Page 34 of Reaper

“I’m coming back,” I said.

Not a reassurance. Not a question. A decision, delivered the same way I’d given Gauge his orders—like the outcome was already settled, and I was just informing the world of it. My voice came out rough. Stripped. The kind of rough that happens when you’ve been talking to men in rooms with fluorescent lights and the switch to something softer hasn’t quite happened yet.

She held my gaze. Didn’t look away. Didn’t nod. Didn’t say she believed me or she didn’t. Just held my eyes with hers, dark and steady in the amber light, and whatever was passing between us in that silence was heavier than any promise I could have made.

Then she reached out.

Her hand found my wrist. The one with the split knuckles, and her fingers closed around it—not gripping, not pulling, just there, contact, her skin warm against mine where the blood had dried—and she drew me toward her. Not hard. Not urgent. Just a steady pressure, her hand on my wrist, and I came without resistance because resistance wasn’t in the calculation anymore.

Her other hand found my face.

Palm against my jaw, fingers pressing into the stubble along my cheek, and the warmth of it hit me in the chest like something physical. I felt it behind my sternum, a pressure that had nothing to do with breathing and everything to do with the woman sitting on the edge of my cot with a bruise along her ribs and her eyes never leaving mine.

I dropped to my knees.

The concrete was cold through my jeans. My hands found her waist, and I was careful—deliberately careful—fingers tracing the outline of her ribs through the thin fabric of her sweater, mapping the bruise without pressing into it. She didn’t flinch. Didn’t stiffen. Just breathed, and I felt her ribs expand under my palms, and the carefulness of it became its own kind of intimacy because careful meant I was paying attention and paying attention meant I was present in a way that fighting never required.

She pushed my jacket off my shoulders. I let it fall. Her hands found the hem of my shirt and pulled it up, and I raised my arms to help her, and the cold air hit my chest and then her palms were on my skin, tracing the scars she found there—old ones, years old, the topography of a body that had been doing this work for longer than she’d been alive. Her fingertips lingered on each one. Reading them. The way she read everything.

I pushed her sweater up.

Slow. Letting her lift her arms when she was ready, and when she did, I saw the bruise along her ribs in full—dark, mottled, purple-green spreading from the center where the hayride fence had caught her. My mouth found the edge of it. Not pressing. Just there, my lips against her skin, tracing the discoloration with a gentleness that surprised both of us. Her breath caught. Sharp. Audible. Her fingers tightened in my hair.

“Reaper,” she said. Just my name. Rough in her mouth, the way it had been the first time, and the sound of it did something to my chest that I didn’t try to name.

I stood. Pulled her up with me, my hands under her arms, careful around her ribs, and she came off the cot and into me and her mouth found mine and the kiss wasn’t gentle. Wasn’t careful. Two people who’d been standing in the same eight feet of floor for too long, and the air between them had stopped being air.

Her hands worked my belt. Clumsier this time, fingers fumbling with the buckle, and I caught her wrists. Gentle. Not stopping. Just slowing.

“Slow,” I said. The word came out rougher than I meant it. Stripped. Raw.

Something shifted in her face. The control she’d been holding since the fence, since the gravel lot, since the room with the deadbolt between us—it softened. Not broke. Softened. The way something softens when it realizes it doesn’t have to hold itself together quite so hard anymore.

I backed her toward the cot. One step, two, and the metal frame hit the backs of her knees and she sat down. I followed her. My weight settling over hers, one hand bracing against the wall beside her head, the other finding the button of her jeans. The metal teeth gave way under my fingers, and she lifted her hips to help me, and the wool blanket scratched against her bare skin as I pushed the denim down her legs.

She was warm. Everywhere. Her skin against the room’s chill, against my hands, against my mouth when I lowered my head to her chest and traced the line of her sternum with my lips. Her breath came short. Rasping. Controlled, like she was holding back more than she was ready to give, and I didn’t push. Didn’t rush. Just kept my mouth on her skin and my hands careful around her ribs and let the pace find itself.

When I entered her, she made a sound. Low. Deep. From somewhere behind her diaphragm, and her back arched off the cot and her fingers dug into my shoulders hard enough that I felt her nails through my shirt. I held still. Let her adjust. Let her breathing find its rhythm, and when it did—slower, deeper, each inhale drawing more air than the one before—I started to move.

Slow at first. Careful. My hips finding a pace that her body could follow without jarring her ribs, and the carefulness of it became the point. Not restraint. Presence. The quality of attention that happens when you’re moving inside someone and every shift, every breath, every sound they make is information you’re collecting and responding to in real time.

Her hands found my face. Pulled me down to her, and her mouth was on mine, warm, soft, her lower lip with that slight unevenness I’d noticed in the kitchen, and I felt it against my teeth when the pace picked up and her control started to slip. Her breathing broke. Came in short, sharp pulls, each one carrying a sound that wasn’t words and didn’t need to be, and the sound of it in the small room did something to my chest that made my own breath shorten in a way I hadn’t prepared for.

The cot creaked. Metal against metal, springs complaining under our weight, and the sound was loud in the quiet and neither of us cared. Her legs wrapped around my waist, careful around her ribs, her heels pressing into the small of my back, and I felt her pulse everywhere—in her throat under my mouth, in her wrists where my fingers closed around them, in the heat between us where our bodies moved together in a rhythm that had stopped being chosen and started being inevitable.

When she came, she went quiet. Not silent—her breath held, her body tensed, her fingers gripping my shoulders with a pressure that would leave marks by morning—but the sounds she’d been making stopped, and in their place was just her breathing, ragged, controlled, each exhale shaking slightly before it released. I felt it. Felt the particular way her body changed around me, the pulse quickening, the muscles tightening, and I held her through it, my forehead against hers, my breath in her hair, and the amber light caught the sweat on her skin and turned it gold.

I followed her. My own release hitting with a force that made my breath catch, and for three seconds—I counted them—nothing existed outside the eight feet of concrete, the woman beneath me and the particular quality of silence that comes when two people stop pretending they’re not exactly where they’re supposed to be.

Then the room came back.

The amber light. The cold air. The muffled sounds of the club beyond the door, radios crackling, boots in the corridor, the building settling into whatever came next. My weight settled over her, and I was careful—shifted to my side, one arm under her shoulders, my hand finding the bruise on her ribs and resting there without pressing. She turned into me. Her face against my chest, her breath warm on my skin, and one of her hands found the cut on my forearm where the knife man’s nails had dug in, and her fingertips traced the line of it, reading the damage the way she read everything.

We didn’t fill the quiet with words. Didn’t need to. The things that needed saying had been said in the chapel, in the yard, in the eight feet between the door and the cot where we’d been standing since the fence. What was left was just this: her breathing against my chest, my hand on her ribs, the amber light throwing our shadows against the wall in shapes that the weak bulb from the ceiling had never managed to make.

I stayed. She didn’t ask me to. What came tomorrow sat in the room with us, present, acknowledged, and for now—for these hours, for this dark—set aside. Not gone. Just waiting its turn.

Dawn broke cold over the Devil’s Mark lot. I felt it in my lungs when I stepped out of the clubhouse door—October air, sharp enough to cut, carrying the smell of gun oil, exhaust and the last of the season’s dead leaves crushed under boot heels. The sky was gray. Not the kind of gray that promises rain. The kind that just is, flat and featureless, the color of concrete that’s been left out too long.