Chapter 24
CASH
We came through the gate of Dominion Hall with a car full of dogs, and for the first time in my life, a fortress felt like a homecoming.
I parked in the courtyard and opened the doors, and the pack poured out into the afternoon like water finding its level.
Beans hit the ground already at a dead run, on the theory that somewhere on a property this size, there had to be a squirrel committing crimes.
Tiny followed at his amble, delighted by everything and surprised by most of it.
Banjo screamed his joy from the crate until Mags freed him, and Max—Max stepped down last, unhurried, and took up his post at my knee like he'd held it for years.
The house noticed. That's the thing about a compound full of operators: nothing arrives unobserved. Doors opened. Brothers drifted out into the sun with their wives, drawn by the oldest good news there is—dogs in the yard.
Claire came down the steps at a jog with Marcus behind her, and Banjo saw her and lost his entire mind.
He crossed that courtyard like a mortar round, and Claire went down on her knees on the stone in her good clothes to receive him, laughing, taking the full sixty pounds of him against her chest. "There he is," she kept saying, while he licked her face.
"There's my too-much boy." Marcus stood over the two of them a moment.
Then, the hard, blonde man who'd knelt by Duke's body a few hours ago got down on the stones with his wife and let a washout shepherd climb into his lap, and grinned like a kid doing it.
Here's a thing I know about men, and it's never once been wrong.
Watch a man with a dog. Rank lies, money lies, a firm handshake lies all day long.
A dog gets the truth out of a man in under a minute, because a dog doesn't care who he's supposed to be.
My new brothers passed with flying colors—Tommy already flat on his back somewhere under Beans, Charlie feeding Tiny something he shouldn't, the whole deadly lot of them gone soft in the afternoon light.
You can trust men like that with your life.
I'd trusted them with more. I'd trusted them with hers.
My father watched from the top of the steps.
He didn't come down. That wasn't his way, I was learning—Byron Dane stood at the edge of his family's happiness like a man warming his hands at a fire he'd built and didn't need to touch.
His eyes moved over the yard, the dogs, the sons, the wives, and then, they found me.
We shared a nod across all of it. Just a nod. It carried plenty.
Soon, I'd sit down with him properly. Not war business—the other thing. The mine, and what I brought back from the bottom of it, and the way he'd treated me ever after, like a man who already knew.
I'd carried that question so many years: how he'd known what his boy had seen down there when the boy had never found the words to tell him.
Maybe he'd just read it on me. Or maybe—and this was the thought I'd been turning over since the war room—maybe my father had a story of his own.
A man doesn't fake his death, build a fortress, and stare down his own government without having stood at some threshold himself.
But that was for later. Everything heavy was for later.
Dominion Hall was doing what it did best—somewhere in that house, Elias and Ryker and men I hadn't met yet were pulling the world apart thread by thread, hunting the place where Dominic Craine slept.
When they found it, I'd go to work. Until then, my orders were the same ones I'd have given anyone in my position.
Rest. Hold what you love. Let the machine run.
We went up.
They'd given me a suite on the second floor, the kind of rooms that made my one pack look like a pebble in the Pacific—a bedroom, a sitting room through an adjoining door, windows full of harbor light.
Mags kissed me once at the threshold and disappeared into the bathroom to shower the day off.
I heard the water start, and I stood in the middle of all that quiet luxury with three dogs and no idea what a man does with either.
The dogs knew. Beans and Tiny went to work on the place immediately, noses down, cataloguing every corner and table leg, a two-dog customs inspection working through the suite with their tails going.
Then, Max growled.
Low. Once. Not a threat—a correction. The kind of sound a senior man makes when the recruits have forgotten themselves. Beans and Tiny froze mid-sniff and looked at him. Max looked back, and then he looked, deliberately, at the open door to the adjoining room.
I watched it happen with something close to awe.
He walked over and gathered them the way a good sergeant gathers stragglers—a shoulder here, a nudge there, no second warning needed—and moved the both of them through the door into the sitting room. Then, he stopped in the doorway. He looked back at me.
Until that moment, Max had not left my side.
Not in the kennel, not in the car, not crossing the courtyard—glued to my knee like the post was all that held the world together.
Now, he stood in that doorway and gave me a look I could read as plain as speech, because reading him was never going to be the hard part for the two of us.
You know what you need to do, the look said. I've got the watch in here.
Then, he stepped through and joined the others.
I laughed—quietly, alone in a billionaire's suite, at the wisdom of a dog—and went and closed the adjoining door. Then, I sat down on the end of the bed with my forearms on my knees, and let the day land.
What a day. What a day. I'd woken up on the floor of grief, buried a soldier, stared down the man hunting my family, watched a broken dog come back to life in my arms, and been claimed by him in front of the woman I loved.
It was almost possible, sitting there with the water running and the light going gold on the harbor, to forget there was a threat out there at all. A patient man in a suit, somewhere in the dark, with his gloves coming off.
Let him lurk. Tonight, he could have the dark. I had everything else.
The water shut off. A few minutes later, the bathroom door opened, and Mags came out wrapped in a white robe, her hair wet and combed back, her skin still flushed from the heat. Every thought in my head went quiet at once.
She looked around. "Where are the dogs?"
I nodded at the adjoining door. "Max told the others we needed some personal time."
She laughed—then caught the look on my face and understood I wasn't entirely joking. Because I wasn't. That's exactly what had happened, and we both knew the dog well enough to believe it.
Mags glanced at the door. Deciding something. I watched her decide it.
Then, she untied the robe and let it slip off her shoulders to the floor.
The breath went out of me slow. She crossed the room to me in the gold light, unhurried, sure of herself in a way that had its own gravity, and the sight of her walking toward me did what it always did—surprised me.
Not her. Me. My body, which has held flat through every violent thing this world has thrown at it, came alive for this woman like it belonged to somebody else.
A younger man. A hungrier one. I'd spent my whole life master of it, and she undid that mastery just by crossing a room.
"How much time do we have?" she asked, low.
I didn't know. I didn't care. The honest answer was that nothing short of a bomb dropped on Dominion Hall was getting my hands off her now, and maybe not even then.
"All of it," I said.
She straddled me, her knees coming down on either side of my hips, her arms sliding around my neck. I was already painfully hard before her weight settled—aching, undone, entirely hers. I pulled her the last inch closer.
And the world outside that room could wait its turn.