Page 87 of Savage Surrender

The cashier keeps glancing at the condom boxes. By the fourth, color has climbed from her collar to her cheeks; by the eighth, she scans without looking up at either of us. The overhead camera sits to her left. I keep my hat brim angled down.

“Having a party or something?” she asks when another box passes over the scanner.

“Honeymoon,” I tell her.

Weller puts a case of water on the counter, and the woman’s eyes track between us like she’s working it out. We pay in cash.

“Mason’s sent three updates today,” Weller says when we reach the camera display at the hardware store next door. “They’ve attempted to recover access, frozen what they could, and started moving both assets and personnel. The ballistics from the man the police arrested appear to match, but Mason found no location for Whitney. He’s still looking.”

I turn over the first camera. Cloud storage. Facial recognition. A helpful application eager to know where we live and send it somewhere neither of us controls. It goes back on the shelf.

“Let them move it. The damage is done.”

Weller unlocks the display cabinet with the key the cashier gave him. “Mason can stop some of the transfers.”

“Which tells them where he has visibility.” I hold the loose cabinet door while he kneels. Four cameras on the bottom shelf record to local memory cards. Better. “Every account they touch tells us what they can’t afford to lose, and every person they pull exposes where they no longer feel protected. Block them now, and they scatter. Watch them, and they make us a map.”

“I’ll tell him to keep observing.” Weller closes the cabinet and pushes the cart onward.

The sound of waves outside has me thinking about Bianca’s palm flattening over my mouth while her thumb dragged through the precome at the head of my cock. She smiled when my hips moved into her hand, then bared her teeth when I caught her wrist and took it away.

My memory is unhelpfully precise. I keep getting flashes of the way she looked stretched around Freddie and me last night.

“How sore are you?”

“Extra sore.” She rolled her hips against mine.

Then I turned her around.

Weller hands me a motion-light box which creases beneath my grip.

“Three of these,” I agree, barely listening, and grab two more.

Weller removes the damaged box from my hand, checks that the contents survived, and puts it in the cart without comment. I add memory cards, batteries, alarms, a flashlight, a drill, and enough locks to make the place much less welcoming.

We find only two portable fans. Weller checks the shelf labels, then asks the employee whether there are more in the back. There aren’t.

“Until the threats are null, we’ll be more careful with her in public,” he says while aiming those dark glasses directly at me.

The scrape in my palm starts throbbing.

“A sensible general policy,” I tell him.

“It is neither general nor new.”

Bark had dragged over my knuckles when I caught Bianca’s hips, lifted her against the trunk, and pulled her onto my cock. Her legs locked around my waist, her forehead dropping to my shoulder, while the ocean smothered most of her first cry. I covered her mouth for the rest, as her heels dragged me closer.

The sun came through the trees, thin gold moving over us. When my knot began to swell, she locked her fingers around my wrist.

My legs surrendered first. I took us down to the ground, knees first, and settled back against the trunk with Bianca in my lap, stuck until my knot let go.

“You’re an asshole, by the way,” she said, punching me softly in the shoulder. “I’ve been meaning to bring that up.”

“And why’s that?”

“You bought me a house, Tristan. Like a really nice one. Who does that?”

“It’s a good thing I did, huh?”