Epilogue #2
Just my name, in that low, even voice that had reached into me across a parking lot a whole lifetime ago and never once let go.
He held my hands in his enormous ones, and Max came and sat down against his leg, upright and watchful, on guard.
Cash looked at me like I was the only thing in the whole golden world worth looking at.
"I told you the leaving was done," he said.
"In a fish camp, before I had any right to promise you anything.
I've spent every day since making it true.
I'm not a man who runs anymore. I'm a man who stays.
And I've stayed long enough now to know there's not one single day of the rest of my life I want to spend not married to you.
" His jaw worked, and for the first time since I'd known him, the unbreakable man's voice shook.
"I have walked to the edge of the worst thing there is and looked at it and come back, and I came back to you.
I'll always come back to you. Marry me, Mags.
Let me spend the whole rest of it coming home to you. "
And he opened his hand.
It was my grandmother's ring.
I knew it the instant I saw it—the old rose-cut stone, the worn gold band, the ring my grandmother had worn until the day she died and my mother had kept in a velvet box I'd been shown exactly twice in my life, like a relic, like a promise.
My father had carried it down from Georgia.
My beloved grandmother's ring, the one that had been in our family longer than any of us had been alive, and my father had given it to this man—had looked at Cash Dane, taken his measure the way he took every man's measure, and decided he was worthy of a thing our family held precious.
I looked up at my dad and he was crying, my unbendable father, standing beside my mother with tears running down into his gruff smile, nodding at me, yes, yes, this one, I checked, he'll do.
"Yes," I said. I was already crying, we all were, the whole garden a mess of fierce, dangerous people undone by the sight of it. "Yes. God, yes. Come home to me. I've been waiting."
He slid my grandmother's ring onto my finger where it fit like it had been made for me across a hundred years.
He kissed me, and the garden erupted—the brothers roaring, the women crying, Banjo barking his fool head off, my father crushing my mother against his side, Byron watching his son with a look I'll never forget.
And Max stood up from where he'd sat against Cash's leg, and let out one single, deep bark, once, like a benediction, like a soldier calling the thing done.
Then, he went right back to his slow, watchful circuit of the people he'd decided were his to guard.
Later, when the light had gone violet and the food was mostly gone and Joy had fallen asleep on a garden swing with Micah's arm around her, Cash pulled me down onto the wide bench beside him, my grandmother's ring catching the last of the light, Max settling at our feet with a groan.
"I have to tell you something," he said, quiet, so only I could hear.
"It's not going to be all garden and quiet.
You know that. Craine's still out there.
He ran and we're going to find him—Elias hasn't slept a full night since, my dad’s turning over every stone there is.
It could be a long road. It could get dark again before it gets light.
" He turned my hand over in his and looked at the ring on it.
"I need you to know what you're marrying into.
All the way in. The way you always look at everything—all the way down. "
"I know exactly what I'm marrying into," I said.
And I did. I'd known since the moment I ran my eyes over a wall of soldiers and refused to believe the truth was too big to hold.
"A family that runs toward the thing everybody else runs from.
A man who walks into the dark for the people he loves and comes back out of it.
" I laid my head on his shoulder, careful of the scar, and looked at the bronze dog holding his line in the gathering dusk, and at the living one holding his at our feet.
"Whatever's coming, Cash. Whoever Craine is, wherever he's hiding.
We'll face it the way this whole family faces everything. "
"Yeah?" His arm came around me. "And how's that?"
"Together," I said. "Nobody gets left. Nobody comes home alone." I felt him smile against my hair. "I learned that from some very good dogs."
Max lifted his gray-flecked head at the word, checked us both over, decided we were secure, and lowered it again with a sigh that went the whole length of him.
The watch was covered. It always would be.
And under a bronze soldier and a violet sky, in a garden his brothers built out of love while we were busy surviving, surrounded by people we belonged to, I leaned into the man I'd waited my whole guarded life for—the man who stayed, the man who came home, the man who'd finally, finally taught me how to stop waiting at the gate and simply walk through the door.
The party wound down slow, the way good ones do. The brothers and their women drifted off into the dark in twos, headlights swinging away. My parents took the guest room, my mother's hand in my father's on the stairs. At last, it was just us, and the dogs, and a house that was ours.
Cash came up behind me at the kitchen window with his arms sliding around me and his mouth at my throat, careful of nothing anymore, healed enough now to prove it. I felt the slow burn of him light up every dark and waiting thing I had.
"Take me to bed," I said, and turned my grandmother's ring on my finger, and turned in his arms. "Husband-to-be."
He did. He carried me down the hall of my own crooked house like I weighed nothing, like I was the one thing he'd been built to hold, Max sighing and settling across the bedroom doorway to stand his watch. The door clicked shut behind us, and the rest of the world fell away.
In the dark, Cash set me on my feet only long enough to peel my dress over my head, his hands reverent and rough at once, tracing the lines of my body like he was memorizing every inch he'd almost lost. I pushed his shirt off his shoulders, fingertips skating over the raised scars across his chest and ribs—marks of survival, of coming back to me.
He hissed at the touch but didn't pull away.
Instead, he lifted me again, laid me down on the bed, and came over me, all heat and solid weight and that unbreakable hunger in his eyes.
He kissed me deep and slow, tongues tangling, until I was arching up into him, needy and open.
His mouth moved lower—throat, breasts, the soft valley of my stomach—sucking and licking until my fingers twisted in his hair and I was gasping his name.
When he settled between my thighs, spreading me with broad palms, his tongue found my clit with devastating patience.
He licked and sucked, working me until I shattered hard around him, thighs shaking against his ears.
I was still trembling when he rose up, shedding the last of his clothes.
His cock was heavy and flushed, jutting against his stomach, the head already slick.
He stroked himself once, eyes locked on mine, then notched at my entrance and pushed in—inch by thick inch—stretching me open in that perfect, burning way that made me moan into his mouth.
Fully seated, he stilled, forehead pressed to mine, breathing ragged.
"Fuck, baby," he whispered, voice wrecked. "So perfect. So mine."
Then, he moved. Slow rolls of his hips at first, dragging against every sensitive spot inside me, building that deep, coiling heat.
I wrapped my legs around his waist, heels digging into his back, urging him deeper.
His pace quickened—harder, faster—skin slapping, the bed creaking beneath us.
One hand pinned my wrist above my head; the other gripped my hip, tilting me so he could grind against my clit with every thrust. Sweat slicked our bodies.
His scars brushed my breasts with every stroke.
I came again, clenching around him, crying out as pleasure ripped through me.
He didn't stop. Flipping me onto my stomach, he pulled my hips up and drove back into me from behind, one hand fisted in my hair, the other reaching around to rub tight circles over my swollen clit.
Deeper this way, feral and possessive, his growls mixing with my whimpers.
I pushed back to meet him, lost in the raw rhythm, until he stiffened behind me with a guttural groan, pulsing hot and deep as he came, filling me.
We collapsed together, tangled and breathless.
But he wasn't done. Later, in the quiet hours, he took me again—slow and thorough this time, face to face, every stroke a promise.
His mouth on my neck, my breasts, my lips.
Fingers laced. Eyes open. No walls left.
Just skin, heat, love, and the kind of release that sinks all the way into your bones.
I let myself be, for the rest of my life, exactly where I'd always been afraid to be.
All the way in.
Home.