He started to move. Deep, steady strokes that I felt everywhere. His hands gripped my hips, fingers sinking into the soft flesh, pulling me into each thrust. The wet sound of him sliding in and out of me filled the room. I couldn’t care because every stroke pushed a sound out of me I couldn’t control.
“God, you feel good,” he breathed against my neck. “So fucking good, Trixie.”
I wrapped my legs around his waist and the angle changed and we both groaned because he was deeper, hitting a place that made my vision blur. He fucked me there, steady, relentless, his mouth on my throat, my jaw, coming back to my lips to kiss me deep while his hips drove into mine.
He pulled out. Flipped me over, pulled my hips up, pushed back in from behind. The new angle was tighter, deeper, and the moan that came out of me was obscene. His hand splayed across my lower back, the other gripping my hip as he drove into me with long, hard strokes.
“Been losing my mind over you,” he said, his voice ragged. “Every time you look at me. Every goddamn day, Trixie.”
I pushed back against him, meeting every thrust. He leaned over me, his chest against my back, his hand sliding under me to find my clit. The first stroke of his thumb made me cry out. He worked me while he fucked me, his rhythm deliberate, devastating, and the orgasm built from somewhere deep, tightening, pulling everything toward a single point.
“Let go,” he murmured against my ear. “I’ve got you.”
I came apart. My whole body seized around him, his name torn out of me in a sound that echoed off the walls. He drove into me through it, then followed with a rough groan, his hips jerking, his face buried against my shoulder, his body shuddering.
We collapsed together. His weight on me, warm, heavy, both of us wrecked. He rolled onto his back and pulled me with him. I settled against his chest, his arm around my waist, his hand finding mine.
“He used to tell me I was lucky,” I said. Into the quiet of his room, the safety of his body behind mine. “Lucky to have him. Lucky that someone like him wanted someone like me. He said it so often I believed it.”
Duke’s arm tightened around me.
I told him the rest. The money, the receipts, the cash allowance. The isolation, the slow dismantling of every friendship, every opinion, every decision I’d ever made on my own. The way he’d grip my arm and leave bruises under my sleeves. The shove into the counter. The hand around my throat for three seconds, just enough to show me he could.
“I left for Ruby,” I said. “She was starting to watch. Starting to learn the same things I’d learned. How to be quiet. How to be small. I couldn’t let her grow up thinking that was love.”
He pressed his mouth to the back of my neck. Said nothing. His body said it for him.
I fell asleep in his arms.
When I woke, morning light was coming through the window and he was pulling on his boots. He saw me stir.
“Church,” he said. Quiet. “I’m taking what you told me to Angel. The brothers need to hear it. Stay here as long as you want.”
He kissed me. Slow, warm, the kiss of a man who meant to come back.
I drove to the diner mid-morning. Ruby was settled in the back room with her crayons while I helped Rosie with the lunch prep in the kitchen. Buck hadn’t come in yet and I let myself breathe.
After the lunch rush died down, I took the bins out back. Ruby came with me because she liked sitting on the back step and talking to the stray cat that lived behind the dumpster who she was still trying to entice. It was a nothing errand. Two minutes to put everything in the dumpster, then back inside.
Buck was leaning against the wall by the back door.
He’d come around the side of the building, not through the diner. Rosie hadn’t seen him. Nobody had seen him. He was just there, and the sight of him stopped me dead.
He looked different. The warmth was gone. The concerned husband, the caring father, the man who’d charmed half of Forsaken. All of it stripped away. The man standing in the alley was the one I’d lived with for six years. Cold, still, his eyes flat and patient in a way that made the air feel thinner.
“We need to talk, Trixie,” he said. Quiet. Conversational. The voice he used when the doors were closed.
Ruby was behind me on the step. I felt her go rigid.
“Go inside, Ruby.”
“Stay right there, Ruby.” Buck’s voice was gentle. Fatherly. The performance was flawless even now, aimed at his daughter even when nobody else was watching. “Daddy just wants to talk to Mommy.”
“Go inside, baby. Find Rosie.”
Ruby didn’t move. She was frozen on the step, her eyes wide, her body small and tight, reading the air between her parents with the fluency of a child who’d grown up bilingual in love and fear.
“You’ve had your adventure,” Buck said. His eyes were on me. “You’ve made your point. Now it’s time to come home with our daughter.”