Page 80 of Thorne
"Thorne?"
Her voice is a fragile rasp, barely a thread of sound. I stop, my palm flat against the cold doorjamb, my boots anchored to the threshold. I don't turn around, but her presence behind me is a physical weight: the heat of her, the marks I've left, the debt that is starting to feel less like a ledger and more like a tether.
"Are you … Are you coming back?"
The question isn't a plea. It's an admission. It's the sound of her reaching for the very thing that breaks her because it's the only thing that makes her feel alive.
I look down at my hand on the doorjamb, my knuckles still white. I shouldn't. I should stay out there with the team, with the maps, the strategy, and the clean, tactical reality of the mission. I should put a wall between us that doesn't have a door.
"I shouldn't." The words are low and heavy, carrying a reluctance that tastes like defeat.
I turn my head just enough to catch her in my periphery. She's still braced against the wall, the shirt hanging off one shoulder, her gaze fixed on me with a terrifying, quiet honesty. The sex is becoming a bond, a dark, pulsing wire between us that neither of us knows how to cut.
"But after I put Lily to bed, I'll come." The promise is dark and inevitable.
She nods, a slow, deliberate movement of acceptance. There's no fear in the gesture, only a recognition of the gravity pulling us toward each other.
I slide the bolt home, the mechanical clack sounding less like a prison lock and more like a secret being kept.
22
High Engine Brain
JULIANNA
He saidhe was coming back, but minutes turn to hours, and he doesn't come. That should relieve me. Instead, I curl into a ball and cry myself to sleep. My dreams are dark, twisted, and unclean. I don't know what's happening, except I feel as if I'm losing myself to the darkness that is Thorne's anger.
Morning finds the air in the safe room stagnant, heavy with the scent of cedar and the lingering, copper tang of the debt. I wake to the turn of the electronic bolt, a sound that should trigger terror but sends a treacherous, electric jolt through my chest.
I try to shift on the mattress, and the world turns into a jagged map of fire. The swelling has set in—heavy, hot, and pulsing. The twelve deep, purple-red welts across the back of my legs are a physical ledger, each one a throb that keeps time with my heart.
Thorne doesn't stay in the doorway. He steps inside; the heavy steel door swinging shut with a finality that swallows the light from the hallway. He doesn't say a word, just looks at me, his eyes dark and starved, tracking the way I flinch as I try to sit.
There's a gravity between us now, something warped and magnetic that defies the bruises he gave me and the guilt I carry. It's a sick, pulsing tether that neither of us knows how to cut.
He's at the edge of the mattress in two strides. His fingers hooking into the waistband of my sweats, and his touch is less like an officer and more like a drowning man reaching for a lifeline. There is no calculated anger in his movements this time—just a relentless, crushing need that seems to mirror the ache in my own bones.
He enters me in one deep, punishing slide that knocks the air from my lungs. I cry out, my head hitting the cinder block with a dull thud, but I don't pull away. I wrap my arms around his neck, my fingers digging into the heavy nylon of his tactical vest, pulling him closer, needing the weight of him to anchor me against the pain.
"I hate this," he gasps against the column of my throat, his voice a raw, broken rasp that vibrates through my entire frame. He isn't moving with the precision of a soldier anymore; he's moving with the desperation of a man possessed. "I hate every second I spend in this room, and I hate myself for the way I can't stay out of it."
He grips the back of my head, his fingers tangling in my hair, forcing my eyes to meet his. The conflict in his gaze is a violent storm of loathing and absolute, starving necessity.
"I hate what you are. I hate what you've done to my life." His breath is hot and jagged against my lips. "But God help me, I can't breathe until I'm inside you."
He buries his face in the crook of my neck, his body shaking with a tremor he can't mask. It's a confession that tastes like ash. We aren't just breaking the rules; we're dismantling ourselves, piece by piece, in the dark of this cell.
"Say it," he commands, his voice dropping to a lethal, pained growl as he drives into me again. "Tell me you're as ruined by this as I am."
"Worse than ruined." The words break against his lips like glass. I'm not just breaking. I'm dissolving into the very thing that should make me recoil. "I'm grateful for the weight of you, because it's the only thing heavy enough to keep me from drifting away into my cowardice."
I should be screaming. Every rational, surviving part of the woman I used to be—the architect who commanded rooms, the woman who would have destroyed any man who dared to lay a hand on her—should be clawing for the door. I should be demanding justice against a man who thinks he can take me against a cinder block wall and call it balancing a ledger.
But I don't. I can't. Because the justice I deserve is a grave. Thorne is giving me a different kind of ending.
He isn't just taking me to task for the twelve names from the briefing. He's holding me accountable for the one thing I can't forgive myself for: Lily.
I don't hate him for the belt. I don't hate him for the way he uses my body to bleed out his rage.
