Page 14 of The Guarded Monster’s Truth

The bed sits six inches to my left. My cheek rests against his chest, the purr still running beneath my ear, softer now, a low idle instead of the storm. His arm lies heavy across my back. Pushpins press into the carpet around us, scattered from the corkboard, and at least four of them stick into his back because he hasn't moved and doesn't seem to care.

The scanner on the desk cycles through frequencies. The green light sweeps left to right, left to right. Soft static layers underneath the rumble in his chest.

I smell us. His scent, warm, sharp, the one I couldn't name when it soaked into the sheets, mixes with mine. Two weeks of his touch transferring what I now understand is him into my skin. I smell like Benjamin Walker. And underneath the sweat and the sex, I smell like his.

Dawn pushes through the window in slow blue increments. I trace the scar on his shoulder with my fingertip, pale and raised, the kind a knife leaves when it goes in. I don't ask. He'll tell me when he's ready, or he won't, and I've learned more about this man through what he doesn't say than what he does.

His arm tightens around my back. I press my ear closer to his chest. The purr floods me. His heartbeat runs underneath it, steady and slow, and the tension that lives in his body every waking minute has gone quiet for the first time since I walked into this compound. His breathing catches once, holds, then steadies.

Chapter 6

Bruiser

My phone has gone quiet. Two weeks of blocked calls, hang-ups that hit my voicemail at two a.m., four a.m. and six a.m. because Heckland still runs on Langley time. Then nothing. The screen sits dark on the nightstand, and after eleven years, I know what it means when an agency goes quiet. It means they've found another way in.

Ava sleeps in my bed with one arm thrown across the space where I don't sleep. The sheets carry both of us now. My scent layered over hers, thick enough that every orc and minotaur in this compound read it the moment Finn opened the kitchen this morning at six and the hallway draft pulled air from under my door. By breakfast, Garrett will know. Colt will know. Knox already knows and said what he needed to say days ago.

I stand at the window with a cold coffee and watch her breathe. Her notebook lies closed on the nightstand next to my phone.

The scanner cycles frequencies behind me. Green light sweeping left to right, left to right. Empty channels.

I should let her sleep, and I should handle Heckland, the sedan, the agency cleanup through Church the way I've handled every threat for eight years. Alone, in the dark, with the brothers finding out after the dust clears. The safe play. The useful play.

Instead I pour my cold coffee down the drain, make two fresh cups, and sit at the kitchen table and wait for her to wake up.

She comes out in my t-shirt with her hair knotted on top of her head and pillow lines on her left cheek. She drops into the chair across from me and picks up the mug I left there.

"You're staring."

"I need to tell you something."

She sets her cup down. Her eyes stay level.

"I grew up on a cattle ranch in central Montana. Twelve hundred acres, no neighbors, and a man named Frank Walker who paid me room and board for fence work starting when I was sixteen." The coffee burns my palm through the ceramic but I don't put it down. "I could carry posts the other hands needed a truck for. Frank didn't ask questions about where I came from. He just needed the labor."

Ava doesn't move, doesn't reach for her pen.

"CIA recruited me at twenty-two. A man named Heckland drove to the ranch and told me my size and my ability to retain faces made me valuable to national security. I believed him because nobody had ever called me valuable before." I set the mug down. "Five years of operations. Surveillance, infiltration, asset management. Then they gave me the Feral Sons assignment. Infiltrate the club, document the membership, map the compound, and report back so they could dismantle the largest organized monster community on the West Coast."

"And you did it."

"I drove to Nightfall Cove. I sat at Knox's table. He poured me a drink and asked me where I came from, and for the first time in my life, the question sounded like he wanted to hear the answer." My thumb traces the ceramic handle. "Within six months I knew the agency didn't want integration intel. They wanted a blueprint for dismantling the only people who ever treated me like one of their own."

"So you went rogue."

"I burned Heckland. Stopped reporting. Destroyed the uplink and the dead drops and everything they gave me except the skills I couldn't unlearn. Eight years ago." I meet her eyes across the table. "Knox is the only one who knows. I told him the day I burned it. He let me stay."

"Five years of operations gave me access to things they can't declassify and can't risk me carrying. Eight years on my own gave me more." I nod toward the wall behind me. "My boards map every operational pattern the agency ran through the Pacific Northwest since I went rogue. They don't know how much I've documented. That's why they can't let me walk."

She holds my gaze for long enough that the coffee goes from hot to warm between us. No follow-up questions. The journalist in her reads the room better than any handler I've worked with, and right now she sees that I'm not finished.

"The agency valued me because I could remember faces and crack channels. The ranch valued me because I could carry fence posts. This club values me because I watch for threats. I've never—" I stop. I can't finish it. "Nobody's ever kept me because they wanted me there."

Ava doesn't look away. "I didn't sleep with you because you're useful, Bruiser." She picks up her mug. "What does that tell you?"

The silence fills the kitchen. I don't have an answer. She drinks, and the quiet between us settles without breaking. She lets the question sit the way a good journalist does. Not because she's patient, but because she recognizes when the answer isn't ready yet.

Church meets at nine. I stand at the head of the table and brief the brothers on everything I gave Ava an hour ago.