Page 19

19

SONYA

T he pine needles crackled under Sonya's boots as she leaned against the trail marker. Her thumb hovered over the burner phone's screen.

Meet at the red oaks.

I know somewhere safe.

Send.

He arrived in thirteen minutes flat.

Sonya saw a leather-bound journal in his hand.

The book's embossed symbol caught the light and the age showed. "Something you found?"

He nodded, but she didn't give him time to explain.

She turned toward the overgrown path and simply said, "Keep up." She wanted to get them off the road and out of sight.

Deep into the mountains.

And he did. For three miles of vertical gain, through streams that iced their ankles and switchbacks that would've made a goat wheeze. Not a single labored breath from behind Sonya. When she finally glanced back near the ridge, he was studying his palms.

"Are you good?" she asked.

Landon snapped his hands shut as if caught peeping and nodded.

The cabin slumped ahead like a drunk giant, half its roof kissing the ferns. We ducked through the sagging doorframe into the musk of rotting wood. Landon ran his thumb along the stone hearth. "Cozy. Airbnb finally run out of five-star treehouses?"

"Back room's dry." Sonya's flashlight beam caught the lone iron bedframe, its moth-eaten quilt fossilized with dust. "No fire. They might?—"

"See the smoke. Yeah." His shadow loomed on the wall behind me, too tall, too still. "You're shaking."

"Hypothermia's fashionable this season." The lie curdled as he shook out the blanket—a century of dust motes swirling in the gray light. They sat hip to hip, the cold seeping up through the floorboards.

His thigh burned through Sonya's jeans.

"Roman's got people watching the roads," she blurted.

"Good thing we're nowhere near roads." The quilt slipped as he turned. Frost glinted in his stubble.

"That's why I picked here."

Landon’s thumb brushed a stray pine needle from her collar and Sonya felt suddenly the realization of just how alone they were. No more hiding from each other in this moment. His eyes held that glacial green—sharp enough to cut through the cabin’s gloom. She didn’t remember leaning in. Just the sudden heat of his mouth, the cedar-and-iron tang of him flooding her senses. Static crackled where her fingers found his jaw.

She jerked back an inch. “Wait, I?—”

His palm caged the nape of her neck, not pushing, just… present. Like a cliff edge daring her to leap. She bit his lower lip instead.

The quilt slid off her shoulders as he hauled her sideways into his lap, knees bracketing his hips. “Sonya.” Her name sounded like gravel under tires.

That was all it took. She was done fighting.

“Shut up.” She wrestled his flannel open, buttons pinging off the hearthstones. Her teeth grazed the scar bisecting his collarbone—a story she’d ask about later, if there was a later. His hands froze mid-air, the leather book forgotten in the dust.

“You’re—”

“Still talking.” She stripped her thermal shirt overhead, the cabin’s chill biting her ribs. His exhale fogged between her breasts. “Problem?”

A muscle jumped in his throat. “How many times you rehearsed this little power play?”

“None.” She pressed her bare sternum to his, heartbeat skidding. “You’re just…” Easier to let her hips answer, grinding down until his head thumped the wall. The groan he stifled tasted like victory.

He moved fast then—too fast. Her back hit the floorboards, his forearm cradling her skull before impact. Cold wood bit into her shoulder blades as his free hand tore at his belt buckle—a metallic snick, leather hissing through loops.

“You’re shaking again.”

“Not from cold.” She hooked her heel behind his knee, dragging him down as denim pooled around his thighs. The scrape of his zipper teeth against her inner leg drew a hiss through her clenched jaw. Her own jeans fought back—stubborn rivets, frayed seams—until his palm slid beneath her waistband. Calluses caught on sensitive skin as he wrenched the fabric down her hips in one brutal yank.

“And you’re—” Her breath hitched as cool air rushed between them, his thumb digging into the hollow of her throat. “—overdressed elsewhere.”

Sonya's gasp dissolved into a choked laugh as he filled her completely—too much and not enough, the stretch burning in ways that made her teeth ache.

Her eyelids fluttered, golden light bleeding through the cracks as his callused palm ground her wrists into the floor.

Every thrust jolted her higher, the wood creaked in time with her pulse.

She tasted copper—had she bitten her lip?

His sweat-slick chest dragged against her peaked nipples, each pass sparking twin trails of fire down her ribs.

"Look at me." His command vibrated through the place where they joined.

She turned her face to the side, tendons standing rigid in her neck.

The glow would be pooling beneath her collarbones now, that telltale shimmer creeping up her throat.

She forced her need to change shift down, but her emotions were so high.

His rhythm stuttered as she clenched around him involuntarily, static dancing where their stomachs met.

Fuck, focus on the ache.

The sting. The way his breath breaks on every inward pull.

She cataloged each sensation—the ridge of scar tissue beneath her left palm, the forbidden softness behind his ear when her fingers tangled in his hair, the molten lead weight low in her belly with every retreat.

His groan punched out raw when she rocked up to meet him, nails drawing crescents across his shoulder blades.

The room smelled of sex and and must, her thighs trembling not from exertion but the effort of containing the storm beneath her skin.

Let him think her whimpers were for the stretch of him, the delicious brutality of his hips slamming home—not the way her cells sang to dissolve into lightning, to let the power crackle through them both.

She bit down on a scream as pleasure crested, teeth piercing the meat of his thumb when he pressed it to her lips like a sacrament.

Stay. Stay. Stay. The mantra thrummed through their joined pulse points, a feeble dam against the torrent threatening to melt bone into auroras.

Flesh against flesh, heartbeat against heartbeat—each anchor fractured as her edges blurred, tendons singing with the static of a thousand unsparked storms.

Landon’s pace turned desperate, pistons of heat and hunger, and she clawed at the unraveling seams of herself.

This was supposed to be surrender, not dissolution .

Her body arched, a bridge between agony and rapture, every nerve screaming as if flayed by the friction of existing in only one form.

She’d spent lifetimes disciplined as a blade—honed, unyielding—yet here she quivered like a plucked string, vibrating with the blasphemy of wanting to shatter for him.

It hurt because it couldn’t last. It was good because it couldn’t be .

Each thrust carved her deeper into this fragile human shape, fissures spiderwebbing through her resolve.

She tasted copper, his blood blooming bright between her teeth, and wondered if he knew it was the only thing tethering her to gravity.

His hand slid between them, calloused thumb circling mercilessly.

“Let go.”

The command cracked her ribs open, a seismic fault.

She came with a sob that tore through dimensions, back bowing as temples of lightning erupted behind her eyelids.

He followed with a snarl, as he buried his face into her neck with a growling moan that sent her even further off the edge and for three trembling breaths they were twin supernovas—swallowed by the crush of sweat and spent fury.

Aftershocks still rippled through her when he collapsed against her, both panting into the damp silence.

She pressed a palm to the ache between her breasts, half-expecting to feel starlight leaking through the cracks.

The fireless dark seeped back through decaying floorboards—wet rot fermenting beneath plaster dust, rodent-gnawed foam exhaling chemical decades, a mildew that clung to the throat like drowned secrets.

Landon’s arm cinched tighter around her waist, his forearm ridges pressing fresh constellations into her hipbone where the blanket had slipped.

Outside, the wind gutted the pines.

Needles scraped slate shingles in insectile frenzy, the groans deeper now—less breeze through branches than something dragging its ribs across the roof.

Sonya’s shoulders locked.

“Your ears just twitched,” he breathed against her nape, smile evident in the scrape of stubble as he nuzzled lower.

She drove an elbow backward, meeting the unforgiving wall of his abdomen.

“Shut up.”

The retort lodged halfway.

Happy wasn’t the shape of this thing expanding behind her sternum—sharper than contentment, more feral than peace.

His teeth found the muscle between neck and shoulder, precisely where her pulse still shuddered from earlier convulsions, and for an instant she hovered again in that white-hot crucible where they’d fused atoms.

Her exhale misted in the air as she sank against him.

Let the future gnaw at the door.

Let the house’s arthritic joists protest. He’d traced the scars on her knees without asking, stood up for her in moments he didn't even realize he was doing it, laughed wild and bright when she headbutted him mid-argument. She fit her palm over the hand splayed possessive across her ribs and let oblivion take her.