Chapter 22
CLINT
They wouldn't let me leave on foot.
I tried. I got as far as the courtyard with every intention of walking out those iron gates and finding the harbor road, working the day out of my body a mile at a time. Tommy caught me at the steps, looked at me like I'd proposed swimming home, and put a key in my hand.
"You're family," he said. "Family drives."
The thing at the bottom of the steps was a Maserati the color of wet slate, and it had more horses in it than half of Texas.
I'm a walking man. I'd defend it in court.
But there's a thing nobody tells you about a walking man, which is that he loves a wheel the way a sailor loves a porch.
I came up driving ranch trucks with three hundred thousand miles on them and steering play you could measure in inches.
The first time I put my foot down in that Italian animal and felt it gather up under me like a cutting horse, I laughed out loud, alone, at nothing, with the harbor going by beside me in sheets of light.
Two reasons I left Dominion Hall.
The first was plain. There was nothing for me to do there. The machine was hunting Craine—screens and signals and men who did that work better than I ever would. My job would come when there was ground to cover. Until they found him, I was furniture in a war room.
The second reason had a name.
I needed to see Sasha. Not wanted—needed, and I'd quit arguing with the word somewhere on the drive. A man finds out that his father is alive, his family is a battalion, and his own blood was drawn up in a government file before he was born—and the one place in the world his feet want to take him is a condo on the water where a woman waits. I drove toward her with my whole chest and didn’t examine it, because I already knew what the examination would find.
Her block came up quiet in the late light.
The beach truck was gone. I marked that before I'd parked—no jacked-up pickup, no cooler, no board shorts. For half a second, something cold went through me.
Then, I saw the Miata.
It was parked across from her building with its top down, a Mazda from the nineties, faded red gone to rose.
In it sat an old woman with silver hair and reading glasses and a paperback folded open on the wheel.
She had a sweet tea in the cupholder and a church fan on the dash, and she looked like she'd grown there.
Like the car had been poured around her.
Like she was Charleston itself, sitting out front, taking the air.
She glanced up at me when I crossed the street. The way any old woman glances at any passerby—mild, incurious, already going back to her page.
And I knew.
I couldn't have written the report on how I knew.
The glance was flawless. But it had weighed me, and filed me, and dismissed me as friendly, all in the time it took to turn a page.
There's exactly one kind of person who can do that through reading glasses.
The beach boys had rotated off, and the next shift was a grandmother in a convertible. She was better than they were.
After a day of billions—billions, some fraction of which was apparently mine now, a thought I'd put on a shelf to look later—the notion that my family employed lethal grandmothers didn't even raise my pulse. I gave her a nod she pretended not to see, and went up the steps, and buzzed.
"Yes?" Sasha's voice, through the little speaker, careful and bright and built.
"It's me."
The silence lasted half a breath, and then the built voice fell off hers entirely.
"Clint." The relief came through that cheap intercom like water through a burst pipe. The door lock buzzed before she'd finished my name.
I took the elevator. I watched the numbers climb and my heart climbed with them, same as the first time, and I thought, that's not going to stop happening. Fine. Noted.
She was in her doorway when the elevator opened.
Barefoot, hair loose, standing in the hall with her arms already lifting.
We came together in the middle of the corridor and collided.
I got my arms around her and picked her up off the floor and she wrapped me up, legs and arms and face buried in my neck.
I stood there in a hallway holding the whole warm weight of her while something in my chest reset itself like a bone going back in its socket.
She didn't ask.
That was the thing. She had spent a day behind two locks and no word since.
She had every right on earth to demand the report the second she saw me.
She just held on. She held on and breathed against my neck and let me be back before she asked me to be anything else.
I felt myself go further down into whatever I was falling into.
A woman who has spent her life reading people knows the difference between a man who needs to be questioned and a man who needs to be held. She'd read me from a doorway.
I carried her inside. She reached back and threw both locks without letting go of me.
We ended up on her sofa, her curled against me, and I told her what I could.
Not all of it. Trueborn wasn't mine alone to hand over, and half the rest was still settling in me like silt in a stirred pond. But I told her the spine of it. That the trouble was real, and was a man, and that my family was handling it.
And I told her the thing that mattered.
"My father's alive."
She went still at my side.
"He was standing in the doorway of that house when I got there. He's been alive my whole life. There are reasons, and the reasons are good ones—better than good, they're the kind that take a man apart—and I'll give you all of it, someday. But he's alive, Sasha. I hugged my father today."
She sat up and took my face in both hands. Her eyes were wet, and she looked at me for a long moment.
"Oh, Clint," she said. "I'm so happy for you."
She meant it. There was something else moving behind her eyes, too—something that looked almost like recognition, like a woman checking a thing off a list I couldn't see.
But the happiness was the whole front of her, and it was for me, undiluted.
I hadn't known until that second how much I'd needed to hand this day to someone and have them simply be glad.
"There's a lot more," I said. "More than I understand yet.
It's a big family, bigger than I knew, and there's history in it that's going to take me a while to walk.
" I turned her hand over in mine. "But I want you to meet them.
For real. Not across a hotel counter. At Dominion Hall, at a table, as—" I let the sentence find its own end, "—as mine. I want my brothers to meet you."
I braced.
I knew what I was asking. She'd built a vow out of watching that family's wake come across her marble.
She'd told me to my face she didn't trust Dominion Hall, and the honest half of me expected the walls to come up—the built voice, the let me think about it, the professional distance sliding into place.
She nodded.
"I'd love to meet them," she said. Simple as that. Then, her chin came up, and something sparked across her face that had nothing professional in it anywhere. "But first."
She stood up off the sofa, crossed her arms, took the hem of her top, and pulled it off over her head.
Her hair came down out of it and settled. She stood in her living room, bare from the waist up, and dropped the shirt on the floor without folding it—without folding it, this woman—and looked at me like a landowner surveying an acquisition.
"First, I'm going to have you before you leave again."
The passion coming off her was almost too much to stand in. I'd seen her want before—slow, unfolding, permission-shaped. This was different. This was a woman who had spent a day learning she could lose things, deciding what she was going to do about it, and what she was going to do about it was me.
She came at me. I met her halfway.
We collided for the second time in an hour, and this one had teeth.
Her mouth crashed into mine and her hands were already under my shirt, dragging it up.
I broke the kiss long enough to haul it over my head and then she was back, pressing me down into the sofa cushions, climbing astride me, her breasts against my chest and her fingers in my hair pulling my head back so she could get at my throat.
She kissed me there hard enough to leave word.
I got my hands full of her—her back, her hips, the sweet, heavy curve of her ass—and she rolled against where I was already iron behind my jeans.
She made a sound of pure satisfaction, like a woman confirming inventory.
"Off," she said, working my belt. "All of it. Now."
Her rules. I lifted my hips and we wrestled my jeans gone, and then, I flipped her.
She yelped and laughed as her back hit the cushions. The laugh died in her throat when I stripped her jeans and panties down her legs in one long pull and settled over her, taking her wrists, pinning them soft above her head. Her eyes flared and went dark. Her whole body arched up into me.
"My turn first," I said.
I went down her.
Her throat. Her breasts—no patience in me for the long survey; I took her nipple deep and sucked until she cried out and hooked a leg over my back.
Down the soft of her belly. Then, I put her thighs over my shoulders and my mouth on her, and she was already soaked, already swollen, already halfway to gone.
She tasted like heat and salt and want. I licked into her hard and flat, no teasing anywhere in it.
She grabbed my hair with both hands and rode my mouth, hips rolling, voice climbing, filthy and gorgeous and loud in her own living room with gold light going long across us both.
She broke fast and hard, shaking, my name cracking in half in her mouth.
Then, she hauled me up by the hair, still trembling, and shoved me over and down—her strength surprising me. She went down my body with her hair dragging across my stomach and took my cock in her mouth.
No slow this time. She took me deep and worked me with her hands twinned to her mouth, wet and tight and relentless, her eyes coming up the length of me.
I watched her and swore at her ceiling and gripped the sofa cushion until a seam gave somewhere.
When I got close—fast, embarrassingly fast, she'd built me a hair trigger in days—she felt it and pulled off with a slick sound and climbed me, knees planting either side of my hips.
"Not like that," she said, breathless, wrecked, radiant. "Inside me. I want you inside me when you—"
She reached down and took me in hand and sank onto me in one long stroke.
We both went loud.
She rode me with her hands planted on my chest and her head thrown back, setting a pace that had nothing merciful in it, grinding down, taking what she wanted. I held her hips and met her, thrust for thrust, and the sofa talked.
When her rhythm started to stutter, I sat up into her, wrapped her legs around me, got my arms under her and stood—she gasped, clutched, laughed against my mouth—and I laid her down on the rug in front of the big window.
I drove into her there on the floor, deep and hard, her heels in my back, her nails scoring my shoulders, both of us past language.
She came again with her whole body, clenching around me in long pulls. It dragged me to the edge and over—I buried myself to the root and let go, pulsing into her, her name tearing out of me, her arms locking me down against her like she meant to keep every ounce of it.
We lay tangled on her rug, breathing like we'd run somewhere far.
Her fingers moved slow through my hair. My face was in her neck and her heartbeat was coming down under my mouth.
The whole day—the courtyard, the doorway, the war room, the platoon of brothers, the father—settled over me at once, and settled into something, into place, into a shape with her at the center of it.
I lifted my head and looked at her.
Her face in the low light. Wrecked and soft and open, hair everywhere, eyes finding mine and staying.
"I love you," I said.
It came out the way true things come out of me—plain, level, no running start. I hadn't planned it and I didn't dress it. A man who has spent his life leaving knows better than to sit on the one thing worth saying.
Her breath caught. Her eyes went over, finally, after all the times she'd pulled them back from the edge—one tear, sliding sideways into her hair, and she let it go. She let me see it.
"I love you, too," she said.
Then, her mouth curved, slow and wicked, and her hand slid down between us.
"And if that's the case," she said, wrapping her fingers around me, working me slow, and I was already stirring for her, already coming back to life in her hand like there'd never been a finish, "then I'm going to get my fill of you. Whenever I can. Starting now."
She stroked me hard again with the harbor lights on her skin and her eyes never leaving mine.
Then, she guided me back inside her, and pulled me down, and took her fill.