Page 88 of Forbidden Protector

Her eyes cut away from mine for half a second and come back. What was that?

I let it go. I’m buried to my balls in her after weeks of wet dreams and nothing is going to distract me from this ecstasy.

“I love your sweet, wet pussy. So tight.” My voice has gone ragged with how close she's got me, how fast she's moving now.

"There," she says, breathless, grinding down harder to chase it. "God, Holt, right there." Every sound she makes doing it goes straight through the center of me like it's the only thing keeping either of us upright tonight.

I thrust up into her, meeting her frantic pace, and feel her walls start to tighten around me like she's chasing the edge and about to fall over it. "I'm going to come."

We go over together, a sound that isn't a word at all tearing out of me at the same time, my release spilling deep into her, pulsing, endless.

For a few seconds after, neither of us moves. Her forehead drops against mine, both of us breathing like we ran here instead of rocked each other’s worlds and fell apart.

We stay tangled together on that chair long after either of us has the strength to move, my breath slowing to match hers, the bad hand still resting over her heart where she put it. Not gripping, not failing, just there. Doing the only job either of us asked it to do tonight. She traces slow shapes against my chest with one finger, like you'd trace something you intend to keep memorizing for a long time.

"Fifteen percent," I say, into her hair, and for the first time all night, the number doesn't taste like poison.

"Fifteen percent of a grip." She lifts her eyes to mine and holds them there. "Everything else is running at about a hundred and fifty. I did the calculations myself, and I'm better at math than you, so the numbers even out just fine."

I almost laugh. It hurts less than it did an hour ago.

She finally climbs off my lap to find her clothes, still half a step out of the moment we just had. She's got one leg back in her jeans, still relaxed in the shoulders, still mine for another few seconds, when her phone lights up on the table, face up.

I watch it happen in real time. I watch her go from a woman who just fell apart on my lap to a federal agent with no badge in about a second and a half, the whole soft weight of the last hour sliding off her like a coat she's decided she can't afford to wear anymore.

"What?"

"Salt Lake." She's already reaching for it, already gone somewhere else in her head. "The evidentiary window on the McKenna money closes at the end of the week. If I don't have something solid by Friday, whatever we've built gets buried under a jurisdictional fight that'll take years to dig out of."

"You don't have a badge."

"No." She looks up at me, and whatever softness was in her face a minute ago is gone, replaced by the same flat certainty I watched her level at my father across his own desk. "Which means if I break this case, I break it alone, off the books, with nothing behind me but what I can prove. Starting now."

TWENTY-SEVEN

MACKENZIE

I spread three years of McKenna's money across Holt's kitchen table and start killing it.

That's the only honest verb for what I'm doing at seven in the morning with a mug I've already refilled twice at my elbow and Calloway's flight logs fanned out next to Knox's ledger and my own case notes stacked in a tower that's started to lean.

Not investigating. Not building. Killing, one page at a time. A knife through something that's been alive too long and done too much damage while it was.

The house is quiet and empty, that hum a place gives off once the man who fills it up is gone.

Outside, April's spitting snow under a ceiling pressed down so grey and flat the Front's disappeared entirely. No peaks, just white nothing.

Holt built the fire one handed before he left, stacked neat. It’s the kind of care a man takes when he knows a woman won't think to feed it herself. He left before I was fully awake, some errand of his father's he didn't explain and I didn't push on. Gus is stretched across my feet under the table, permanently, and I wiggle my toes feeling his warmth.

I've got a legal pad, three highlighters, and a Friday deadline breathing down my neck. I push down the panic and focus.

I start with Calloway, because Calloway's dead and dead men don't lie. They just stop talking, and everything he left behind in that hangar duffel is a paper trail thick enough to choke on, nobody bothered to shred before he swallowed his way out of testifying.

Feedlot invoices that don't match feedlot output. A second set of shipping manifests that route cattle nobody ever loaded. Four wire transfers routed through a Shelby co-op with a name so boring it might as well be wallpaper.

I follow the money backward, patient, refusing every shortcut that would feel good and prove nothing.

Calloway wasn't smart. He was thorough, which is different. Thorough men leave a cleaner trail than smart ones because they think process is the same thing as cover.