Page 73 of Buried Past

He raised himself to his knees, bracing himself with one hand on my shoulder, while the other worked my jeans open. He took me in his hand, ruthlessly jacking until my vision blurred.

I bucked my hips and tried to slow him, but he leaned in and bit my shoulder. He milked me with both hands, with his chin hooked over my shoulder, panting hot in my ear.

I came hard enough that the edges of my vision went white, and I had to bite the inside of my cheek to keep from shouting. Dorian held me, cheek pressed to my chest, listening to the staccato pounding of my heart.

After, we lay tangled on the stripped mattress, our legs and arms a mess of old scars and new bruises. Dorian's eyes searched the concrete ceiling for patterns. He reached for his shirt and then let it drop halfway, as if he could not yet bear to dress again.

I propped myself on an elbow, watching him in the fluorescent glare. His hair stuck to the bandages at his hairline, and his lips were split, and still he was beautiful, beautiful in the way a dying star was beautiful: incandescent, impossible, already halfway to ruin.

I stroked his cheek. "You with me?"

"Yeah." He cleared his throat, and his voice was ragged. "We need to move. Michael's got a car out back, plates swapped."

We'd won the night, but the war wasn't over—and Hoyle wouldn't wait long to retaliate.

Chapter twenty

Dorian

The safehouse coffee tasted like burnt pennies, but I kept drinking it anyway—anything to occupy my hands. The concrete walls pressed close around us.

Matthew sat across from me at a fold-out table, cleaning his sidearm with methodical precision. Each click of metal against metal cut through the silence. Michael paced near the reinforced door, radio chatter crackling from his earpiece in sporadic bursts of coded updates.

Marcus claimed the corner by the supply cabinet, laptop balanced on his knees while he monitored police scanners and federal databases. The screen's blue glow highlighted his chiseled facial structure.

Matthew looked up. "Anything?"

Marcus answered. "Clean so far, but that won't last. Hoyle's people will regroup quickly."

I took another sip of the metallic coffee and tried not to think about warehouse chairs and zip ties. The burn on my wrists had stopped bleeding, but the skin still felt wrong—tender and twitchy, like it remembered being restrained better than I did.

I shifted in my seat, careful to keep my hands in sight, even though no one here would hurt me. My body hadn't gotten the memo. It still braced for orders, curled tight around old reflexes I thought I'd buried years ago. It was still hours until dawn.

Glancing over at the corner of the room, I spotted a plastic laundry basket half-full of mismatched socks and an unopened package of Hanes briefs. Someone had stocked the safehouse like a bachelor pad for one very paranoid man.

I nudged the basket with my foot. "This place has bulletproof doors and six kinds of surveillance, but whoever packed it still thought we'd need fresh underwear."

Matthew looked up from his sidearm, lips twitching. "Maybe he believed in clean starts."

"Or maybe he just really hated doing laundry," I muttered.

Marcus didn't even blink. "There's also a rice cooker in the cabinet. Name's probably Todd."

Matthew's phone buzzed against the table. He glanced at the display and frowned.

"Unknown number."

The phone buzzed again. Then again.

I set my cup down. "Let me see it."

Matthew slid the device across the table to me. The message appeared innocent enough—a string of numbers and letters that looked like random keystrokes. GPS coordinates followed by what most people would dismiss as autocorrect failures.

But buried in the digital gibberish, four words in Pashto made my blood turn to ice water: "Zuma wror pak di"—My brother is clean.

The phone slipped from my fingers, clattering against the table.

"Dorian?" Matthew's voice sounded far away.

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