Chapter 7 : Still Bleeding

He handed me the phone without a word.

The text was three sentences.

"Marcus is dead"

Shot in the warehouse after you left. Whoever sent the second team they're not done.

They want the senator. And they know about you.

Both of you.

Cole had the door locked, the curtain drawn, and his shirt off before I could say a word. The graze on his side was worse than he'd let on. Dark and raw, the skin already purpling at the edges, blood dried in a thick line from his ribs to his hip.

"You said it was manageable," I said.

"It is."

"Cole, that needs stitches."

"It needs a cloth and some pressure. Sit down."

He went to the bathroom and came back with a wet towel and a first aid kit from his bag. He sat across from me on the edge of the bed and pressed the cloth to his own side like it was nothing. Like he hadn't taken a bullet two hours ago protecting me and my father.

I crossed the room, took the cloth from his hand, and held it myself.

He let me.

That was how I knew how tired he was. Cole McKnight didn't let people do things for him. He stood between people and everything that could hurt them and he absorbed it alone and he called it fine.

"You scared me tonight," I said.

"I know."

"When you didn't come out that door—"

"But I did."

"That's not the point." I pressed the cloth down harder than necessary. He didn't flinch. "The point is I stood there waiting and I didn't know. And I realized I didn't have a version of tonight that worked without you in it."

Cole looked up at me. His eyes were dark and exhausted and stripped of every wall he'd spent the last week building.

"Don't," he said.

"Don't what?"

"Don't say things like that when I'm trying to keep my head straight."

"Your head doesn't need to be straight right now. My father is next door. The door is locked. There's nobody coming for the next few hours." I pulled the cloth back and checked the wound. Pressed a clean bandage from the kit across it and taped it down.

"Tonight you get to stop."

Cole caught my wrist when I moved to pull away. His grip was loose. He wasn't stopping me. He was holding on.

"I don't do this," he said. "I haven't let anyone close in years. I built everything around not doing this."

"I know."

"And you walked into my perimeter on night one and just— " He stopped. Jaw tight. "I didn't stand a chance."

I put my free hand against his face. He turned into it slightly, like he didn't mean to, like his body moved before he could stop it.

"So stop standing a chance," I said. "Stop fighting it."

He stood, and the distance between us closed, and he kissed me the way he hadn't let himself yet. Not fast. Not desperate. Slow and certain, both hands on my face, thumbs at my jaw, kissing me like he'd made a decision and wasn't walking it back.

I pulled at his belt. He pulled my shirt over my head. We stripped each other down with the kind of focus he gave everything — deliberate, thorough, nothing wasted.

When he laid me back on the bed and hovered over me, arm braced beside my head, he looked at me for a long moment without moving.

"Tell me what you want," he said.

"You. All of it."

He pushed inside me slow and deep and held there while I adjusted, his forehead dropping to mine, both of us breathing through it.

"You want to know what scares me?" His voice was rough, low, right against my ear.

"Tell me."

"Not them. Not the people coming for us. Not dying." He pulled back and drove forward and I gripped his shoulders. "Losing you. That's the only thing I can't run a plan against."

"Cole"

"I look at you and I forget the job. I forget the protocol. I forget every reason this is a bad idea." He moved deeper, harder, finding a rhythm that made thinking impossible. "And I don't care. That's what scares me. I don't care anymore."

I pulled him down and kissed him hard because his words were doing as much to me as his body and I needed somewhere to put all of it. He kissed me back and picked up the pace and the headboard struck the wall and neither of us cared about that either.

He said my name once, low and wrecked, when he broke. I was right there with him. After, he rolled to his side and pulled me against him, his arm locked across my chest, his breathing slowing against the back of my neck.

We stayed like that. His palm flat over my ribs. My hand covering his.

His phone lit up the nightstand.

He ignored it.

It lit up again. Three more times in quick succession.

Cole reached over without moving his body away from mine and read the screen. Every muscle in his arm went hard.

"What is it?" I asked.

He turned the phone so I could see.

Four messages from the same unknown number that had told us Marcus was dead. The first three were photos. Our motel exterior. The parking lot. His car, license plate visible.

The fourth message was two words.

"Check outside."