Chapter 11
Nora couldn't sleep.
She'd tried. Slayer's arm was around her and his breathing was steady at her back and the compound was as quiet as it got, and she lay in the dark with his real name in her mouth and the smell of smoke still in her hair and the bruise on her temple throbbing in time with her heartbeat, and sleep would not come.
Every time she closed her eyes she saw the fuel drum exploding. The breached door. Bishop's men coming through the fence. The sawed-off shotgun swinging toward Slayer's back.
She turned in his arms.
He was awake. Of course he was awake. He was lying there with his eyes open and his hand on her hip and the bruise on his throat dark as ink in the faint light, watching her the way he'd been watching her since the night they met — like she was the only landscape that mattered.
"Can't sleep either," she said.
"No."
"I keep seeing it."
"Me too."
She put her hand on his chest. His heart was beating steady under her palm, and she pressed harder, feeling the proof of it. Alive. Here. The man who'd nearly had the air choked out of him by a professional three hours ago, still breathing, still warm, still hers.
"I need you," she said. Not a seduction. A fact. The truest thing she'd said since goodnight. "I need to feel you. I need to know we're both still here."
He pulled her up and kissed her. Soft at first, careful of the cut above her ear and the bruise at her temple, his hand cradling the uninjured side of her face.
She tasted toothpaste and the faint copper of blood from a split inside his lip he hadn't mentioned, and she kissed him deeper, chasing the taste, needing it because it was real and he was real and they were both alive in this bed.
"Not here," she said against his mouth.
He pulled back. Looked at her.
"The projects room. Off the garage." She traced the bruise on his throat with her fingertip, feather-light. "I want to be where we fought for this. I want to feel the building around us."
He understood. She could see it land — the recognition that this wasn't about novelty or heat but about standing on the ground they'd held and claiming it with their bodies the way they'd claimed it with their fists.
They went barefoot through the dark compound.
Down the stairs, across the great room where the mining lamps were dark and the bar gleamed in the moonlight through the high windows, through the wrecked garage that still smelled like chemical foam and scorched metal.
The projects room was at the back — a concrete box with a steel workbench and a locked tool cage and a single bare bulb that Slayer didn't turn on.
Moonlight came through the high window. It was enough.
The workbench was the mirror of her shop bench where they'd had each other the first time, and they both felt it — the echo, the rhyme.
But everything between then and now had changed.
That night she'd been a woman running on survival adrenaline who didn't know his name.
Tonight she was a woman who'd put out a fire in his garage and wrapped his brother's burns and told him she was in, and she knew his name was Wade, and she wanted him with a clarity that had nothing to do with adrenaline and everything to do with love.
She reached for his cut.
It was hanging on the back of the door where he'd left it, and she lifted it off the hook and held it for a moment — the weight of it, the leather worn soft from years, the Mayhem patch that meant everything to every man in this building.
She'd never touched it before. It felt like holding something sacred.
She stepped behind him and settled it onto his shoulders.
He went still.
Then she slid her hands under the leather and pushed it off, slow, her palms running down his arms as the cut fell away. It hit the concrete with a soft heavy sound, and she pressed her mouth to the back of his neck, between his shoulder blades, where the muscle was knotted with tension and pain.
"Nora." His voice was raw. Wrecked. "What are you doing to me."
"Taking care of you." She kissed the bruise on his shoulder where Bishop's gun butt had hit him. "The way you take care of everything else."
She pulled his shirt over his head and ran her hands across his back — the muscles, the scars, the damage from tonight mapped in bruises that were going dark under her fingers.
She kissed each one. The ribs where he'd taken the hit.
The forearm swollen from the pipe. The throat where the chokehold had left its mark, purple and ugly, and she put her mouth on it so gently he shuddered.
He turned and caught her face and kissed her, and this time there was nothing careful about it. His mouth was desperate and his hands were shaking and he pulled her shirt off and lifted her onto the workbench in one motion, the steel cold under her thighs, his body hot between them.
The echo of the first time. The same bench, the same position, the same man between her knees. But his hands moved different now — not hungry and half-blind with adrenaline but slow and searching, learning her like he had all the time in the world even though neither of them could stop shaking.
He unhooked her bra and slid it off and put his mouth on her breast, and she arched into him and fisted her hands in his hair — that silvered hair she'd been gripping since the first night — and held him there while his tongue worked her nipple and his hands pulled her jeans down her hips.
She kicked them off. He stripped his own and she wrapped her legs around him and pulled him close enough to feel the hard length of him against her center, nothing between them, and the contact drew a sound out of her that was half sob and half moan.
"Please," she said. She never said please. "Wade. Please."
His name in her mouth undid him. She watched it happen — the last wall behind his eyes crumbling, the control he held over everything else in his life dissolving because she'd said his real name and meant it.
He reached for the condom he'd put in his pocket before they came downstairs — because he'd known, the same way she'd known, that this was where the night was going — and she took it from him and rolled it on, her hand steady even though the rest of her wasn't.
He pushed into her and her head fell back and her hands braced on the steel behind her and the sound she made echoed off the concrete walls of the dark projects room like a prayer.
He didn't move right away. He held himself inside her, his forehead pressed to hers, his breath ragged, and she felt every inch of him and the ache of the stretch and the rightness of being joined to this man in this building on this ground they'd bled for.
"Look at me," she whispered.
He opened his eyes. Gray-blue, storm-dark, wet.
"I'm here," she said. "We're here. We're both still here."
He started to move.
Slow and deep and unhurried, each stroke drawing all the way out and pushing all the way home, and she met him on every one, her hips lifting off the bench, her hands gripping his shoulders.
The bench rocked against the wall with a slow metallic rhythm that was the only sound in the room besides their breathing and the soft wet sounds of their bodies meeting.
She pulled his mouth to hers and kissed him while he moved inside her, and the kiss was as slow and deliberate as everything else — tongues sliding, breath shared, his hand tangled in her loose hair.
She tasted the split in his lip again and this time it didn't taste like damage. It tasted like survival.
He shifted the angle and she gasped and her nails dug into his back. His hand slid between them and found her, his thumb tracing slow circles that matched the rhythm of his hips, and the pressure built in her belly like a tide coming in — slow, inevitable, impossible to hold back.
"Don't stop," she breathed. "Don't stop, don't stop —"
He didn't stop. He drove deeper and his thumb pressed harder and she came apart with her forehead against his, her body clenching around him in long rolling waves, and she held his face in both hands and looked into his eyes while it happened because she wanted him to see her.
All of her. The woman who fought and fixed things and stood on her ground and was falling apart in his arms because he was the one man she trusted enough to let it happen.
He held her through it, his arms around her, his body braced and trembling with the effort of holding back. When the last wave passed she pulled him deeper with her heels and whispered his name — his real name, Wade — and he let go.
He came with a sound she'd never heard from him before — broken and raw and completely unguarded, a man who controlled entire rooms brought to ruin by a woman on a workbench in a dark room.
He shuddered against her and she held him, her arms around his neck, her face in his hair, and she felt him breathe her name into the hollow of her throat like he was memorizing the shape of it.
They stayed.
The bench was cold under her. His skin was hot over her. The smell of smoke and antiseptic was still in both of them, layered now with sweat and sex and the raw clean scent of two people who'd stripped each other down to nothing and found that nothing was exactly enough.
After a long time, he lifted his head.
"You said my name," he said.
"I know."
"You said it like it belonged to you."
She touched his face. Traced the scar from his ear to his collarbone with her thumb. "Doesn't it?"
He turned his mouth into her palm and pressed his lips to the callused center, the same kiss he'd given her on the back steps when they'd traded their losses like currency. A kiss that said: I see you. You see me. That's everything.
"Yeah," he said. "It does."
She didn't let go of him for a long time, and he didn't pull away, and the dark projects room held them the way the building held everything else — solid, scarred, still standing.