Page 34 of Ranger's Honor
My chest fractures. Everything in me breaks open and settles all at once. Vulnerability slices through me—sharp, unfamiliar, terrifying. Because saying it out loud means surrendering the last piece of armor I’ve been clinging to.
I thrust once more, burying myself to the hilt as I spill into her.
"I love you," I grit out, forehead pressed to hers. "You’re everything."
She smiles through the tears on her lashes.
Her smile steals my breath, but it’s the way her scent wraps around me—warm, wild, undeniable—that seals it. There’s no going back now. She’s mine in every way that matters. And God help anyone who tries to take her from me.
Somewhere beyond these walls, the world is still moving, threats still circling. But right now, I have her. And I’ll be ready when the first one dares to step out of the shadows.
CHAPTER 13
KARI
Iwake to the slow, pulsing ache of Dalton’s bite low in my neck, the heat of it still thrumming beneath skin tender from his claim. The sheets are twisted around my thighs, warm with the imprint of our bodies, and for a moment, I let myself feel it—how right it felt to be held, to be chosen, even if the world outside might tear it all away. The scent in the air is unmistakably us. Musk, salt, and the faint sweetness of my shampoo still clinging to his skin.
Early light filters through the curtains in hazy gold, casting a glow that catches drifting dust motes and bathes the room in quiet stillness. Everything feels saturated with what happened between us. The ache, the scent, the warmth—it’s all a vivid echo of surrender and everything it altered.
The mattress dips under his weight, his chest a solid wall at my back, breath steady at my nape. There’s a deep, bone-heavy warmth in the room, the kind that speaks of safety, of belonging. My body is sore in ways that have nothing to do with pain and everything to do with him—his hands, his mouth, the way he claimed me like he’d been waiting his whole life to.
Still, it’s that pulsing ache in my neck—warm and insistent—that centers me in this moment, reminding me what we are now.What I am to him. What he’s becoming to me. The pressure isn’t painful—it’s a steady beat that hums in the background of my awareness, a low, rhythmic beat that anchors me to this moment and the mark he left behind. Like a brand that belongs.
His arm is heavy across my waist, holding me fast with a quiet possessiveness that makes something deep in me settle. There’s a safety in the weight of him, a sheltering pressure that eases the last tendrils of uncertainty from my chest. For the first time in what feels like forever, my breath doesn’t catch at shadows or what-ifs. I let myself believe—if only for this moment—that I’m not alone anymore. That maybe I never was.
His body is warm against mine, breath steady, one leg tangled with mine like he’s still holding on even in sleep. Everything feels... right in a way that slips past logic and lodges deep beneath my ribs.
That’s the word that keeps echoing. I don’t feel owned or overtaken. I feel rooted. Centered. Like something inside me has locked into place.
I ease myself upright, careful not to wake him as I slip from beneath the sheets and pad toward the bathroom. The mirror catches my reflection, and for a second, I don’t recognize the woman I see there. Hair wild, bite dark and healing, eyes bright. There’s a confidence in my posture that wasn’t there before, a steady flame where self-doubt used to flicker, where I used to second-guess every move, every instinct. Now, I stand like someone who knows her own strength and isn’t afraid to wield it. There's a steadiness in my spine that doesn’t depend on anyone else’s validation.
He didn’t make me strong. He just reminded me I already was.
I head downstairs, still rubbing the last of the sleep from my eyes, and move straight to the kitchen. My hands move on autopilot as I brew a cup of coffee, the familiar rhythmgrounding me while the weight of everything starts to settle deep in my bones. The machine hisses softly, and the rich scent of roasted beans slowly fills the air, curling upward in warm tendrils that offer something close to comfort.
By the time I make it to the table, that same scent lingers like a promise. The tile is cool beneath my bare feet—solid, anchoring. I wrap my fingers tighter around the warm ceramic mug and take a slow sip, the bitter edge cutting clean through the fog of sleep and leftover heat.
There’s a different kind of tension humming through my system now—not the kind that made my limbs melt beneath his hands last night, but something sharper. More urgent. And yet, beneath that urgency, a quiet awareness lingers. The knowledge that he’s upstairs, likely sprawled across the sheets, warm and strong and mine for however long the world lets me keep him.
His presence anchors me in a way nothing else ever has. There’s weight to it, a dense kind of comfort that wraps around me like a quilt still warm from the dryer. The ache in my neck dulls beneath the steady rhythm of my heartbeat, soothed by the simple fact that he’s here. It doesn’t dissolve the tension, but it reshapes it—steadies the chaos in my chest just enough for my focus to sharpen. The energy inside me coils tight, not frantic, but ready. Like the charged stillness before a storm. My mind is already shifting, switching gears.
The lingering imprint of last night coats me; not just in scent, but in sensation. It clings like heat trapped after lightning, lingering in the ache between my thighs. It's a visceral, lingering reminder not just of the physical, but of the emotional realignment last night carved into me. For the first time, I let myself want something real, something more. And now, that want hums like a struck chord still reverberating, at the base of my spine like the aftermath of a slow-burning storm. It pulses through my bloodstream, speeds up my heart, tightens behindmy ribs like a piano wire drawn too tight as I settle at the table. My thoughts begin to move—measured, strategic—threading together files, patterns, names that haven’t made sense yet but soon might.
I fire up the laptop, ignore the low battery warning, and open the decryption string Gage sent me. The one he said was'buried so deep you’d need divine intervention and a gallon of caffeine to crack.'
Luckily, I’ve got both.
Lines of code tumble across the screen, slow and stubborn. I trace each one manually, muttering under my breath. Something’s off. A delay in one sequence. A redundant loop in another.
A cold thread knots low in my gut, tightening with every heartbeat.
I isolate the string. Run it again.
It’s a tracker.
A spike of disbelief lances through my chest, sharp and disorienting. No. No, this can’t be right.
The realization doesn't crash in—it seeps, slow and jagged, like frost spreading across glass, delicate and merciless, threading into my chest and locking around my lungs. I reread the line once. Twice. Each pass burrows deeper, stripping the air from my lungs. My heart jolts hard enough to hurt, and my hands tremble as I lean closer, willing the screen to rewrite itself. It doesn't.
