Chapter 23 #2
When he finally moves up over me, the heat of his body covering mine, his cock hard and hot against my thigh, the realization lands in my bones before it reaches my head. I trust him. Completely.
Not just with my body tonight, but with the thing I've never handed anyone.
The reins. The watching. The door. The debt, the sauna, every power he could have taken and didn't. It's all cleared in this moment.
My body knows it first. He's not the man who once held control over me.
He's the one I chose to give it to. He's holding it like it matters, even with me bound and open beneath him.
He notches the head of his cock at my entrance, eyes locked on mine.
"Still," he says, and pushes in.
Slow. So slow. Inch by thick inch until he's buried deep and I can feel every beat of his heart through where we're joined.
The belt creaks softly when I test it on instinct.
He doesn't move at first. Just stays there, letting me feel the stretch, the fullness, the weight of him pinning me down in the best way while my wrists stay caught above my head.
I can't touch him. I can't pull him closer. I can only take it.
Then he starts to thrust. Deep. Measured. Controlled. Each stroke deliberate, hitting places that make my vision blur, the belt holding my arms steady as my body tries to rise into him. I stay as still as I can, taking it, giving him exactly what I promised.
The pleasure builds slow and heavy, different because I'm not chasing it.
I'm receiving it. When I come the first time it's with a broken sound, my body clenching hard around him while the belt keeps my wrists exactly where he put them.
He doesn't stop. Just keeps the same steady rhythm, drawing it out until I'm shaking, oversensitive, still somehow holding the stillness he asked for.
He comes not long after, hips pressing flush, the hot pulse of him spilling deep inside me as a low groan breaks from his chest. Even then he holds me steady, one hand on my hip, the other braced beside my bound wrists, until the last tremor fades.
After, he reaches up and loosens the belt, freeing my wrists with careful fingers. He gathers me in. I'm gone in the good way, boneless, wrapped up in him in a bed gone to ruin, his arm heavy across me and his mouth in my hair.
"You good?" he says into my hair, low, the careful checking-in he does after, the gruff version of tenderness.
"I'm so far past good there isn't a word." I find his hand in the dark and lace my fingers through it. "Thank you. For the way you did that. For asking first, every step, even when I told you to stop asking."
"I'll always ask." He says it plain, once, no inflection behind it, and somehow that makes it more of a vow than if he'd dressed it up. "You handed me the one thing nobody's ever trusted me with. I'm not going to be careless with it."
"You weren't." I press a kiss to the nearest part of him, his collarbone, salt and heat. "Go to sleep. You earned it."
He makes a sound that isn't quite agreement. His hand finds my hair in the dark, moves through it once, slowly.
"Hey," I say. "I don't do that. Let someone have the wheel. I've never done that. With anyone."
He doesn't answer right away. His hand keeps moving through my hair.
"I know," he says, quiet.
"I wanted you to know I know."
"I know that too." A pause. "Stop talking."
"Okay."
"In a minute." His breathing starts to slow anyway, the way it only does when I'm against him. I lie there in the dark with his arm heavy over me and let myself think the thing I came in here not wanting to think. It arrives quiet, final, and it changes everything.
He didn't kill my father.
I don't decide it. I just know it, the way I knew about the baby, in the body before the head.
I've spent two months trying to catch him at it.
I came into this house with a knife in my boot, more or less, watching him at his own table, in his own halls, waiting for the crack where the murderer showed through.
And it never showed, because it isn't there.
I think about the man who just held the whole weight of me in his hands and gave it back gentler than he took it. The man who tore up a debt that owned my entire life, then handed me a lighter in the dark and left the choice mine, every single time, when he could have simply taken it.
A man who built a fortune on never giving anything away for free, giving and giving here, waiting for an invoice I am never going to send.
That man didn't turn over a chair in my father's kitchen and stage it to look like the Russians did it.
I have lived inside his every habit for two months, and the story doesn't fit him.
It never fit him. If his people killed my father over the debt, why did he then erase that debt?
Why stand between me and the world with his own name?
It makes no sense as his crime. It only ever made sense because I needed someone to hate, and he was the one standing in the light.
The relief is so big it hurts, and right behind it comes the cold, because clearing him doesn't answer the question, it opens a worse one. If not him, then who.
Somebody killed my father. Somebody made it look like Bratva debt collection so cleanly that I believed it for two months, that the county believed it, that the whole valley believed it.
Somebody is following my car, pulling my rescue's funding, asking the city who has my father's things.
And it isn't the man whose arm is around me.
The man who did it's still out there, I have no idea who he is, and I've spent all my hate on the wrong target. The right one walked free.
I press closer into Isaak's side, and he tightens his arm without waking all the way, a reflex, keeping me even in his sleep. Lying here in the dark with his heartbeat under my ear, I stop fighting the one thing I've kept walled off for weeks and let myself know it plainly.
I love him.
No slip, no blurted accident this time, just the quiet fact of it laid down where only I can hear.
I married him to save a ranch. I fell for him somewhere between a round pen, a kill-pen mare, and a popper in a cigar.
I'm carrying his child. I would now do anything to keep him, which is the worst position a woman in my situation can be in, because love is exactly the blind spot that gets people like me killed.
I don't say it. He's asleep, and the first time I say that out loud is going to mean something. I'm not going to waste it on a dark room while he can't hear me. I hold it instead, the way I'm holding the baby, the way I'm holding all the things I'm not ready to set on the table.
Tomorrow I tell him about the baby. That much I've decided. The rest, the love I can't say yet, the cold new question of who really did it, those I keep, for now, in the dark with the man I've finally stopped suspecting and started, God help me, needing.
I fall asleep on his chest listening to a heartbeat I'd kill to keep going, and for the first time since a porch in September, I don't dream about my father. I dream about nothing at all, safe. Somewhere tonight I stopped asking the question, and the sleep is the answer I didn't go looking for.