Chapter 10
Chapter Ten
Eli
She sleeps against me and I don't sleep at all, and I'm glad of it.
I don't want to lose a minute of this to unconsciousness.
Nine years I slept fine and alone; I'll trade a lifetime of that sleep for this one sleepless hour with her hair across my chest and her hand curled in the hair over my heart like she's holding on even unconscious.
I should feel like a man who broke his own rule. I broke it cleanly, completely, with both hands. The eighteen years between us didn't shrink and the arithmetic didn't change and every reason I built the line is still standing.
I don't feel like a man who broke a rule. I feel like a man who finally told the truth.
But I'm not built to lie in the warm and forget the cold, so even now, with her breath slow on my skin, the part of me that's kept me alive is doing the math.
The scout's gone dark. Down in the valley, the men who sent him are sitting in a heated truck somewhere checking a phone that isn't lighting up, and at some point, tonight, tomorrow morning, they're going to stop waiting and start understanding.
A scout who doesn't come back tells them more than a scout who reports in.
It tells them somebody up here can make a man not come back.
It tells them the witness isn't alone.
I ease out from under her. She makes a small sound and reaches, and I put a pillow where I was and she settles around it, and the sight of that does something to me I don't have time for. I go to the window with the dead man's map and the dead man's phone and I do the work.
The phone's locked but it lit up twice while she slept, and both times the screen showed the front of a text without the body: a contact saved as DALE, then the same DALE again, an hour later, the second one just a question mark.
So. Dale is below, Dale is the one who sent this man up, and Dale is starting to wonder.
The map in my hand tells me the rest. They scouted the long grade, they know it tops out at the saddle, they know it's foot travel to the cabin, and they've written WITNESS over my home like a target.
They'll come in force and they'll come soon and they'll come knowing, now, that the last quarter mile is the kill zone, because their scout learned it and didn't come back to say so.
It's a worse fight than it was this morning. This morning I had surprise. Now I've got terrain and nothing else.
It'll have to be enough. It's going to be enough. I decide it the way I used to decide a recovery was going to go: not as a hope but as an order I give myself.
"You're planning," Wren says from the bed, awake, watching me in the low light with those clear eyes. "I can hear you planning from here. You get very quiet in a specific way."
"You should sleep."
"So should you. Come back to bed and plan horizontally.
" She holds up the blanket, an invitation and a command, and I am, it turns out, a man who can be commanded by this woman, which is new information about myself I'll examine later.
I cross the room and get in and she fits herself against me, careful of her ribs, fearless of everything else. "Tell me the real number."
So I tell her. The scout. The dark phone.
Dale below, waking up to the truth. Two days, maybe less.
The kill zone in the last quarter mile and the loss of surprise and the terrain we've still got.
I lay it all out flat, the way she's earned, and she takes it the way she takes everything, without flinching, turning it over.
"What do you need from me," she says.
Not what do we do. She's leaving the tactics to the man who knows them, the way I'd leave the rocks to her. But what do you need from me. Like she's part of the standing-between now. Like there are two people on this side of the door.
"I need you to do exactly what I say when it starts," I tell her, "even when it's hard, even when everything in you says run or fight, because the thing that keeps you alive is going to feel wrong and you have to trust me past your own instinct. Can you do that?"
"Yes."
"I need you to know that whatever I have to become when they come up that slope, it's not who I am with you. It's a tool I pick up and put down. Don't be afraid of it."
"I'm not afraid of it." She says it into my chest. "I watched you put it down and come back through that door braced for me to hate you. A monster doesn't come home scared of being a monster. Stop telling me to fear the best man I've ever known."
I hold her tighter. The fire burns down. Somewhere below us, a man named Dale is checking a phone that's never going to answer, and the cold is settling its weight over the mountain, and tomorrow or the day after it's going to come for the woman in my arms.
"I'm going to keep you," I tell her, low, into her hair, and it's not a sweet nothing.
It's the truest order I've ever given myself, the vow I've been circling for three days.
"Whatever comes up that hill. Whatever I have to do.
You're mine to keep, Wren, and I am going to keep you, and then I'm going to take you down off this mountain and stand on your solid ground with you in the daylight where everyone can see, age and all, blood and all, and I am never going to apologize for a second of it. "
She's quiet a long moment.
"Promise me you come back through the door," she says. "Every time. That's my one. Keep me if you want, I'm yours, but you come back through that door."
"Every time," I tell her.
For a while we lie in the dark and don't talk, and I think she's gone under, and I let myself do the thing I have no right to do, which is memorize her.
The weight of her leg over mine. The slow tide of her breath.
The cold tips of her fingers curled in the hair over my heart.
Down the mountain a man named Dale is waking up to the truth about his scout, and somewhere in me the old machine is still running the math on it.
But here, under my hand, is the only number that's ever going to matter again, and I am a man who has just been handed everything to lose on the night before I might lose it.
I should let her sleep. She needs it. I make the decision the way I make all of them, flat and final, and then her hand slides down my stomach, over the old scar, lower, and unmakes it.
"You're not asleep," I say. My voice has gone rough.
"Neither are you." She props up on her good elbow, and even in the banked-fire dark I can see her eyes, clear and certain, reading me the way she reads stone.
"You're lying here cataloging me like you're saying goodbye.
I can feel you doing it." Her cold palm flattens low on my belly and my whole body goes taut.
"Don't say goodbye to me, Eli. Say the other thing. "
"Wren." It's half warning, half prayer. "You're hurt. You should?—"
"I should get touched by the man I love on the one night I'm sure of him.
" Her hand closes around my cock and I lose the rest of whatever I was going to say in a hiss through my teeth.
She strokes me slow, learning the shape and weight of me with that scientist's attention, watching my face for the data, and the wonder of being wanted, me, this, after nine years of being weather no one came out in, nearly takes the top of my head off.
"I read you all day," she says, low. "Now let me read you in the dark.
Yes or no, Eli. I need your number too."
"Yes." It comes out of the bottom of the quarry. "God help me. Yes."
I roll us, careful, always careful of the ribs, the leg, the body that hit a mountain four days ago, and settle my weight on my forearms above her, and she pulls me down into a kiss that has none of last time's first-time hesitation left in it.
She's learned me. That's the thing that undoes me, the thing I'll carry up that slope at dawn: that in three days and one night she has learned me, and she's not afraid, and she keeps choosing it anyway.
I kiss down the line of her throat, slow and deliberate, savoring every inch because if this is the last quiet hour I get, I'm going to spend every fucking second buried in her.
"Let me," I rasp against her skin, voice rough with need.
"Let me have this. Let me have you. I spent nine years up here with nothing to lose and I was so goddamn proud of it, and then you walked into that whiteout and ruined me for everything else.
I want—" My mouth closes over her full tit, sucking hard on her stiff nipple, tongue flicking as she arches into me with a broken moan.
"—I want every minute they're going to try to take from us. "
"Take them, then." Her fingers fist tight in my hair, yanking me closer. "All of them. Fuck me like you mean it."
So I do. I take my time devouring her the way the mountain erodes stone.
Slow, relentless, inevitable. My mouth and rough hands map every curve and dip in the firelight, teasing the places I learned before and hunting for new ones.
The way her pulse flutters wildly when I drag my beard along the sensitive skin of her inner thigh.
The filthy way she whimpers my name like it's a prayer and a curse.
She's soaked, her cunt dripping and swollen when I push two thick fingers deep inside her, curling them against that spot that makes her hips buck.
The scorching heat of her slick pussy gripping me, the obscene wet sounds as I pump them in and out, has me gritting my teeth against the urge to shove my cock into her right then.
"Eli." She's clawing at my shoulders, fierce and desperate, her body alive and trembling. "Now. I don't want careful. I want you to wreck me. I want to be sore and bruised and leaking your cum tomorrow so I remember exactly who fucked me."
"You'll be the death of me," I growl, meaning it with every cell in my body.
I line up the thick head of my cock at her dripping entrance and push in slow, stretching her open inch by inch until I'm buried balls-deep in her tight, clenching heat.
We both shatter at the feeling with her pussy fluttering and squeezing around my shaft like a velvet fist. I go still, jaw locked, fighting the overwhelming need to pound her into the mattress, until she rolls her hips and snarls, "Move, damn it. Fuck me."
There's no gentleness left. She doesn't want it and I sure as hell don't have any.
All the dread and hunger and tomorrow's violence pours out in raw, brutal thrusts with my hands bruising her hips as I grip her, her nails raking bloody lines down my back, the bed slamming rhythmically against the wall.
Her voice breaks in my ear, begging harder, yes, fuck me deeper, telling me she's mine, her cunt pulsing around my cock with every stroke.
I answer with my mouth against her neck, biting and sucking marks into her skin: "Mine.
This pussy is mine. I'm going to come back through that door and claim you again and again. "
I slide a hand between us, my thumb circling her swollen clit in tight, slick strokes while I drive into her harder, faster, the wet slap of our bodies filling the room.
I hold back the roaring storm inside me by sheer force of will because I need to feel her come first—always her first. Her walls flutter and tighten, milking my cock as she climbs.
"That's my brave fucking girl," I pant, watching her face contort in the firelight. "Come on my cock. Squeeze me. Let me feel that pussy gush before the sun comes up."
She comes hard with my name torn from her throat, her cunt clamping down like a vice, spasming and flooding around me as her whole body shakes.
The sight of her breaking, the gift of her orgasm ripping through her, drags me over right behind her.
I slam deep one last time, burying myself to the hilt as I explode, pumping thick ropes of cum into her pulsing heat.
My face buried in her hair, her arms locked tight around the back of a man two slopes' worth of killers are coming for.
For one suspended heartbeat there's no mountain, no dawn, no threat. It’s just her, just this raw, filthy, perfect union, and the terrifying truth of having something worth fighting for again.
After, I gather her against me and pull the wool up over her bad ribs and hold her while our hearts come down off the slope together.
She presses her mouth to the scar on my shoulder, the way she did the first time, the way I think she's going to do every time we touch, and I feel her smile against my skin.
"There," she says, drowsy and sure. "Now you've got something worth coming back for. Don't you dare forget it on that hill."
"Not a chance." I press my lips to her hair and hold the weight of her like the litter line I'm never letting slip again. "Sleep now. I've got the watch."
And I mean it as much as I've ever meant anything. Which is why, when Juniper's head comes up off her paws an hour before dawn, and her low growl rolls through the dark, and I'm at the window in time to see not one light but three coming up through the trees toward the saddle, I'm almost glad.
Because the waiting's over. And waiting was the only part I was ever going to lose.