Page 45 of Diesel’s Desire

They thought to cover their tracks. Good. That’s good. That’s exactly what needs to have happened for any version of tonight to end without every single person who walked through that basement door landing in a cell right alongside Pemberton’s ghost.

By the time I leave the estate, the sun’s climbed high enough that my eyes are bleary just looking at it, and every joint in my body’s stiffened from standing too long in one position or another. I drive home on autopilot, barely registering the turns, and I don’t honk at my parents’ place this time either, too wrung out to lift my hand off the wheel.

Inside, Thunder greets me with the same enthusiasm he always has, oblivious to the night I’ve had, and I let him out into the yard while I strip out of my uniform standing in the hallway, not caring that it lands in a heap by the door.

The shower runs hot enough to sting, and I stand under it a long time, forehead pressed against the tile, letting the water do what it can about the last twelve hours. It doesn’t fix anything. Doesn’t wash away the image of Addison clutching that blanket, or Johnson retching into the hedges, or the particular color Morris’s face turned when reality finally caught up to him.

But it’s hot, and it’s quiet, and for a few minutes it’s the only thing demanding anything from me.

I fall onto my bed face-first before I’ve even finished drying off, and I’m asleep before I can think another single thought about Douglas Pemberton, about Addison Miller, about a badge that didn’t move fast enough, or about the men in masks who moved instead.

23

DIESEL

Penny’s cruiser sits crooked in her driveway, nose angled toward the mailbox like she didn’t bother straightening it out before she went inside. Porch light’s off. Every window’s dark except the faint glow leaking around her bedroom curtains, blue-tinted, probably a lamp she forgot to kill.

I knock soft. Twice. Wait.

Nothing.

I knock again, a little harder this time, and still get nothing but the sound of crickets going off somewhere in the grass behind me. Twenty hours since Pemberton’s basement. Twenty hours since I put a bullet in a man who deserved worse, and I haven’t slept, haven’t really tried, because every time I close my eyes I see Addison standing beside that bed.

I need to see her. Not talk. Not explain anything about tonight, because there’s nothing to explain that either of us wants spoken out loud where it can be repeated later. Just see her. Breathing. Whole. Safe in a bed that isn’t a basement.

Her parents always kept a spare key under a garden gnome. I remember it from when we were seventeen, sneaking her out past curfew, sneaking myself in when her folks worked the night shift down at the plant. I chuckle when I see she inherited the habit.

Thunder meets me in the hallway, tail going before he’s even fully awake, and I crouch down to scratch behind his ears, murmuring low so he doesn’t decide to announce me to the whole street. He leans his whole weight into my palm, satisfied, and follows me deeper into the house like he already knows I’m not a threat worth worrying about.

Her uniform’s on the floor of the hallway. Tossed there in a hurry, like she walked in exhausted and just started shedding layers before she even made it to the bedroom. I bend down and gather it up—shirt, pants, the whole thing—and fold it and set it aside.

That’s when I notice the cuffs still clipped to her belt.

I go still.

Standard county-issue, chain-link, the kind she probably puts on drunks twice a week without a second thought. I run my thumb along the metal, and something in my chest shifts. A different kind of want that’s got nothing to do with violence and everything to do with needing her hands on me, needing to feel something good after a night that had nothing good in it.

I unclip the cuffs from her belt and set the folded uniform on the hall table.

Her bedroom door’s cracked open, lamp still burning low on the nightstand, and Penny’s asleep on her side, one arm curled under the pillow, hair loose across the sheets. She looks wrung out even sleeping—shadows under her eyes, mouth soft, chest rising slow and even. She earned this. Whatever peace she’s got right now, she earned every second of it.

I strip out of my clothes quiet as I can manage, boots first, then everything else, laying it over the back of her reading chair instead of leaving it in a heap. The cuffs I keep in hand.

She doesn’t stir when I ease onto the mattress beside her. Doesn’t stir when I stretch out, when the bed dips under my weight, when I lie there a minute just looking at her in the lamplight, memorizing the shape of her face relaxed instead of braced for the next bad thing.

I close one cuff around my own wrist. Metal’s cold, snaps shut with a small, definitive click, and I lift both arms slowly, hook the loose end around one of the wrought-iron bars of her headboard, and let it hang there.

“Penny.” I say her name softly. Then again, a little more. “Hey. Wake up.”

Her eyes flutter open, confused, lashes catching lamplight, and it takes her a second to focus on me lying beside her, naked, one cuff around my wrist, the other hanging over a headboard bar.

“Evan?” Her voice comes out thick with sleep, rasping. “What—what are you doing?”

“Waiting on you.”

She sits up slightly, propping herself on one elbow, hair falling across her face, and her eyes drop to the cuff, then back up to mine, brow furrowing deeper. “Is that my—did you break into my house and steal my handcuffs?”

“Didn’t break in. Used the key under the gnome.” I lift my free hand, let the loose end of the cuff dangle from my fingers, waiting to see what she does. “And I didn’t steal them. Borrowing.”