He rides out the spasms, milking every drop of my release before he allows himself his own.
He groans, his control finally snapping.
“Iris.”
He drives into me one last time, hard and deep, burying himself to the hilt. He stiffens, his body bowing like a drawn bow, muscles locked in tension. He pours himself into me, hot and pulsing, gripping me like he tries to merge our bodies.
He collapses on top of me.
We lie there, tangled in the ruins of our restraint. His weight presses heavy, crushing, and perfect. His heart slams against mine, a frantic, shared rhythm.
The silence returns to the room. Altered. The charge is gone. Broken.
We broke it.
For a long while, there is only the fire, our breathing, and the wet, shared knock of two hearts outrunning each other. Then, because he is still inside the circle of my arms and the dark makes it possible, the thing I never say comes loose.
“I had a brother.” My voice doesn’t sound like mine. “Danny. Wild. Beautiful. Reckless. He put his bike into a guardrail at nineteen, and I was a first-year medical student who thought she knew everything.” I stare past his shoulder into the firelight, the memory bright and merciless. “I packed the wound with my own shirt. My belt. My hands. Everything the textbook said. And I tracked his pulse fading under my fingers until it just stopped. I was still holding him when it did.”
“Iris…you don’t have to…”He doesn’t give me a platitude. He doesn’t tell me it wasn’t my fault. He listens the way he does everything, completely.
“Maybe that’s why I do it,” I say. “Penance. Or maybe I just want to beat the Reaper. To be the one who gets to say,Not today.”
He shifts. In the firelight, I find the small jagged scar on his left bicep, paler than the burns, lighter than the shrapnel.
“Treehouse,” he says. “I was ten. Certain I could make the jump to the neighbor’s roof. I missed. Laid in the dirt for anhour, refusing to cry, refusing to call out, until my old man finally came looking.” His thumb settles over the pulse in my throat. “Learned it early. Nobody comes for you unless you’ve got something they want.”
It costs him to hand me that. I feel the cost in how still he goes afterward. This, the boy in the dirt, the one rule he built a whole life on top of, he has guarded far longer, and he gives it to me now, after, when there is nothing left to take and no advantage in the telling.
That is the surrender that wrecks me. Not mine. His.
And I want to be clear with myself, even here, even ruined, that what I handed him on this floor I handed over with my eyes open. I have carried this hunger for years and tested its edges in careful rooms, with safe words, the lights left on, and a man playing a part he could set down by morning.
This is the first time I gave it to someone who didn’t need the script. I chose him in the truck. I chose him on the porch. I chose this. The surrender was mine to give. I gave it.
And lying there, pinned beneath the weight of the man who was supposed to be my protector, knowing I gave him everything he asked for and more, I know one thing for certain.
I never want to be put back together.
10
The Breach
BOYD
My hands are on her.
In her hair first. Silk, heat, and the sharp inhale she doesn’t get to hide. Her mouth parts beneath mine, lips swelling from the kiss I haven’t finished taking. She presses against me everywhere at once: the curve of her waist under my palm, the tremor in her body pinned beneath mine, and the way she melts into pressure like she’s been waiting for it.
Mine.
The thought lands hard and dangerous. It anchors itself in the center of my being, a heavy, jagged weight having nothing to do with the mission and everything to do with the woman.
I deepen the kiss. Instinct overrides discipline for one fatal heartbeat. She tastes like adrenaline, heat, and want. My body locks in, weight, control, possession, everything in me roaring yes. The world narrows down to the friction of our bodies and the scent of woodsmoke.
Then a sound splits the air.
Not a noise. A high-pitched, rhythmic screech shreds the moment clean through, vibrating in my teeth, in my bones. The sound of a perimeter violation. The sound of a nightmare becoming real.
