Chapter 26
CASH
After, I finally took that shower. I didn't take it alone.
The bathroom was built like everything at Dominion Hall—stone and glass and water pressure that could strip paint. We stood under it together and let the day come off us both at last.
I washed her hair. She laughed at me for how seriously I took it. I told her a man should be serious about sacred work, and she went quiet and let me.
I soaped every inch of her, slow, unhurried, learning her by hand the way I'd learned her by eye in the streetlight bars of her bedroom—the wing of her shoulder blade, the dip of her spine, the scar on her knee from some childhood on some base she'd tell me about someday.
She did the same to me. Traced the map of me, the old marks and the new ones, and didn't ask about a single one. Someday, I'd tell her, anyway.
It was a long shower. It was a long shower because I could not get enough of her, and I'd quit pretending otherwise.
Every time I decided we were done, my hands disagreed and went back for more of her—her hips, her waist, the slick warmth of her against me under the spray—and she'd tip her head back and smile at the ceiling like a woman winning a bet with herself.
By the time the water went off, we were both wrinkled and warm. I was sure I'd follow her anywhere on earth for the rest of my life for the price of that smile.
I figured she was done in. It had been the longest day. I handed her a towel and took one for myself and knotted it at my waist, already thinking about the bed and eight hours and her breathing beside me.
She had other plans.
She stepped in close, still damp, and slid her arms around my waist like she wanted a hug. I gathered her in—and felt her fingers find the knot of my towel and tug it loose. It hit the floor. She looked up at me the whole way down.
Then, she went to her knees on the warm stone.
I said her name once. It came out low and wrecked.
It wasn't a protest, and she knew it wasn't. She took me in hand and then took me in full, no shyness in her, nothing careful, her eyes closing like a woman at a meal she'd been promised for years.
The breath left me in a way it has never once left me in any dangerous room on this earth.
I got a hand in her wet hair, gentle, and let her have me. She was not gentle. She was thorough and greedy and entirely in command. I stood there in a billionaire's bathroom being taken apart by the only person alive who'd ever been able to do it, my composure going the way my towel had gone.
She took me to the edge of everything and would have taken me over it. I didn't let her—not because I wanted it to stop, but because I wasn't finishing anywhere but inside her tonight. I told her so, and felt her hum her approval around me, which nearly ended the argument right there.
I lifted her off the floor. She came up laughing, damp and bare. I carried her out of the bathroom against my chest, her arms around my neck, and crossed the dark suite to the bed.
I meant to lay her down. She had other plans there, too.
The second her knees touched the mattress, she turned in my arms, and instead of settling onto her back, she went to all fours in the middle of that big bed and looked at me over her shoulder—offered herself, open, sure, wanting. Whatever thin thread of civilization I had left burned clean through.
I knelt behind her and put my mouth to her.
I took my time about it. I'd learned her taste already and wanted it again.
I worked her slow and thorough from behind until her arms shook and her breath went to pieces, until she was soaked and whimpering into the pillow, her hands fisting the sheets, my name falling out of her in fragments.
I could have stayed there an hour. I'd have counted it time well spent.
She had one more order in her.
"Cash." Ragged. Certain. A command, not a request. "Come inside me. Now."
I obeyed her. God, help me, I obeyed her—rose up and took her perfect hips in my hands and gave her every inch of me. We finished the day locked together, her spine bowed and my name in her mouth and my whole world narrowed to the woman underneath me.
When I finally poured myself into her, it felt less like an ending than a vow. Everything that's mine is yours. I'd told her that with words already. Now, I'd said it every other way I had.
We came down slow, tangled, her back against my chest, our legs woven together in a knot neither of us tried to solve.
The energy had finally gone out of both of us—all of it, the grief and the fear and the wanting, burned down at last to a warm, quiet ash—and what was left in me, holding her in the dark, was the simplest thing I know.
I was happy.
I don't say that word much. There hasn't been much cause.
But I lay in that bed with Magnolia Bennett asleep against my heart and three dogs breathing through the wall and my father alive under the same roof, and I was happy, plainly and completely, for maybe the first time since I was a boy who hadn't fallen yet.
I fell asleep without one part of me on watch. Max had the watch. I'd felt him take it.
Somewhere in the deep of it, someone knocked.
I was awake between the first knock and the second, the way I wake—all at once, no fog. I slid my arm out from under Mags without stirring her, found a robe, and padded to the door, barefoot and silent.
Brock stood in the hall, dressed for work.
He didn't say good evening. He said, "We found him."
Every quiet thing in me stood up and came to order. "Where?"
"The old Navy Yard." A grim satisfaction moved under Brock's voice.
"North Charleston. The base the Navy shut down thirty years back—most of it's rotting piers and dry docks now, but the officers' row still stands.
Big, old houses on the quiet end, federal property nobody looks at twice.
" He shook his head slow, like the nerve of it still impressed him.
I turned it over once. It was smart. It was arrogant. It told me things about Craine that three searches of his face hadn't—a man who wrapped himself in the institution because he believed the institution was his to wear.
"Do we go now," I asked, "or does it keep ‘til morning?"
"Now.”
Now was fine with me. Now was better than fine. I've done my best work in the hours when the rest of the world trusts the dark to hold.
"Five minutes," I said.
"Armory. Ground floor, east wing. I'll walk you through the toys." A ghost of a grin. "You're going to like the toys."
I closed the door and crossed back through the dark to the bed, and I did the thing you do when you love someone—I didn't let her wake to an empty room.
I sat on the edge of the mattress and put my hand on her shoulder, gentle, and she surfaced the way she does, quick and complete, a woman raised in houses where the phone ringing at night meant something.
"They found Craine," I said. Quiet. Plain. "I have to go."
I watched her take it in. And here is the measure of Magnolia Bennett, the thing I'll hold about that moment as long as I live: she didn't argue.
She didn't ask me not to, didn't ask if it had to be me, didn't hand me one ounce of her fear to carry into a night where I couldn't afford the weight.
Her father's daughter, all the way down.
She'd spent her whole childhood watching people she loved walk out doors like this one, and she knew the only gift you can give a man at that door is a clean exit.
"Okay," she said. Steady. Then, because she is also entirely herself: "Don't forget about my dad. He lands tomorrow, and if you stand up the colonel because you were out doing—" she waved a hand at all of it, the robe, the dark, the war "—whatever this is, I cannot protect you."
I chuckled. Middle of the night, on my way to a hunt, and the woman made me laugh. "Wouldn't miss it," I said. "I can't wait." And the strange thing was, I meant it.
She caught my hand and pressed her mouth to my knuckles once, hard, and let me go. That was the whole goodbye. It was exactly right.
I dressed fast and quiet—dark, practical, the clothes of my old life that had been waiting folded in my pack for a night like this. I was at the door with my hand on the latch when I stopped.
Max.
I'd nearly forgotten him, and it shames me to say it, except that forgetting only lasted the length of a heartbeat and he'd never have allowed it, anyway. I eased open the adjoining door, and he was already standing.
Not sleeping. Not startled awake. Standing, in the middle of the dark sitting room, facing the door, ears up, eyes on me—dressed for work himself in the only clothes he owns.
Beans and Tiny snored on around him in their heaps.
Max stood in the middle of them like a man who'd heard the phone ring through the wall and gotten up without being called.
Of course, he knew. Of course, he did. He'd been listening to the frequency his whole life; he'd heard the change in the house the way he'd once heard bombs sleeping under roads. Somewhere out there was work, and the work was mine, and what was mine was his.
I didn't say come. I didn't say anything. I just held the door, and he crossed the room and fell in at my knee, and we went out together into the sleeping house.
Man and dog, down the long, dark hall, moving quiet through a fortress full of family—and I'll tell you what walked with us, because I felt it plain as the floor under my feet. Not nerves. Not the cold arithmetic of a hard job. Something older and steadier than either.
Certainty. The kind I've only ever trusted when it comes up from all the way down.
Whatever was about to happen in a dead admiral's house on the edge of the water—whatever this night decided to be—it was supposed to happen, and we were supposed to be the ones walking into it, and we were going to do it the way we'd do everything from here to the end.
As one.