Page 19 of Rope Burn

Her fingers find the ridges of scar tissue across my knuckles and lace through mine into the sheet. The gesture is unguarded, but nothing about Engel is careless. Even now, she knows exactly what she's showing me.

I want her eyes. She gives them, and the contact holds through stroke after stroke: bare, furious, wanting. The agent is still there. I see her measuring every command, every inch she concedes. She surrenders nothing accidentally.

I feel her tighten around my cock with every thrust, her body clenching in a gathering rhythm that tells me she's close again.

"You wanted me here, Carrick." Her voice is raw, stripped bare. "Finish it."

The eye contact breaks from her side first. She turns her head, burying her face in my neck, and the sound she makes against my throat is raw and wrecked and nothing she'd ever let anyone hear outside this room. The surrender of it—she can't keep my gaze and keep herself together at the same time—is what sends me over the edge.

I bury myself deep and hold. Her second orgasm hits with my cock buried to the hilt, her inner muscles locking around me in hard, rhythmic contractions that I feel from base to tip.

The pressure builds at the base of my spine, white-hot, and when it releases, the force of it empties my lungs and bows my back and drives me into her so hard that the bed frame cracks against the wall.

I come in long, pulsing waves, each one dragged out by the grip of her body clenching around me, and the heat of it spreading between us is the most honest thing either of us has done all night.

My arms shake. My forehead drops to the mattress beside her head. Her fingers are still laced through mine, her other hand pressed flat between my shoulder blades, and for several seconds neither of us moves. Her pulse hammers beneath my hand, and my weight pins her to the mattress while the air conditioner rattles beneath the window.

The aftermath is quiet. I roll onto my back. She stays on her side of the bed, not touching me. She keeps exactly enough distance to deny that lying beside me means anything.

My breathing slows. The motel ceiling is water-stained and low, and the highway light pushes through the curtain gaps in thin orange bars that stripe the wall.

She doesn't ask what this was. I don't tell her. The answers would require a conversation that happens with the lights on, and neither of us reaches for the lamp.

I'm not sure when sleep takes me. The miles, the competition, the physical expenditure settle into my muscles and drag me under before I can decide whether her warmth beside me is keeping me awake or putting me under.

When I open my eyes, the room is gray with early light and the bed beside me is empty. The sheets on her side are cool.

The door is closed. Her bag is gone from the dresser. Her printed page is gone from the bed. She took everything she brought.

She never asked for the second carrier name.

A federal agent who forgets to close out the exchange she came for has stopped operating like a federal agent. That fact catches behind my ribs in a place I wasn't expecting.

I sit on the edge of the bed. Sandy's photograph is where I left it. My catalog is where I left it.

One woman is dead. The other walked out without taking the name she came for, and whatever happened in this room has already changed the investigation.

The highway is already humming outside the window. The circuit moves today, and wherever it goes, she'll be there.

6

MORGAN

Ipass the fairgrounds on my way to the motel. Carrick's truck is already parked beside the livestock loading area. I spot it before the Thornton trailers, before the stock pens, before the vendor row I'm supposed to survey. That's the first problem.

The second is that I recorded nothing. Hours of highway between his motel room and this event, and I spent them replaying the way his hands locked around both my wrists instead of reviewing the carrier codes he'd offered to trade. His stock-supply catalog sat in that room all night, and I slipped out and drove away before it was light. Staying until he woke up would've required me to decide whether last night was a lapse, something more dangerous, or a disclosure I was obligated to file.

My next report will contain dates, routes, and an assessment of Carrick's reliability. It won't contain the fact that I slept with the person of interest. The omission has already stopped being a lapse. By the time my ASAC asks for an update, it'll be a lie.

I check in, spend an hour with Torres's hauling records on the dresser, and return to the fairgrounds before the gates open. Apart from High Mesa, the carrier names I ran against the federal registry came back clean. Carrick's second phantom isn't surfacing through the database alone. The search has to continue from the field.

I slip my lanyard over my head and walk through the vendor lot toward the arena. Morgan Engel, Western Range Mutual, regional claims specialist. The cover holds because insurance people are invisible. They carry clipboards, ask boring questions, and nobody wonders what they do with the answers.

Heat is already building, dry and insistent, pulling the smell of livestock and trampled grass into the air above the pens. Arena crew members run test tones through the sound system, and the feedback whine bounces off the metal grandstands before cutting out. A farrier sets up near the holding area, the ring of his hammer sharp and bright across the lot. Handlers push cattle through the alleys, and hooves on packed dirt produce a low, persistent rumble beneath the human noise.

Penny is in her usual spot on the vendor row, her folding table set with display cards of turquoise and silver. Her hair is pulled back under a faded bandana, and she's arranging bracelet trays with the focused attention of a woman whose livelihood depends on presentation.

"You're back," she says when I pass her table.