Page 50 of The Jackal

Then, she went to her knees on the warm stone.

I said her name once. It came out low and wrecked. It wasn't a protest, and she knew it wasn't. She took me in hand and then took me in full, no shyness in her, nothing careful, her eyes closing like a woman at a meal she'd been promised for years. The breath left me in a way it has never once left me in any dangerous room on this earth.

I got a hand in her wet hair, gentle, and let her have me. She was not gentle. She was thorough and greedy and entirely in command. I stood there in a billionaire's bathroom being taken apart by the only person alive who'd ever been able to do it, my composure going the way my towel had gone.

She took me to the edge of everything and would have taken me over it. I didn't let her—not because I wanted it to stop, but because I wasn't finishing anywhere but inside her tonight. I told her so, and felt her hum her approval around me, which nearly ended the argument right there.

I lifted her off the floor. She came up laughing, damp and bare. I carried her out of the bathroom against my chest, her arms around my neck, and crossed the dark suite to the bed.

I meant to lay her down. She had other plans there, too.

The second her knees touched the mattress, she turned in my arms, and instead of settling onto her back, she went to all fours in the middle of that big bed and looked at me over her shoulder—offered herself, open, sure, wanting. Whatever thin thread of civilization I had left burned clean through.

I knelt behind her and put my mouth to her.

I took my time about it. I'd learned her taste already and wanted it again. I worked her slow and thorough from behind until her arms shook and her breath went to pieces, until she was soaked and whimpering into the pillow, her hands fisting the sheets, my name falling out of her in fragments. I could have stayed there an hour. I'd have counted it time well spent.

She had one more order in her.

"Cash." Ragged. Certain. A command, not a request. "Come inside me. Now."

I obeyed her. God, help me, I obeyed her—rose up and took her perfect hips in my hands and gave her every inch of me. We finished the day locked together, her spine bowed and my name in her mouth and my whole world narrowed to the woman underneath me.

When I finally poured myself into her, it felt less like an ending than a vow. Everything that's mine is yours. I'd told her that with words already. Now, I'd said it every other way I had.

We came down slow, tangled, her back against my chest, our legs woven together in a knot neither of us tried to solve. The energy had finally gone out of both of us—all of it, the grief and the fear and the wanting, burned down at last to a warm, quiet ash—and what was left in me, holding her in the dark, was the simplest thing I know.

I was happy.

I don't say that word much. There hasn't been much cause. But I lay in that bed with Magnolia Bennett asleep against my heart and three dogs breathing through the wall and my father alive under the same roof, and I was happy, plainly and completely, for maybe the first time since I was a boy who hadn't fallen yet.

I fell asleep without one part of me on watch. Max had the watch. I'd felt him take it.

Somewhere in the deep of it, someone knocked.

I was awake between the first knock and the second, the way I wake—all at once, no fog. I slid my arm out from under Mags without stirring her, found a robe, and padded to the door, barefoot and silent.

Brock stood in the hall, dressed for work.

He didn't say good evening. He said, "We found him."

Every quiet thing in me stood up and came to order. "Where?"

"The old Navy Yard." A grim satisfaction moved under Brock's voice. "North Charleston. The base the Navy shut down thirty years back—most of it's rotting piers and dry docks now, but the officers' row still stands. Big, old houses on the quiet end, federal property nobody looks at twice." He shook his head slow, like the nerve of it still impressed him.

I turned it over once. It was smart. It was arrogant. It told me things about Craine that three searches of his face hadn't—a man who wrapped himself in the institution because he believed the institution was his to wear.

"Do we go now," I asked, "or does it keep ‘til morning?"

"Now.”

Now was fine with me. Now was better than fine. I've done my best work in the hours when the rest of the world trusts the dark to hold.

"Five minutes," I said.

"Armory. Ground floor, east wing. I'll walk you through the toys." A ghost of a grin. "You're going to like the toys."

I closed the door and crossed back through the dark to the bed, and I did the thing you do when you love someone—I didn't let her wake to an empty room. I sat on the edge of the mattress and put my hand on her shoulder, gentle, and she surfaced the way she does, quick and complete, a woman raised in houses where the phone ringing at night meant something.