Page 61 of Dagger

He shifted slightly and the very air that filtered over his naked body was friction enough, sharpening the awareness. His body stirred before his mind caught up, disoriented, weighted by the heaviness of sleep. He drifted in that place between sleeping and waking, caught up in the kind of dream that was as elusive as fog.

The air smelled of sex and warm skin, a hint of an elusive perfume clinging to the sheets, to him, to the space between them. A place where control was overshadowed by connection, and just a taste of it had him hungering for more, that hunger was loneliness that had shadowed him for a long damn time, affecting everything between him and his heart, Brian, the team, the boys…and…her.

His internal clock ticked in warning, zero six hundred was fast approaching, and duty, as always, was waiting. Yet for the first time, he decided that duty could wait just a second. The act of possessing her again was nothing more than a roll, bodies touching, fusing, meshing.

Her touch jolted him like a charge, everything from last night slamming into place. Quinn. Her hands. Her mouth. Her surrender. His own. Not just lust. Not just release. It was something deeper, something tangled and dangerous and impossible to ignore. Something that cracked through the armor he’d kept bolted around his heart since the day she’d looked at him like he was the enemy. This was a place of fear…of vulnerability, of taking off armor and being exposed. Of trusting in something that was bigger than himself, something that had such a huge chance of wounding him severely.

Her hand on him. Soft. Slow. Deliberate. It increased the hunger at the same time as it mended something inside him that he’d thought broken beyond repair. Fingertips dragged lightly across his chest, tracing him like a memory he didn’t deserve to keep. He clenched his jaw.That was the guilt talking.It wastime for him to assess exactly what he did deserve. What he could live and not live without.

Her caress wasn’t just the touch he craved. It was a revelation.

She no longer hated him.

That touch said it all. She didn’t see him as the enemy anymore. She wasn’t reaching out of obligation or loneliness or need. She was reaching for him of her own free will. His throat contracted. There were times misery dogged him, especially after he’d taken her sons, when he could barely breathe at the memory of her collapse, her pain, and his helplessness. There was that control again, something he thought he could wield, but it wasn’t a sword or a shield…it didn’t hurt anyone but himself.

God, that meant everything.

It cracked something open inside him, a door he hadn’t dared try to unlock. A possibility he’d buried so deep beneath guilt and grief he didn’t recognize the shape of it anymore. But now it was here. Rising. Real.

She’d willingly given herself to him. She’d soothed him with her words, supported him in his spirals, cherished him with her hands, her voice, her sweet, sweet body. Last night hadn’t been about possession. It hadn’t been about comfort or relief or drowning out the pain. It had been something far more intimate.

It had been a claiming.

Not of body, but of space. Heart-space.

Their bodies had fused, meshed, tangled together, but that wasn’t what kept him awake now. It was this—this simple, sacred act of her reaching for him after everything. The gentleness of it. The grace. The kind of grace only Quinn Cole could give, fierce and raw and soul-deep.

She deserves happiness, healing, and her boys back. She deserves to move on?—

With you?Tex had asked. Dagger had wanted to throw those words back at him. But they'd stuck, lodged under his skin, echoing louder now, rattling around in his chest like a truth he hadn’t wanted to face.

Yes.The answer roared in his mind now, undeniable.

His heart contracted, tight, sharp, then expanded with something like clarity. The question that had clawed at him since the team’s intervention washed over him again. But this time, he didn’t flinch. Didn’t recoil into that cold, shadowed place inside him. He didn’t let the monster wave of guilt and fear drag him under.

Instead, he stood in it, let it come, let it batter him. Finally, he looked. Really looked at the wounds he’d been ignoring. Wounds that had festered not just from loss, but from refusal. His refusal to see things as they were.

What did he want?

It was a brutal question. A loaded one. But he met it head-on now, no escape routes left.

He’d spent years disciplining himself not to want her. Trained himself to keep his walls up, to never let her breach his heart. Because she had belonged to Brian. That was a line he never allowed himself to cross, not even in thought.

But the truth was uglier, more painful than that. Brian hadn’t just been his brother, he’d been his compass, the one who taught him what being a man meant when their father couldn’t. Dagger had watched him lose himself in Quinn, be terrified of losing her even while pushing her away. He saw the love turn to fear, the fear to distance, and still he hadn’t stepped in. He hadn’t known how.

Then Brian died, and Quinn was no longer his. Had she ever really been? Another wound, another scar he never tended.

God, he’d been so fucking afraid. Her hatred had gutted him. Her silence had torn him apart. Watching her spiral, helplessto stop it, had been its own form of torture. So, he did what he’d always done. He pulled back, and distance had severed the connection. None of that had protected him.

Those kids…they needed him after he’d taken them from their mother. Lost, bereft, still feeling their father’s death, they were so young without the wisdom to understand any of it. Her touch got bolder, pressing into his skin like she needed something from inside him, and he ached with the pleasure of it. Dagger forced himself to think about those kids, and Tex’s words gnawed at him.

He’d tried to remain in the shadows, but Quinn and the boys wouldn’t let him. He swallowed hard. He’d already acted like a father, and he’d never stopped loving Quinn. He told himself the boys weren’t his. When she recovered, they’d go back to her, and he’d fade from their lives again. Even when she’d said in her office that she wanted him gone, he’d had no idea how hard that would hit.

Losing her was a pattern. When he’d first met her, he’d lost her even before he had a chance to find her. He’d lost her a second time when she blamed him for Brian’s death. He’d lost her again when he was forced to take her children. Not because he wanted to, but because he had to. Because someone had to protect them, even if it meant becoming the villain in her eyes.

Now…lying here in the echo of her touch, in the scent of her skin, the silence wasn’t hollow anymore. It was full. Full of truths he couldn’t keep pretending didn’t exist.

He wanted her. Fiercely. Not as a possession, but in a way that lived in his bones. She was his, not by claim, not by conquest, but in something older, deeper. Something that felt… inevitable. Those boys, his nephews, first, yes. But now his sons. Biologically, undeniably. They needed a father.

---