11. Sophie
SOPHIE
Hector's weigh-station data gives me a truck, and that gives me a town four hours north, so by afternoon Lucian and I are on a two-lane highway pretending to be a couple who buy antiques.
A refrigerated hauler with a flagged manifest is scheduled to overnight at a depot outside a place called Ferristown, and I want eyes on the depot's front operation, a farm-equipment distributor that, on paper, has no reason to lease three reinforced units a month.
Kian's people shadow the actual truck. Kurtis has a crew staged an hour back.
Lucian and I are the soft approach, the two faces that can walk into a diner and a hardware store without anyone reaching for a phone. He drives, and I navigate complaining.
"You could put some music on," I tell him. "I won't tell the pride you have feelings."
"I'm listening to the road."
"The road is not saying anything."
"It's telling me we've been behind the same gray sedan since the county line." He says it mildly, eyes forward. "Two cars back now. It let one pass to keep the gap even. That's not how people drive when they're going somewhere. That's how they drive when they're going where you're going."
I check the side mirror instead, and there, gray, patient and wrong, is another car tailing us.
"Weigh-station data's a two-way street," I say, and I hate how steady I sound. "If I can read their schedule, someone competent can wonder who's suddenly reading it."
"Someone competent did." His hands haven't tightened on the wheel. If anything he's gotten calmer, and I'm learning his calm is the most dangerous thing about him. "Hold on. Not hard. Just be ready."
He already knew about the car tailing us, and in thirty seconds, my mind rearranges my understanding of what he can do behind a wheel as thoroughly as the stairs rearranged everything else.
He loses them, a turn taken late onto a farm road, a stretch of gravel at a speed that should end us in a ditch, a hard cut behind a grain silo where he kills the engine.
We sit in sudden ringing quiet while the car goes shrieking past on the highway a quarter mile off, hunting a car that's no longer there.
"They'll circle back," he says. "We can't make Ferristown now. They'll have the depot watched and our faces flagged."
"So we don't." My heart is going like a trapped bird, and I force it to stop. "We go dark. Kian's still on the truck, the mission isn't blown, just us. Is there somewhere?"
He's already reversing down the farm road. "There's always somewhere."
We approach a cabin up a logging spur, one of Kurtis', built into a hillside so it reads as terrain from any angle that matters. No power line runs to it. No road shows it. Inside it's clean and stocked, a woodstove, a lantern, and a single bed we don't mention.
We don't dare a fire until full dark. So we sit in the last blue light with the cold coming up through the floor, and with nothing to do but wait, the walls we've both kept up all these weeks have nothing left to lean against.
"I keep thinking about that boy," I say. "Kurtis' seventeen-year-old." I pull my knees up. "I've thought numbers lead somewhere true, and it's not my job to feel it. That story stopped working about a week ago."
Lucian's shadow is across the small room, and his voice comes low.
"I've told myself a version of that for years.
Feel it later. Carry it alone. Grieve on a schedule.
" He exhales. "My father died telling me the pride comes before the man.
I built my life on obeying him. I'm starting to think he was wrong, or at least that he was lonely in a way I mistook for strength. "
"You're allowed to think he was wrong and still love him."
"Am I? Nobody's ever told me that." He says it lightly, but it isn't light, and the dark makes us both braver.
"You do that. You say the thing directly.
Do you know how rare that is around me? Everyone I've known since I was a boy calibrates every sentence for the Alpha.
You never have. You threw a dinner roll at my back the first night. "
"Your attitude insulted me."
He laughs, quiet and real, and the sound of it does something to the distance between us.
We've been circling this for weeks, the lingering looks I refused to acknowledge, the moments where we stayed close, the terrace where I felt him decide not to close the distance and was disappointed that he didn't. Out here, with no pride watching and potentially being found, the circling has nowhere to go.
"Can I tell you something," he says, "and have you not audit it?"
"I make no promises."
"I stopped being afraid of you being right about me.
" He shifts closer, just enough that I feel the warmth of him against the cabin's cold.
"What scares me now is how much I've started needing you.
I've protected everyone I've ever cared about from a careful distance.
I don't know how to want someone standing right next to me.
I never learned it. There was never anyone I trusted enough to try. "
I could deflect. It's my whole toolkit, the sharp thing that keeps people at arm's length. I've used it my entire life to make sure I leave first, that I never need anything, and I face everything alone because alone can't be taken from you, but I don't.
"I've done the same, never needed anyone," I say. "It's exhausting, Lucian. I'm so tired of being strong. Then you handed me the keys to everything and trusted me completely, and I didn't know what to do with it, because nobody's ever…" I stop. Start again, simpler. "I just want to be next to you."
His palms find my face, careful, giving me every chance to pull back. They're warm along my jaw, and mine is fisted in his shirt without deciding it. He kisses me without hesitating, and we both stop circling, weeks of held breath let go at once.
I shove him back against the rough-hewn table, wood creaking under his weight.
His mouth stays on mine, hungry, teeth catching my lip.
My hands yank his shirt up, and my palms slide over the hard planes of his chest, the heat of him searing through.
He grows under my touch with a low growl vibrating against my tongue.
I break the kiss to drag the fabric over his head and toss it aside.
His bare skin is hot, marked with faint scars that catch under my fingers as I trace him.
He spins us, and pins me to the table edge.
My jacket hits the floor first, and then his hands work my shirt open, buttons scattering, then shove the material off my shoulders.
Cool air hits my skin a second before his mouth does, open, wet, dragging down the line of my throat to my breasts.
He yanks the cups of my bra down, doesn't bother with the clasp, and sucks one nipple hard.
I arch, fists in his hair, the sharp pull of his teeth sending a jolt straight between my legs.
His free hand works my other breast, thumb rough over the peak until I'm panting against the top of his head.
I reach between us, finding his cock straining his jeans.
He growls when I squeeze slightly, deeper when I pop the button and shove the denim down to free him.
Thick, hot, and wanting. I stroke him once, twice, thumb circling the tip.
He bites my shoulder, not hard to break skin but enough that it makes me gasp.
His hand drops, yanks my pants and underwear down in one rough motion.
I kick them free, bare now from the waist down, pussy already aching.
He lifts me onto the table, spreads my thighs wide with his hips.
Two fingers slide inside, finding me soaked.
He groans at the feel as he pushes them inside, curling, working me open while his mouth returns to my breast. I rock against his hand, chasing the pleasure, the wet sound of it loud in the quiet cabin.
His thumb brushes my clit, and I jerk. He starts to circle it hard, reading my body's movements to know what I like.
Heat builds fast, tight in my belly. I dig my nails into his shoulders, breathing ragged.
He adds a third finger, stretches me, fucks them in and out until I'm screaming.
The edge rushes up, and I come hard around his fingers, thighs clamping, a broken sound torn from my throat.
He's so hard, his cock heavy against my thigh.
I shove his jeans the rest of the way down, no more waiting.
He grips my hips, drags me closer, and notches the head of his cock against my pussy.
One thrust and he's buried deep, stretching me full, the burn perfect.
I lock my legs around him, and he pulls back and drives forward again.
The table scrapes the floor below, his strength visible as he fucks me.
Each stroke hits deep, the thick shaft dragging over every sensitive spot.
My hands scramble for purchase on the wood behind me.
He leans over me, one palm braced by my head, the other gripping my hip hard like it will bruise.
His mouth finds mine again, open and rough, matching the pace of his hips.
I meet every thrust, rolling up to take him deeper. The cabin air is cool but we're burning. He shifts the angle, hits a spot that makes my vision spark. I dig my heels into his back,
"Faster." I moan.
He gives it, pounding into me, the slap of skin loud.
My pussy clenches around him with every stroke.
He growls against my mouth, the sound half-animal, and I feel him swell thicker.
One of his hands slides between us, finds my clit again, rubs tight circles while he fucks me without slowing.
The second orgasm hits harder, ripping through me, walls pulsing around his cock, and my body uncontrollably leaning into his thrusts.
He doesn't stop, he watches me as he fucks me through it until I'm physically shaking, then pulls free to flip me onto my stomach over the table.
He spreads me open with both hands and sinks back in from behind, deeper this way. I push back onto him, greedy. His grip tightens on my hips, and I grab the edge. He sets a relentless pace, each thrust forcing a moan out of me.
"Ah, fuck…" He groans.
The table digs into my thighs, and I reach back, grabbing his wrist, holding on. He leans over my back, chest hot against me, mouth at my ear.
"Take it," he rasps, and I do, pushing back harder.
His cock drags over that perfect spot again and again. The rush of heat and pulsing travels through me, and I come a third time, quieter, body locking up around him. My mouth wide open in a silent scream.
He follows, burying himself and pulsing hard, flooding me.
His hips stutter through it, grinding deep until his orgasm slows.
We stay like that a moment, breathing hard, his weight a solid press along my back.
He eases out carefully, and I attempt to straighten slowly with my legs unsteady.
He turns me, pulls me against his chest, arms wrapping tight.
No words, just the thud of his heart under my ear and the residual tremor in both our bodies. My forehead rests against his shoulder.
Outside the night stays dark and quiet. Inside, the only sound is our slowing breath and the faint creak of the floorboards under our bare feet. He keeps one hand low on my back, thumb stroking idle circles, anchoring us both while the heat fades into something quieter, steadier.
Morning arrives with us by the woodstove, finally lit, the danger of last night burned down to gray light through the one window.
Lucian's watching me the careful way he watches everything, except the guard's gone out of it. I've spent time decoding that face. This morning there's nothing to decode.
"We should raise Kian," I say, and don't move.
"In a minute." He hands me coffee made on a camp burner, bitter and perfect. "Sophie. Whatever happened last night, I'm not going to pretend it back into a working relationship. I'd rather remember than agree it didn't happen."
"Neither do I." It surprises me how easily it comes. "But I'm not softening on you. I'll still call your bad ideas, bad ideas."
"I'd notice if you stopped. I'd assume you were replaced." The corner of his mouth moves. "That's the part I didn't expect. It doesn't make you less useful to me. It makes you more."
turn the mug slowly in my hands, letting his words settle.
"Partners, then," I say. "The real kind."
"The real kind." He pulls me in. "Now let's go find their truck."