Holt
He sends for me again in the early evening, and this time I come alone.
I am standing in the middle of the study, not against the wall, and that is the first thing wrong.
Tonight my father didn't let me disappear into the paneling.
"Come stand where I can see you."
I came, because some habits outlive the reasons for them, and I am still finding out which ones.
"You defended her." Gideon doesn't look up from the desk. He turns one page of the ledger in front of him, unhurried, like the sentence can wait on his schedule instead of mine. "In front of me. In my own house."
"Yes."
"You are the one son I never had to worry about wanting things.
" He says it slow, like a man laying stone.
"Knox wants the ranch. Wants Maren and said so in front of both sets of parents like a man who'd stopped caring who heard it.
Sage wants to matter to somebody who isn't me.
Even your mother wants her garden and her silence and whatever she buries in both.
" His hand goes flat on the desk. "You never wanted anything.
That was the whole use of you. A man with no wanting in him doesn't get talked out of his post."
"I heard you."
"You heard me and you're still standing there like I handed you a compliment. I am telling you what you were for, Holt. Past tense, because you've gone and ruined the present one."
Standing at the peak of a mountain with wind reminding me I was on top of the world.
The high lakes I used to backpack into alone before anybody thought to ask why a kid would rather sleep above the treeline than in his own bed.
A woman who put her hand on my pulse in a snowstorm and didn't flinch at what she found there.
I don't say any of it. Arguing is for men who think the other side is listening.
"Anyone who touches her answers to me." I report it like a fence line down. Flat, no weight loaded into the words because the words don't need it. "Doesn't matter whose payroll they're on. Doesn't matter whose name is on the account. That includes anyone in this house."
His jaw goes tight, one flex and release. I watch him understand it half a second late, same as a man clocks a round leaving the chamber after he'd already decided he was safe.
"That's a threat."
"It's a fact. I don't threaten. You taught me that."
The clock on the mantel ticks through ten full seconds before he answers. When he does, his voice has gone somewhere I've never heard it go, not louder, just further away.
"Then you're out from under whatever this family owed you," he says.
"Effective tonight. Whatever protection came with the name, whatever purpose, consider it withdrawn.
You'll keep the house. You put the timber up yourself, two winters of it, and I'm not petty enough to pretend that land under it doesn't still run through my books. "
"Understood."
One word. I gave him that exact word once already, in this study, the night she landed. I let him hear the echo and don't explain why.
Then I leave. No triumph in it, because there's nothing here to win, and a man doesn't celebrate finding out the floor was never load-bearing.
The drive to the Riverview takes eighteen minutes, and every mile of it is the same three words on a loop: she said no.
Six figures squared on my father's blotter this morning, and she didn't blink.
Headlights carving a tunnel through dark that doesn't care what I just lost. Somewhere past the Sullivan gate I catch myself running terrain like Gideon taught me, angles, cover, who's watching, and I shut it down cold.
Not tonight. Tonight there's only the truck, the road, and a door I haven't knocked on yet.
She's standing in it when I pull in, badge nowhere on her, hair loose, one hand braced on the frame like she already knew the sound of my engine before I cleared the turn.
"They pulled my clearance an hour ago." She says it flat, the register she uses when the fact is too big to dress up. "Tom's people. Administrative leave, they're calling it, which is a word for exactly nothing. I'm not federal tonight. I'm a woman with a gun she's not currently licensed to carry."
"I'm not a Blackwater tonight. Not the kind that means anything."
We stand in a doorway with the porch light throwing both our shadows long across the gravel, and neither of us says the rest of it out loud, because it doesn't need saying.
She lost the badge that made her someone the Bureau could point at a problem and trust to solve it. I lost the name that made me useful to a man who never once asked what I wanted, only what I could do.
Eleven days ago, those two things would have made us enemies standing on opposite sides of a fence line. Tonight, they're just two people standing in the cold with nothing left to answer to but each other.
The quiet in that is the kind that comes after a storm finally blows itself out instead of before one starts.
"I keep waiting to feel like I lost something," she says, quiet now, no badge-voice left in it at all. "I don't. That's the part I can't explain to anybody who isn't standing right here."
"I've spent two years being the tool my father sharpened whenever he needed cutting done.
Tonight he put me down." I look at her, really look, the porch light catching the honey in her eyes, same as the first night I ever saw her without the sunglasses on.
"I don't feel dulled by it. I feel like I finally got to choose what I'm for. "
"And what's that?"
"You already know."
She doesn't answer that with words. She doesn't need to.
Her hand comes up first. Not a question this time. She fists it in my shirt, right over the scroll she's already memorized by feel. She pulls, and I go where she pulls me, over the threshold and into the room.
"Talk," she says.
One word. The same weight I handed my father across a desk eleven days ago, and now I'm the one taking the order. Something that has been standing at attention since I was nineteen years old finally stands down.
"Every night since the line shack has been the same one," I tell her. "Over and over. Your voice, your hands, how you took me apart on a mattress that wasn't even yours."
I get her against the doorframe, my mouth working down her throat, patient at the center and starving at the edges.
"Calling you Tatum in that study was the ugliest thing I've done all year. I've been hard for you more hours of the last two weeks than not. Every near-touch. Every almost. All of it stacking up until tonight finally broke the dam."
"Lost everything today." My mouth finds her collarbone while my hands work her shirt open. "Both of us. Same hour."
A laugh gets out of me, rough, disbelieving. She catches it against my jaw and laughs back, and it is the strangest, best sound either of us has made all week.
"We're a couple of unemployed disasters," she says, breath already unsteady, fingers working my belt like she's got somewhere better to be.
"Speak for yourself. I've got a house."
"Congratulations. You're a disaster with equity."
"Careful. Keep flattering me and I'll start believing it."
"Don't let it go to your head, Blackwater. There's not room in there for both egos tonight."
We get each other's shirts off first, buttons losing the fight, and she pushes me back onto the bed like she's done waiting for permission.
She strips my boots off one at a time, impatient, then works my jeans down, and I let her, hands resting on the mattress, watching her decide exactly how she wants this to go.
She kneels between my legs, deliberate, both hands braced on my thighs, and I look down at her and lose whatever I was about to say.
Her mouth is patient and merciless at once. I have led men through worse country than this without losing composure, and I lose it here in about ninety seconds.
She works the tip slow, tongue swirling, sucking and stroking together. My hand finds her hair without asking permission and she lets it stay there.
"Mackenzie." Her name comes out wrecked. "Keep that up and this is over before it starts."
"Maybe I want it over before it starts." She says it around me, and I feel it more than hear it. "Maybe I want round two to be the one that lasts."
She hums like she means it, and I get two fistfuls of her hair and hold on until the edge gets close enough to taste.
"My turn." I get her up off her knees by the arms, and she comes up laughing, breathless. I don't let her land on her feet. I get an arm under her and lift her clean off the floor, and she weighs nothing at all. I lay her back on the bed like the last careful thing I'm capable of tonight.
I start at her mouth, the taste of me still on her lips. Her throat gets the same slow attention, and her breasts, until she's arching up for more of it, and by the time I reach her belly she's caught enough breath to talk.
"God, that mouth. You're going to kill me before we even get to the good part." Her hips are already shifting under me, restless, chasing more before I've given her anything yet.
"This is the good part." I don't stop moving down her body while I say it. "Been wanting to bury my face in your pussy for days."
Then my mouth is on her and she doesn't get another sentence out.
I take my time, like I told her once I would.
Two fingers first, working deeper by degrees while my mouth stays on her clit, patient, reading every catch in her breath the way I'd read a wind flag.
Long slow strokes of my tongue mixed into the rhythm of my fingers, until she's panting, rocking against my hand.
"Oh god, Holt." Her hand fists in my hair, holding me right where she needs me. "Please, right there, don't stop."
I don't. Her whole body goes rigid and then boneless, legs trembling against my shoulders, my name breaking apart in her mouth.
"You're so ready for me, baby." I mean every word of it. Her cheeks are flushed, her thighs are wet, and I have wanted a great many things in my life and never once wanted one this much.
"I can't wait another second," I tell her, all gravel. "Not one more."
I dig a fistful out of my jeans pocket and drop them on the nightstand, a loose pile of foil.
"How many is that?"
"Ten. Give or take."
She goes still, then laughs, loud and disbelieving.
"I plan ahead."
"You're an optimist, Blackwater."
"You're welcome to prove me wrong."
I roll one on with a hand that isn't quite steady, and I like that it isn't. I come down over her, both forearms braced either side of her head, and go into her slow, an inch at a time, watching every second of it cross her face.
"More," she says, not a request. "Give me more."
So I do. Every inch, and she takes it with her back arched and her nails already finding my shoulders.
I set a pace that has nothing careful left in it, and she meets every stroke, wet and loud and shameless.
Her nails are dragging down my back and her teeth are at my shoulder.
Both of us are leaving marks the other one is going to feel for days.
"Mine." I say it against her ear, ragged, not a question. "Tell me you're mine."
"Yours." She gets it out in pieces, breathless, her hands fisting in my hair to pull my mouth back to hers. "God, Holt. Only yours."
I go over the edge right behind her, her name the last word my mouth still remembers how to make, and for a long time after neither of us moves at all.
When it's over we're tangled on a motel bed neither of us can afford to be embarrassed by anymore. Her head on the arm that used to answer only to orders, my hand spinning slow circles on her spine.
"We just burned down both our lives in one day," she says into my chest, not sorry about it.
"Better view from the ashes."
"That's disgustingly poetic for a man who talks in four-word sentences."
"Don't get used to it."
Her phone goes off on the nightstand before either of us can decide what to say next. She reaches for it without lifting her head off me, and I watch her whole body go still reading the screen, the good kind of loose gone rigid in half a second.
"Someone claiming to be a witness," she says. "Says they've got ledger pages. Wants to meet. Alone, off the highway, tonight."
My phone lights up on the floor where my jeans landed. Same message, near enough, from a number I don't recognize and already don't trust.
We look at each other across a bed that just held the only good thing either of us has left, and I already know we're going.