Chapter 5
Ava
My notebook tells a story I didn't assign it.
I flip back through two weeks of notes, cross-legged on Bruiser's bed in a t-shirt and socks while his scanner cycles frequencies on the desk.
The integration piece, the one my editor paid for, the one that belongs on these pages, died somewhere around page six.
Every page after the first six reads like a field study of a single subject.
Sleeps in two-hour rotations. Never more than ninety minutes uninterrupted.
Eats standing. Won't turn his back to a door.
Left horn: watchtower symbol at the base, carved deep, the oldest mark.
Right horn: seventeen marks carved at different depths.
Mix of crossed lines and closed circles.
The circles read like a tally. Years since the Emergence? Count fits. TBC.
I photographed the horn carvings yesterday while he reviewed camera feeds at the desk. Fourteen images on my phone, angled to catch the raised lines in the lamp light. He didn't turn around. He knew I took them. He let me.
The last entry sits at the bottom of today's page in handwriting messier than the rest.
The scent. Warm, heavy, sharper than musk. Saturates the apartment. Getting stronger. Concentrated in the sheets, the pillow, the hallway outside the door.
And above it, the one I almost scratched out:
His hand on my back through the kitchen door this morning. The warmth stayed an hour. Each contact the warmth holds longer than the last. What does that mean?
I close the notebook. Set it on the pillow and press my palms flat against my thighs.
Ten years profiling people for a living.
I can break down a politician's tell in forty-five minutes, read a PR deflection from the second sentence, spot the gap between what someone says and what they mean from across a diner counter.
This isn't that. Somewhere in the last two weeks I stopped profiling Bruiser and started tracking what he does to me.
His radio crackles from the desk.
Rex's voice, clipped: "Two at the Anchor. Heckland and a younger one. Showed Sal a photo. Not a brother. Woman, dark hair." A beat of static. "Matches your journalist."
My stomach drops before my brain catches up. Bruiser's on his feet, radio in hand, and for the first time since I walked into this compound he looks at me before he looks at the monitors.
They're not looking for him. They're looking for me. Whoever they are.
He doesn't need to order a lockdown. Knox sealed the compound yesterday. Bruiser adds layers: camera feeds cycling, secondary monitor on the Anchor's street, a radio call to Chain for eyes on the sedan. He doesn't raise his voice. Doesn't repeat himself.
When the radio goes quiet, I ask. "Who's Heckland?"
He sets the radio on the desk. "James Heckland.
CIA. Recruited me when I was twenty-two.
Gave me an assignment to infiltrate this club.
" He stops for a moment. "I went rogue eight years ago.
Stopped reporting. He's been trying to bring me in ever since.
" He glances at the monitor showing the Anchor's street.
"Showing your photo in a public bar—that's not how he runs things.
That's not protocol. Heckland's panicking. "
He wouldn't go on the record for me the first week I arrived. Now he hands me his whole life unprompted, and the only thing that changed is a photograph of my face on a bar top in the Rusty Anchor.
"Why are they showing my photo?"
"Because they put you here. And now they can't reach you."
I don't understand that. My editor at Pacific Northwest Monthly assigned this story.
David Harlow, who I've worked with for two years, who bought me coffee in Portland and walked me through the pitch.
Normal channels. Normal assignment. Nothing about Heckland or the CIA or whatever Bruiser is telling me connects to the freelance integration piece sitting half-written in my notebook.
I file the questions. They're the wrong ones for right now.
Because his hands are shaking.
His voice held through every word. His body didn't. He sets the radio down and his left hand opens and closes against his thigh, the shake in his fingers running on fury, not fear.
"CIA agents are in my town showing your photograph around. You want to explain that?"
"You think I'd be sitting here confused if I had an explanation? I followed an assignment. My editor gave me a story and I drove here."
"You walked in here with an assignment about the monsters here and the club I was sent to infiltrate. Your editor handed you a story that put you inside my compound. Now Heckland can't find you and he's asking locals." His jaw works. "That's not a coincidence, Ava."
"David Harlow is a magazine editor. I've worked with him for two years. He is not CIA. I don't work for the fucking CIA, I think I wouldn't know if I did."
"Then somebody is using you and you didn't bother to ask questions."
That hit me and it hurts because it might be true, and because the way he says it sounds less like an accusation and more like a man furious at himself for not seeing it coming.
But underneath the sting, the questions start stacking. David Harlow pitched me this story. If someone else put it in his hands first, I need to know who.
He turns back to the monitors but he's not seeing them.
His hands grip the edge of the desk and the wood groans under his fingers.
The muscles across his shoulders lock tight, his breathing goes shallow and fast, and something behind his eyes leaves the room.
Leaves me. Goes somewhere older than this argument, older than this compound, and whatever lives there has his whole body vibrating.
A low, grinding tension that makes the air around him feel like it could crack.
He's seven feet tall, three hundred pounds and every ounce of it has gone rigid. I should step back. The animal part of my brain that understands what a minotaur looks like when the leash slips—that part is screaming at me to give him the room.
But instead I cross the room. Take his left hand. Then his right.
"What's your real name?"
The question catches him mid-breath. His fingers tighten around mine and I see his eyes refocus on me.
"What?"
"Your mother didn't name you Bruiser. If you can accuse me of being CIA, you can tell me your real name."
"Benjamin." His voice drops. "Benjamin Walker."
I hold his fingers tighter. The tremor runs from his knuckles into my palms.
"Just breathe with me, Benjamin."
His breathing catches, and his fingers tighten around mine before he can stop them.
Then he's kissing me.
His mouth finds mine like he ran out of reasons not to. His grip pulls free, one fist catching the back of my neck, the other my hip, and the momentum takes us both backward until my shoulders hit the corkboard on the wall behind us.
Pushpins scatter. A length of red string snaps. Photo printouts shift and crinkle against my back and I don't care because his mouth opens mine and the sound he makes vibrates against my lips. Low, broken, dragged up from somewhere he's kept sealed for years.
I fist his shirt and pull him closer. The height difference makes this impossible standing, and he solves it without breaking the kiss.
His palms drop to my thighs, he lifts me off the ground one-armed, and my back presses flat against the corkboard while he braces his free hand on the wall. The plaster cracks under his palm.
I wrap my legs around his waist.
The growl that rips from his chest rolls through his ribcage into mine, so deep I feel it in my sternum, my hips, the soles of my feet. My fingers dig into his shoulders, and the muscle beneath them runs taut.
Then the purring starts.
Not the buried rumble from the other night at the desk. This one erupts, deep-chested and involuntary, rolling through his body in waves that travel through every point of contact between us. His chest flush to mine, his palms on my thighs, his hips pinning me to the wall.
I press my palm flat against his chest where the vibration runs.
His forehead drops to mine. His breathing comes ragged, his voice a half-step above a growl.
He carries me from the wall to the bed with one arm, the other sweeping my notebook to the floor.
His shirt goes over his head and I get my first look at what his clothes hide.
Broad chest tapering to a hard waist, dark skin stretched over muscle that flexes when he plants both palms on the mattress above me.
A scar cuts across his left shoulder, pale against the dark.
A second one runs along his ribs, thinner, older.
I pull my shirt off. His fingers land on my ribs, spanning from my waist to the underside of my breasts, and the restraint in it hits me harder than anything else he's done tonight. The constant check between what his body can do and what he lets it do.
"I'm not fragile. I don't break."
His grip tightens. The restraint vanishes.
He strips my shorts and underwear down my legs in one pull and his mouth follows, dragging across my hip, the crease of my thigh, the soft skin below my navel.
The purring hasn't stopped. It pulses against my skin everywhere his lips land, turning every nerve into a live wire.
My fingers twist the sheets and my back arches off the mattress as his palms pin my hips with a pressure that snaps my breath short.
His mouth reaches my pussy and I stop thinking in sentences.