Chapter 35

Her hair is loose tonight, a sign she's at ease in here. She catches me looking and her face shifts. Small. Private. Only for me. She lifts her glass an inch, no smile big enough for the room to see, and I lift mine back. For three weeks we've been making love nights and mornings, since she took my hand at the door and led me down the hall. If you ask me, it will never be enough.

What I feel for her gets bigger by the day. The word for it is coming, and she knows it. She isn't asking before I'm ready to say it, she's letting me get there on my own.

I'm keeping every promise I made her after the worst morning. When Killian's people came by last week I called her before she had to ask, and I haven't hidden from her once when it got hard. We're doing this together now, all of it.

Below me at the card table Killian wins another hand. Bear laughs at Ryker's face, Silas almost laughs with him, and Ryker mutters under his breath. The whole sound of it: six men I'd have lain down in any room for, six women who chose them, one twenty-one-year-old already drinking the beer he opened, Mama Lou in the middle of it, watching over everyone in the room. It fills the mezzanine to the ribs.

I take a swallow of whiskey. It's good. Jaxson doesn't pour the bottle for nothing.

I think about what Killian said.Justice is for Danny.True. That's what he and Jaxson and the rest of us built. Danny gets it on paper now, in a court prosecutors took the time to walk through. The years of him being a name nobody outside this room said out loud are over. That part is done.

But there's another word for what just happened to me. And only one person in this room is responsible for it.

I didn't think I could be saved. I had told myself the opposite for so long I'd built a life around it.

She saved me regardless.