Page 45 of Shadow Secrets
Her orgasm hit hard, her back arching as he built an incredible rhythm. Her vision whited out, and she cried his name. As she moved her hips under him, milking it for every last drop, she felt him tighten and follow her over the edge.
“Sutton,” he ground out.
“I’m here,” she whispered, kissing him. “For all of you.”
She lay against Sebastian’s right side, her head on his chest, her hand resting on him. Her fingers traced the edge of the scar in a slow, idle pattern, careful not to touch his bruise. She was thinking about the scar, the bullet, the man beneath her hand, the brother who’d pulled the trigger.
Sebastian’s arm was around her. His thumb moved lightly over the ink Penn had given her. The symmetry of it wasn’t lost on her—his hand on Penn’s tattoo, her hand on his scar. Two marks left by the same man on two people who’d found each other because of him.
The sheets were tangled at their waists. The desk lamp threw a soft circle of light across the floor. His heartbeat was slow and steady under her ear.
She traced the scar again, felt the ridge of tissue under her skin. “I’m sorry he did this to you,” she whispered.
The words had been sitting in her chest since the bathroom. Since before the bathroom—since the parlor, since the porch, since the first moment she’d understood that the man in front of her carried a wound her brother had made.
She’d been angry about it. She’d been defensive. She’d resented him for surviving when Penn hadn’t.
But underneath all of that, buried deep, she’d needed this—needed to touch the scar, needed to feel his heartbeat, needed to lie against him in the quiet—to find what had always been there: sorrow for what her brother had done to him.
Sebastian’s arm tightened around her. She felt his chest expand with a breath that was longer than the ones before it. His thumb paused on her shoulder. “Let’s make a pact,” he said.
She tilted her head to look up at him. In the lamp’s amber glow, his face was relaxed in a way she’d never seen—the jaw unclenched, the surveillance in his eyes replaced by something softer. He looked younger. He looked like the man he might have been if one day in a fundraiser ballroom hadn’t rewritten the rest of his life.
“No more regrets about the past,” he said. “Yours or mine. We can’t change it. We can’t undo it. But we can stop letting it decide what happens next.”
She held his gaze. Those eyes, steady and certain, were asking her for something he’d never asked anyone—to let go of the guilt, the anger, the endless loop of what if and if only that had been the soundtrack of both their lives for six years.
She rose and pressed her lips to his scar. A kiss so light it was barely contact. A seal on a promise. “No more regrets,” she said.
He pulled her closer. She settled against him and closed her eyes. The carousel was still. The noise in her head was quiet. There was only the warmth of his body, the rise and fall of his breathing, the steady beat of a heart that had taken a bullet and kept going.
She fell asleep with her hand on the scar and his arm around her.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Sebastian
Three days of quiet was making him more anxious than three days of gunfire.
Sebastian stood at the kitchen counter at zero-six-hundred, drinking coffee that had burned his tongue while he stared at the tree line through the window.
The compound was still. Mack was running the perimeter check. Jasper was in the tech room, monitoring Claire’s encrypted updates from the FBI field office. CB had gone home to Regan for the first time in days with Garrett’s blessing and the understanding that his phone stayed on.
The waiting was the hard part. Not the operational waiting—he’d done that for years during stakeouts and protection details where nothing happened for hours and readiness was the only product.
This was different. This was waiting for someone else to do the work while he stood in a kitchen drinking bad coffee, his body healed enough that the bruised ribs only complained when he twisted too fast, his lip scabbed over.
Sutton was still asleep in bed. A bed he’d been sharing and didn’t give a damn who noticed. No more regrets. No more hiding.
He didn’t regret any of it. The night in the bathroom, the scar, the way she’d kissed the place where the bullet had gone through him—none of that was a mistake. He’d let her past the last wall. He’d let himself feel something that wasn’t contained, managed, or sealed away after thirty seconds. He didn’t regret it.
But he was worried.
He’d been circling it for two days, poking at it the way he’d probed his bruised ribs. They’d found each other inside a crisis—gunfire, murder, a conspiracy that had upended both their lives. Every moment of connection had been forged under pressure—the farmhouse porch, the truck ride, the floor of her room, the hospital. Adrenaline was a bonding agent. Fear created intimacy. Shared trauma built bridges that felt permanent but were sometimes just the desperate architecture of survival.
What happened when the danger passed?
He took a sip of the coffee, grimaced, and poured it out.
