Chapter Seven #2
The laptop has been crushed, the hard drive has a hole in it like someone shot it, and my notes are torn to shreds. Ten days of work. Every photograph, every measurement, every observation—gone.
I sit down on the front step of the cottage because my legs have decided they’re done.
Sabaak pushes his head into my lap, and I put both arms around him, press my face into his fur, and just breathe for a minute.
I hear Wyatt behind me, talking to the officer in a low voice, and then his hand settles on my shoulder, warm and steady.
I don’t cry. Not yet. I’m too wrung out for it.
The officer takes Monteith and his associate into custody—they’ll be held until police can arrive from the mainland.
People begin to clear out slowly, the way they do when the emergency has passed and the night is coming on.
Acca appears at some point, which doesn’t surprise me; news travels fast on a thirty-person island.
She takes one look at my face, then at Wyatt’s, and makes a decision.
“Come on, yungaq,” she says to me, using the Aleut word gently. “You’ll stay at the inn tonight. You need rest, and this cottage needs to breathe.” Her eyes cut to Wyatt over my head—a whole conversation in a glance. “I’ll bring her back in the morning.”
I look at Wyatt. His jaw is tight, the muscles working. He gives a single nod.
I want to argue. I want to stay. But Acca is right—the cottage is a crime scene, technically, and the officer needs space to finish his work. I need to think clearly about what I’m going to do about a senate presentation in four days with no research.
I squeeze Wyatt’s hand once. He squeezes back, harder, and doesn’t let go for a long moment.
“Morning,” he says. It’s a promise.
Acca takes me down the hill. I look back once and see Wyatt standing in the open doorway of the cottage, arms crossed, watching us go.
Then I see him turn back inside, and I know he’s alone with the broken frames and the gutted cushions and the only place in the world that still holds his parents—and something in my chest aches for him in a way that has nothing to do with my stolen research.
***
Wyatt comes for me in the morning, as promised. He’s at the inn before I’ve finished my coffee, Sabaak at his heel. There’s something different in his face—something quieter, more settled, like a decision he made alone last night and is done reconsidering.
He doesn’t say much. He takes my bag. We drive back up the hill in the early light.
When we step back into the cottage—tidier now, the worst of the chaos cleared away, the photographs back on their shelf, though one frame is cracked and held together with tape—I feel the weight of the last day lift just slightly.
We have one day left.
We spend it working. He helps me reconstruct what I can from memory and the cloud backup my laptop had partially synced before it was destroyed.
It isn’t much—fragments of notes, a handful of photographs, the audio recordings I’d sent to my own email as they were made—but it’s more than nothing, and something about sitting side by side at his kitchen table, piecing it back together, settles me more than any amount of reassurance could.
That evening, I stand at the window and look at the water going copper in the late light, and I know I have to leave tomorrow. The police arrive at first light. I need to be on that plane.
Wyatt comes up behind me. His arms come around my waist, and his chin drops to the top of my head, and we stand there for a long time, watching the light change on the water, not saying anything.
“I’ll come back,” I say finally. “After the meeting. If you want me to.”
He turns me around. Those hazel eyes are steady on mine—no deflection, no retreat into the gruffness he hides behind when something costs him. “I want you to,” he says. “But we’ll talk about it after. When you’re not standing in front of a senate committee in four days.”
“I’m scared I’m going to fail them.”
“You won’t.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I know you.” He cups my face in both hands, tilts it up.
“I’ve been watching you work for ten days.
You know these animals. You know this island.
That’s not nothing—and whatever’s left of your research is enough for someone who knows what she’s talking about.
” A pause. His thumb traces my cheekbone.
“You didn’t come all the way out here to fail. ”
I close my eyes. Breathe him in. The cottage is quiet around us, the island going to dusk outside, and at this moment—his hands on my face, his voice certain in a way mine hasn’t been all day—is something I want to press between pages and keep.
“Stay with me tonight,” I say.
He answers by pressing his mouth to mine.
This is different from before.
Every other time has had urgency in it—need, heat, something unspoken driving it forward faster than either of us could think.
This is slow. This is his hands sliding my shirt over my head and setting it aside like it matters where it lands.
His mouth at my temple, my throat, the curve of my shoulder—not rushing toward anything, just learning me again, like he wants to memorize what he’s about to lose for a week.
I pull him closer, not because I can’t help myself but because I choose to. Because tomorrow I leave, and tonight I want every last moment of him I can hold.
He lays me down and takes his time undressing me the rest of the way, his eyes moving over me in the low light with an expression that makes my chest ache.
When I reach for him, he lets me pull his shirt off, and I drag my hands over the hard planes of his chest and stomach, feeling the muscle shift under my palms, watching his jaw tighten with the effort of keeping his pace.
“Sylvie.” My name in his mouth, low and rough.
“Don’t stop,” I say. “Don’t you dare stop.”
He doesn’t.
He kisses down my throat and over my breasts, his beard a soft drag against my skin as his mouth closes over my nipple.
I arch into him with a whimper, my fingers sliding into his hair, and he takes his time there too—tongue and lips and the faint scrape of teeth until I’m trembling and pulling at him, needing more.
When he finally moves down my stomach and settles between my thighs, I’m already aching. He looks up at me once, those hazel eyes dark and steady, and then puts his mouth on me.
I sob.
He’s unhurried. Long, slow strokes of his tongue through my folds, circling my clit without quite giving me the pressure I’m begging for with my hips.
He pins me down with one large hand spread flat on my stomach when I try to roll against his face and takes his time like he has all night, like tomorrow isn’t coming, like this island and this bed and the two of us are the only things in the world.
“Wyatt, please—”
He hums against me, and the vibration alone pulls a broken cry from my throat.
Then he seals his mouth around my clit and sucks, soft at first, then harder, working me with his tongue until my thighs are shaking on either side of his head.
My fingers are fisted in his hair, and the orgasm crests so slowly it’s almost unbearable—then crashes through me all at once, wave after wave, my back arching off the bed as I cry out his name into the quiet cottage.
He kisses the inside of my thigh while I come back to myself, his beard a gentle rasp against sensitive skin. Then he moves up my body, and I reach for him, wrapping my hand around his cock and stroking slowly, watching his eyes close and his breath go ragged.
“Come here,” I say.
He settles between my thighs, and I guide him to my entrance. We both go still for a moment when he presses in—that first slow stretch that I feel all the way through me—his forehead dropping to mine, my exhale matching his.
Then he moves.
Slow and deep, his body over mine, his weight a comfort rather than a demand.
I wrap my legs around him and pull him closer.
He obliges, burying himself to the hilt and rocking into me with a steady rhythm that builds heat without urgency.
I feel every stroke. I feel his hands in my hair, his mouth at my jaw, the catch of his breath against my cheek when I tighten around him.
“Look at me,” he says quietly.
I do. Those hazel eyes hold mine in the low light. Something passes between us that neither of us puts into words—something that doesn’t need them, that we’ve been carrying since somewhere around Day Three and will keep carrying long after I board that plane tomorrow.
It doesn’t rush. It builds slowly and true, and when I finally tip over the edge, I do it with my arms around his neck and my face pressed to his throat, his name a whisper instead of a cry.
He follows me with a low groan, his hips pressing deep and stilling as he spends himself inside me, his arms coming tight around my back.
We don’t move for a long time afterward. Because tomorrow I leave, and tonight I want every last moment of him I can hold.
I don’t cry. But it’s close, in the best way—the kind of close that means something real is happening, that this isn’t something you just set down and walk away from.
I will come back here. I will come back to him. Whatever the senate decides. Whatever it costs.
I fall asleep still thinking it, his arms around me, the island quiet outside.