by Isabel Wroth
It was the right choice, and so was starting something new. This was her home, and these were her people.
Nasa lifted his hand from her thigh to wrap his arm around her shoulders, his lips cruising across her temple. “Seems like the Universe has spoken.”
“It's really weird when you talk about yourself in the third person,” Ruckus commented dryly.
*****
With her hair plastered to her scalp and mascara running down her flushed cheeks, Nasa watched Dillon come apart at the seams, certain he'd never seen anything so utterly beautiful in his entire life.
Truly, he'd only intended for them to have a relaxing shower before bed. Dillon said she couldn't do a bath without falling asleep the second she was horizontal in the hot water, so they changed it up.
But as soon as she set her soapy hands on him, lovingly caressing every inch of his body with this look of worry on her face, he realized they both needed more.
He understood her need to touch him. To reassure herself that he hadn't been toughing it out this whole time and hiding an injury.
When Nasa got to washing her in return, it felt like a dance. They moved together, breathed together, skin slipping and gliding together in one of those deeply intimate moments of connection that had nothing to do with sex.
Of course, it became about sex not long later, but the intimacy remained, and here they were, shuddering and panting together as they languished in the aftermath.
Literally, it was the perfect ending to a fucked-up day.
Once Dillon's pussy gave up the exquisite vise-like grip on his dick, Nasa groaned and let her feet drop to the floor.
She made those sweet noises of regret he loved hearing when he pulled out and kept her cuddled close as his knees re-solidified.
Swaying slightly on his feet, he grabbed one of the facial cloths she liked and got it wet, working it in his hands to build the lather before gently washing the remnants of her mascara.
She laughed softly and tipped her head back for him. “Do I look like a raccoon?”
“I was gonna go with masked crusader.” He chuckled, turning with her so she could lift her face into the spray. “Thank you for trusting me today. At the shelter,” he clarified when she scooped the water off her cheeks and looked at him with a frown. “It took some kind of guts for you to stand there behind me and not do something.”
“Guts?” She scoffed. “Right up until he said there was a woman upstairs with a bag of C4, I was doing everything I could think of not to pass out or start screaming. I hate how his voice has the power to trigger such panic in me.”
Nasa felt her shudder and saw the way her skin pebbled despite the heat of the shower.
“That Ghost got close like that is on me. I was in a rush to find the drive and I didn't clear the building or bring in Duke and Tobias, like I should have. I put everyone else's needs above yours, and I fucked up.”
The look she gave him in response was gentle and yet unimpressed. “I was in a rush, too, and if you'd said you wanted to clear the building and bring in Duke and Tobias, I would have shut you down because I was willing to put everyone else in the shelter's safety above yours. We fucked up, and we won't make that mistake again.”
He bent to rest his forehead against hers, assuring her that no, they would definitely not.
“It happened, and because you're a sneaky genius, we survived and got what we were after.”
Dillon made a fair point, but the fact remained, he'd failed in his primary job to put her first, no matter how much it might upset her or inconvenience someone else.
It was the first and last time he would ever give a fuck what anyone else might think or feel about how he went about protecting his woman. His treasure.
“Do you want to know when I realized I was falling in love with you?”
Nasa froze in the midst of scrunching a towel through Dillon's fair hair. His entire body tensed in response, waiting to hear her tell him.
It took him a breathless minute to realize she'd asked him a question.
“I do.”
She rolled her lips under her teeth, her fingers nervously tracing circles over his heart as though she was uncertain about how he felt.
“The night I woke up from my last nightmare, when I told you about how I had dreams of being in the hospital all alone with Ghost?”
Nasa swallowed hard, remembering exactly what she'd told him.
“You said you were looking for a dragon.”
Cheeks rosy, Dillon nodded. “When I woke up all I could think about was finding you because with you, I'd be safe. Then I opened the door, and you were already there.”
The importance of what she told him—that she'd felt that way even before he'd put his hands on her, before her second session with Collette, before the massage... incredible.
“I'll be your dragon, Dillon,” Nasa murmured, closing the scant distance between them to press his mouth against hers, whispering to her in between kisses. “No other treasure in the world could possibly be safer or more loved than mine.”
From a breath away, Nasa watched her pupils flare and constrict, Dillon's happiness and absolute adoration shining back at him as the gold flecks in her eyes flashed.
“I love you, too,” Dillon told him, the softly spoken words snaking around his heart like silk covered chains that would bind him to her for as long as he lived.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
PEN
“There’s a note.” Nasa told him, reaching out to grip his shoulder. His enormous paw was probably the only thing that kept Pen from swaying on his feet when he saw the slip of paper sticking out from the velvet.
Pen didn't even know what it said, but his heart was racing with fear. “You read it?”
“I did. There's not much there, but it's important.”
Pen nodded a little too quickly, a tremor quaking through his hand before he could stop it.
Afraid he'd drop the case and shatter the pen, he snapped it shut and tucked it inside his cut.
There wasn't a doubt in his mind who'd wrote the message, but as he read it once, twice, and a third time, Pen found himself getting irrationally pissed off again.
“I didn't run the number,” Nasa told him quietly. “And I don't understand why Ghost would pass this along after everything he did to keep us from finding Wren in the first place, but it wasn't my call to make.”
Pen stared so hard at the swirling loops and distinctive curls, they blurred. He didn't give a single fuck about why Ghost let him have this, not right now.
“Thanks,” he managed to force out, finding it harder and harder to breathe as hope started to slither through his defenses.
Nasa squeezed his shoulder hard enough to get Pen's attention, forcing him to drag his gaze away from the note.
“Whatever you need next, we're all here.”
Throat to tight to speak, all he could do was nod. Not wanting an audience if this turned out to be some kind of joke, or just another way for Ghost to fuck him over, Pen left the happy atmosphere of the family meal about to happen and retreated upstairs to his room.
He closed the door and leaned back against it, looking at the bookshelf where he kept his collection of all the glass pieces Wren deemed too flawed or poorly made to have sold. He had cups, a bowl full of marbles and colorful beads, animal figurines, a vase or two, and some plates.
So focused on dealing with the aftermath of the Leviathans’ attack on the compound, on getting Damon and Saint back safe, Pen hadn't noticed Wren was gone until it was too late.
She'd disappeared back into WITSEC, all her clothes and personal items gone from the house she'd rented, her studio cold and dark, and per the rules of the program, Wren hadn't left him with any way to contact her to tell her what a fucking prick he'd been.
After everything that happened, the fragile, flawed glass was all he'd had left of her.
Now, he had a note and a number, and part of him was terrified to make the call. Pen couldn't
count the nights he'd dreamed of finding her.
Of opening his eyes to see she was still curled up beside him on the porch swing, her hair trying to escape the braid she'd twisted it into.
Of walking into her studio to see her with a blow torch in hand, huge welding goggles on her face, and her tongue poked out to touch the corner of her lips as she concentrated.
But every time, he'd wake up alone, and she was gone. If this turned out to be another dream...
Pen blew out a harsh breath and staggered over to sit on the unmade bed, bracing his elbows on his knees as he held the note in one hand, and his phone in the other.
His thumb hovered over the screen, lips dry, heart pounding so hard he could feel it knocking against his ribs.
“Fuck,” he hissed furiously. Three years of waiting and he finally had a goddamn number to call. “Sack up, you coward.”
Pen hit the damn button, and put the phone to his ear. Just when he was sure he was about to be sent to voicemail, the call connected.
“Hello?” The quiet, uncertain murmur hit him, and every muscle in his body tightened in answer. Pen slammed his eyes shut, forcing every other sound away to focus on the voice.
For a second, Pen wasn't sure he'd be able to push words past the searing lump in his throat.
He started to see spots, stars dancing across his vision, but somehow, he managed to draw in enough air to speak.
“Where are you?”
Her voice hitched, and he felt it like a punch in the gut. “Pen?”
“Where are you?” he repeated, so torqued with tension he could feel himself shaking. She'd only said two words, but he would have recognized the sweet, husky sound of her voice anywhere.
“I'm... I'm safe. I'm okay.”
Thrilled as he was to hear it, Pen didn't give a shit. He needed to know where she was and figure out how fast he could get there, right now.
“Where. The fuck. Are you?”
She blew out an unsteady breath and the sound of her sniffle was muffled. He could hear the tears in her voice every bit as clearly as he could the sound of an engine starting somewhere in the distance.
“Just outside Temple.” Jesus Christ. Texas. She was in Texas, less than a hundred miles away.
He leapt to his feet, patting himself down to find the keys to his bike even as he headed for the door.
“Stay where you are. I'm on my way.”
“No!” she said quickly, causing Pen to freeze in place with his hand around the door knob.
“I thought you wanted to come home,” he forced himself to say, wondering if she'd actually written the note or if Ghost had and this was some kind of set up.
“I do, but I—”
“Are you alone?” Pen interrupted harshly. He couldn't think about how scared and vulnerable she sounded. He couldn't let his guard down until he was sure.
“Yes. You don't need to come get me because I'm already in the car. I had to stop and pee a little while ago, and I've been drinking this really gross coffee, and you know what happens to me when I drink coffee.”
He leaned forward to rest his forehead on the door, staring down at the scuffed-up leather of his boots, listening to her babble and stutter nervously.
He did know what happened when Wren drank coffee. She turned into the damn Energizer Bunny and would be bouncing off the walls all night. If she was already on her way to him, she'd be here in about an hour.
“Nasa said Ghost left him the pen. How’d you get him to do that?”
The sound of keys jangling and the low growl of the car starting almost covered up the sound of Wren letting out a slow, steady breath.
“He didn’t leave it behind. I did. I’ve been living in Santa Fe, and about two months ago, he found me and brought me back to Texas,” she admitted softly. “It’s a long story, but the short of it is we made a deal. He needed inside the shelter because I helped one of the girls escape, and if I did what he wanted, Ghost said he’d let me go.
“It wasn’t anything I couldn’t live with, so I made the deal. It felt like fate when I found this backpack with the NASA logo on it, you know?” Wren sniffled hard, her voice cracking as she got worked up.
Pen gritted his teeth, wanting nothing more in the world than to comfort her, to tell her everything would be all right, but the speed of her story increased, and he couldn’t get a word in edgewise.
“Like a reminder that if I did this one bad thing, maybe you’d find some way to forgive me, and I could come home. So I was like, ‘It’s no big deal. He isn’t asking me to kill anyone or hurt them, right?’ All I had to do was go into this women’s shelter and look for a flash drive.”
“And then I got in there, and after getting over how big the building was, I realized it was a fortress those dumbasses couldn’t get into, and for about a week, I just sat on my bunk and thought about trying to call you.
“But there were all these women in there with their kids, women just like me, trying to get away from some asshole making their lives a living nightmare, and I knew if I didn’t make good on the deal I made, all of them would suffer for it and it would be completely my fault.
“So, I started looking. All the cleaning that had to happen in there made it possible for me to search the place top to bottom, but I didn’t find anything, and he was getting impatient.
"I had to talk him down a few times, and I have no idea how I managed to hold him off as long as I did.
“A few days ago, he finally lost it, and said he was coming in to look for himself. That it was my choice whether he came in quiet and left the same way or made a mess to get what he wanted.
“Having seen firsthand what Ghost considers a mess, opening a window to let him in was the only way to make sure he didn’t kill anybody.
"I thought he’d be in and out before the sun came up, and I freaked out when the shelter manager came in at breakfast to say someone was coming to do some maintenance on the security system.
“I couldn’t sneak off to figure out if Ghost was gone yet or not, and then Patti had us all move into the game room a while later, and while I was trying to get upstairs and shut the window, I heard Nasa’s voice.”
Wren was crying in earnest now, and it gutted him to not reassure her everything would be okay. Pen swung back and forth between righteous rage and unbearable sympathy for what she must have gone through.
“I ran down to warn him, but I literally turned a corner and Ghost yanked me into one of the private rooms. He just held me there with him, didn’t say one word to me until Patti went up.
“I don’t even know how long he stayed with me there, watching everyone move around on the cameras from his phone. Then he was like, ‘Daddy has some business to take care of. Stay here and be a good girl until I tell you it’s safe.’ Which was so freaking creepy, and then he left.”
Wren’s voice dropping to a ridiculous mockery of Ghost’s voice would have been funny any other time, but not today. Now, as Pen pictured what she’d gone through, he felt sickened by his own selfishness.
If he hadn’t been such a bastard three years ago, maybe he could have convinced Wren to stay and let Perdition keep her safe. Instead, he’d chased her off, and she’d had to bear the burden of the consequences alone.
“I swear to god, I almost threw up on him, and part of me wishes I had. But nooo, I just waited right where he told me to until I found the balls to poke my head out of my little mouse hole.
“I thought he was talking to Nasa about honoring the deal they’d made, but then I heard a woman’s voice telling Ghost she deserved better for everything he’d put her through. I just… she sounded like Ever. Strong, you know?
“She wasn’t afraid, and it made me think about you, about how bad I wanted to come home, so I dug deep and found some balls big enough to get me through.
"I’d stashed my backpack right across from where I was, and I had my hand around the strap when I heard the gunshots. Then there was a dog going crazy, Patti shouting about the cop
s coming, and I… I panicked a little.
“I dropped the backpack by Nasa’s stuff and ran out just in time to get lost in the herd of women leaving the shelter.
"It was the second hardest thing I’d ever done to just stand there across the street and wait, surrounded by cops, Nasa literally within shouting distance.
“But by the time Ghost called to tell me I was free, Nasa and his woman were gone. Ghost said he’d gotten what he came for, and there would be a car parked in a lot three blocks away with the keys inside if I wanted to leave.
“The cops were still everywhere, and one of them walked me to the car. I just got in and left. I didn’t know if anyone would call this number or give a shit about me after everything that happened—”
Unable to stay quiet for a second more, Pen cut her off, “I give a shit, Wren. I’ve spent every day since you left kicking myself in the ass for being such a moron.
"You risked everything to come to us when Ghost took Saint and Damon, and then you were just fuckin’ gone. I have been looking for you. I've spent every goddamn day since you been gone, looking. I want you to keep driving. I want you to come home. You hear me?”
“Yes,” she hiccupped, her breath stuttering over the line as she tried to get it together. No lie, Pen’s eyes were burning, and there was no one to see the moisture he wiped off his face.
He turned around and put his back against the door, sliding down until his ass met the floor to sit there
“You remember how to get here?”
“I do.”
“Good. You keep comin’, baby. We’ll figure everything out when you get here. You’re almost home.”
Her breath hitched hard, but her voice was steady when she said, “I'm on my way.”
CHAPTER THIRTY
“You are never going to believe this!”
Dillon looked up to see Nasa heading toward her with a maniacal look of triumph on his face. He had the tablet he'd downloaded Ghost's drive onto in his hand, and she could practically feel the energy vibrating off him.
