Page 62 of Reluctant Bride

He doesn’t talk. He just lets me take every inch of him exactly how I need it, and I fuck him like I’m trying to burn something out of both of us, an inherited grief neither one of us asked to carry. My release builds fast and mean, no patience left in either of us for slow, and when it hits I bite down on his shoulder to keep the sound contained.

He goes over the cliff right behind me, my name torn out of him, his hands fisting in my hair like he’s the one holding on instead of the other way around.

We stay tangled on the horsehair rug afterward, both of us spent in a way that has nothing to do with satisfaction. His breath slows against my temple. My heartbeat takes longer to follow.

“I keep thinking,” I tell him, into his collarbone. “Six generations. If I had a daughter of my own someday, she’d be the seventh. She’d grow up thinking she hated a name for a reason that was never real.”

“She won’t.” His voice comes out rougher than I expect, confidence in it that has nothing to do with comfort. “Whatever this turns into, whoever finds out what actually happened to that mountain, I promise you the story doesn’t survive us. It ends with our names on it, not hers.”

I lift my head enough to look at him. “You can’t promise that.”

“I can promise you I’ll spend the rest of my life trying.” He says it like a man signing something, not like a man offering ease. “That’s different from a guarantee. I know the difference. I’m making the promise anyway.”

Neither of us says anything else. There isn’t anything else that would fix it. Some things you just carry until the carrying gets easier, and this is one more thing riding shotgun with the rest of what we’ve been hauling around since the courthouse.

I’m reaching for my shirt when the door at the top of the stairs opens without a knock.

“Dawson.” Mackenzie’s voice, clipped, already moving before either of us can get decent. “The informant’s backup finished decrypting an hour ago. I’ve been trying both your phones since eight.”

“We were working,” Dawson says, entirely too calm for a man still lying on a horsehair rug with his jeans flayed open.

“Working.” Mackenzie doesn’t dignify that with anything more than a humph, already descending the stairs, tablet lit in one hand. “Knox wants an answer on Cruz by tonight and I’ve got maybe six hours of actual analysis time left before that clock runs out, so I need both of you to be people who answer phones for the next few hours, not people who lock themselves in a records room.”

“Understood,” Dawson says, tucking his boxers in and zipping his fly.

“There’s a name buried three folders deep that finally decoded clean. It’s not McKenna. It’s not the command layer we’ve been chasing.” She stops at the base of the stairs and looks at me instead of Dawson, which is somehow worse. “It’s Ashley Rourke. From eight years ago.”

I go still with one arm still caught in my shirt sleeve. The letter, the archive, the fury I just spent on Dawson’s body, all of it goes quiet under the sound of a name I have never once heard connected to anything that happened before this summer.

“Eight years ago,” I repeat, and my voice comes out steadier than anything in me feels right now. “What happened eight years ago that Ashley Rourke has anything to do with?”

Mackenzie doesn’t answer.

She looks at Dawson instead.

And Dawson, who hasn’t looked away from anything all morning, who took a jagged metal beam to his own forearm yesterday and a letter that rewrote his family history without blinking, looks at the stone floor like it’s the only thing in the room he can stand to face.

TWENTY

DAWSON

Eight years of hating a girl for wanting me turns out to be the easy version of this story.

Mackenzie hasn’t moved from the doorway since she said the name out loud, and the room hasn’t finished absorbing it either, the kind of quiet that comes right before a structure decides which way it’s going to fall.

“Say it again,” I tell her, because some part of me is still hoping I misheard it the first time.

“Ashley Rourke.” She doesn’t soften it. Mackenzie’s never once softened anything since I’ve known her, and I respect her too much to want her to start now. “There’s a payment record buried three folders past the name, dated years back. I need you both upstairs so Tate can walk you through what it actually says before either of you decides what it means.”

Sage is still sitting on the horsehair rug, shirt half on, hair a wreck I put there myself, and she’s watching my face with intense scrutiny. I know that look. I’ve been on the other side of a table from it exactly once, the day she buried my road in front of the county commission, and I remember thinking even then that I’d rather be cross-examined by her than loved by anyone else.

I don’t get to enjoy that thought right now. Right now it just tells me she’s already building a case, and I’m the one holding the evidence she hasn’t seen yet.

“Okay,” I say, and my voice seems to come from somewhere outside of my body. “Let’s go upstairs.”

She doesn’t ask me a single question on the stairs. That’s worse than if she had.

Tate’s got three monitors going in Knox’s main house office, the smell of burnt coffee thick enough to taste, and he doesn’t look up when we walk in, which from Tate means he’s already hours deep into something he doesn’t like.