his eyes land on me, the whole hard, furious set of his face just breaks open.
"Cassie." My name sounds like a prayer answered, and then I'm in his arms, off my feet, his face buried in my neck.
"You came." I'm crying and laughing at the same time. My fingers dig into his cut like I can weld us together through sheer force of wanting it.
"Told you I would. Every damn time." He pulls back to check me over, his hands running down my arms like he needs the physical proof I'm whole. "Did they hurt you?"
"A cut, that's all. I'm okay. I'm okay, Ethan."
Behind us, Knuckles drags Rafael out of a side room by his collar. He’s still in his own half-finished wedding suit, and his face has gone pale and furious. "This one's done playing groom for the day."
"Where's my father in law?" I ask, suddenly remembering, and suddenly terrified of the answer. "Is Brick, is he...?"
"Stable. Fighting." Ethan's voice cracks with the relief of saying it. "He’s got to make it, Cass. He's gonna make it."
I sob into his chest, grief and relief so tangled together I can't separate one from the other anymore.
Brax's voice carries from somewhere down the hall, hard and cold. "Found him. He was hiding in the wine cellar like the coward he is."
I look past Ethan's shoulder and there's Nerd, his hands zip-tied, and being shoved forward between two grim-faced brothers, refusing to meet a single set of eyes in that hallway.
"You." My voice comes out flat, disbelieving. "You did this."
He doesn't answer. He doesn't even look at me. Whatever excuse lives behind his eyes, he's not ready to say it out loud yet, not with the whole club standing around him with murder written plain across every face.
"Church," Prez's voice booms from the front entryway, arriving late but unmistakable.
He looks at Rafael, still pinned in Knuckles' grip, then at me.
"Him, we hand to your brothers. Rafael's mess belongs to the Famiglia now, not to us.
But this one." His eyes cut to Nerd, cold enough that even the air seems to drop a few degrees. "This one's ours. Load him up."
Ethan doesn't let go of me the entire walk out to the bikes, one arm locked around my waist like he's never planning on loosening that grip again, and for the first time since that car door slammed shut on me three days ago, I actually believe I'm safe.
I'm going home.
He gets me straight upstairs the second we're back, past the brothers already gathering to hand Nerd over to Church, past the old ladies waiting with open arms I promise to fall into tomorrow, because tonight the only thing I want is a locked door and my husband's skin against mine, proof neither of us dreamed this ending.
"Let me look at you." He sits me on the edge of our bed, careful with the cut above my eyebrow, his thumb tracing just beneath it like he can heal it through sheer force of will. "I kept thinking about all the ways I might not make it in time."
"You made it." I catch his hand, press it flat against my chest so he can feel my heart still beating under his palm. "I'm here. I'm not going anywhere."
"I need to feel that for myself." His voice comes out rough, and when he kisses me it isn't gentle. It's hungry. Three days of fear breaking loose all at once, and I meet it with everything I've got, dragging him down onto the bed with me like I can't stand one more inch of space between us.
"Show me." I pull at his shirt, desperate for skin, for weight, for the undeniable fact of him alive and here. "I need you to show me I'm really home."
He doesn't need telling twice. He strips us both down fast, no patience left for slow tonight, and when he settles over me his whole body's shaking, some tremor he can't quite master even now.
"I almost lost you." He presses his forehead to mine, hips already notching against me. "I don't know what I would've done."
"You didn't lose me. I'm right here." I wrap my legs around him, pulling him in until there's no space left between us at all. "Show me, Ethan. Show me I'm yours."
He pushes into me in one long slide, and the sound he makes against my ear is half relief, half agony, like he's been holding his breath for three days and this is the first real one he's taken since.
Then something in him snaps loose entirely, his pace turning hard and almost punishing, like he's trying to brand the last three days out of both our bodies through sheer force of feeling.
I meet him for every single one of them, my hands fisted tight in his hair, crying out his name loud enough that I don't care who hears it through these walls, because for three days I thought I might never get to say it again.
"Mine." He growls it against my throat, over and over, punctuating every drive of his hips. "Mine, Cassie. Always."
"Yours." I sob it out, close already, wound too tight from fear and relief both to last much longer. "Only yours."
He reaches between us, his fingers finding exactly where I need them, and it doesn't take more than a few strokes before the whole world goes white behind my eyes, his name torn out of me on a sob.
He follows right behind me, a low, rough sound breaking against my collarbone, both of us shaking through the aftermath together.
We lie tangled afterward, his heartbeat slowing gradually against my ear, and neither of us says anything for a long while, just breathing each other in like proof.
"I’m never letting you out of my sight again," he says eventually, his voice rough with something between exhaustion and wonder.
"I might hold you to that." I press a kiss over his heart. "I love you, Ethan. More than I have words for tonight."
"I love you too, Cass. Every single piece of you." He pulls the blankets up over us both, holding me like he means to keep his promise starting this exact second. "Sleep. I've got you."
I do, finally. I know I’m safe in the only place that's ever felt like it was mine to keep.