She nodded, tight, the look on her face pure challenge.
"Fill me up," she said, and the sound of it—her demanding, not pleading—snapped whatever restraint I had left. I held her hips and pumped hard, three, four more times, and then I was gone, the shudder of it so intense I thought it might crack me in half. She gasped, riding it out with me, her arms looped around my neck, her mouth pressing my shoulder as if she'd bite to anchor herself to the world.
I didn’t try to last. There was no reason to. I gripped her ass, pulled her all the way down, and unloaded inside her with a jolt so intense I nearly blacked out. She kept her eyes open the whole time. Not a dare. Not a warning. Just so she could watch me fall apart, see that she still had that power, even when the rest of the world was hunting us down.
She held me inside her with a hand on the back of my neck, like she knew I’d try to get up and fix something if she let me. "Don’t move," she said, voice barely above a whisper. "Just…stay."
So I stayed. I let my face rest on the curve where her neck met her shoulder, breathing in the scent of sweat and the peach body wash from the last safe house. We were both sticky, a little gross, but neither of us cared. For a minute, all of it—the chase, the threats, the future—felt like something that could be survived.
“I love you,” she said.
I kissed her lips. “I know,” I said. “I love you too.”
“I’m so glad it’s all behind us now,” she said with a laugh.
I nodded, laughing under my breath. “Yeah,” I said. “Me too.”
Chapter 25: Dante
Chapter 25: Dante
Marco was already outside when I stepped out into the dawn chill, pacing the alley with a phone in one hand and a half-eaten granola bar in the other. I waved him off. This wasn’t a conversation I wanted an audience for.
I moved to the far end of the lot, where the frost hadn’t yet melted from the windshield of a parked car. The burner felt too light in my palm. I stared at it for a beat before dialing.
The line clicked twice. Then a voice I hadn’t heard in years, low and lethal.
“Callahan.”
“It’s Dante Moretti.”
A pause. Not long. Just enough to let the silence cut.
“Well,” Tristan said. “Hell must be freezing.”
“I need a favor.”
He gave a dry, humorless laugh. “You’ve got some balls.”
“I need a place for Jade. Somewhere safe. Somewhere no one will look.”
“You’re asking me to babysit your girl while the feds close in on you?” he said. “You think I run a shelter for war brides?”
“Yeah, I figured,” he said.
Tristan’s voice went flat, the way people in my old business sometimes did when they were calculating risk. “Why should I?”
“Because you owe me,” I said. “And because if this goes sideways, it won’t just be the Morettis cleaning up the mess. It’ll be everyone who ever looked the other way.”
The line went silent. I pictured him in some glass tower in Boston, feet up, drinking something that cost more than my last three cars combined. I pictured the furniture, the view, the kind of money that made the world both soft and sharp. I wondered if he ever thought about the kid we’d left on the stoop in Queens, the way I did.
Finally, he spoke.
“I’ll do it,” he said. “But not out of charity. You bring her yourself. You walk her in the front door, in daylight. And you leave the trouble outside.”
“I can’t. I have to send my brother.”
Tristan didn’t say anything for a long time. I heard the city in the background—a siren, a gull, the distant tick of a train over rails. Then: “You think your brother can get her here in one piece?”
