Page 39 of The Foreman
"I'm not telling. I need both of us to be focused on the job at hand."
"You two do realize everything you're saying to each other is being broadcast over the comms, right?" Gavin's voice broke in. "Stay sharp, and let's get this done."
The elevator inside the high-rise hummed as it climbed, each floor another drumbeat in Macy’s chest. Trace stood at her side, silent, weapon concealed but close. Their reflection glinted backat them in polished steel, his body taut with control and hers thrumming with defiance. She reached out, lacing her fingers through his. He didn’t pull away.
When the doors slid open, Meridian’s CEO stood waiting in the hallway, posture relaxed yet menacing, as if he had known all along they would come straight to him.
Dorian Kells was taller than she remembered from the dossiers, his suit tailored to a lethal edge and his smile curling with predatory amusement. Two guards bracketed him on either side, their holstered weapons displayed like warnings rather than hidden threats.
“Macy Dane,” he drawled, like her name amused him. “The infamous scapegoat.”
Her smile was pure venom. “Better infamous than irrelevant.”
Kells chuckled. “You walked right back into the fire. Very brave, or very, very foolish.”
“Funny,” she said, stepping forward with a tilt of her head, “people keep confusing survival with stupidity. I’ve made a career out of proving them wrong, and you’re about to learn that the hard way.”
Trace’s hand twitched near his Glock, the urge to draw sharp in his veins, but he forced himself to hold back. He let Macy speak, let her own the space, his restraint a dangerous act of trust.
The negotiation that followed was anything but civil. Every exchange cut sharper than steel, words turned into weapons as Kells tried to dominate the room. His arrogance bled through with every sneer, and in his hunger to boast he revealedmore than he should have. The feeds captured it all: contracts siphoned off, agents bought with dirty money, assassins dispatched in the dark. Each slip was another chain tightening around his throat, another nail sealing his fate.
But predators never fall without a fight, and Kells was the kind who would bare his teeth and strike until the very last breath.
The first shot blew out the window in a spray of glittering shards, the round burning past Macy’s ear close enough to stir her hair. The room erupted in violence, glass raining down as Trace yanked her to the floor and covered her with his body.
The room shook with gunfire and the shriek of tearing metal. Hawke’s rifle cracked from his perch, each shot echoing like a hammer strike, while Reed slammed through the doorway with the force of a charging bull. Jesse’s clipped commands snapped through the comms, crisp against the chaos. Silver Spur’s trap closed with brutal precision, but Meridian’s mercenaries poured in wave after wave, their weapons flashing, intent on drowning the room in blood.
Macy dove behind the conference table, lungs burning, adrenaline hammering through her veins until the roar in her ears drowned out everything else. Splinters stung her palms as she braced against the floor. Trace dropped to cover her body with his own. His eyes were hard with lethal focus, every line of his body radiating controlled violence. “You good?”
She grinned through ragged breaths, forcing lightness into her tone. “Still breathing, and you?”
He crushed his mouth to hers in a hard, savage kiss that stole her breath, then tore away and drew his Glock. His eyes blazed with promise and fury as he said, “Stay low. We finish this together.”
The battle raged through shattered glass and twisted steel. Bullets ripped through the air, ricocheting off walls, while bodies slammed against desks and blood streaked the floor. The stench of cordite and copper clung to the back of Macy’s throat, every breath raw with smoke. She moved with Trace, instincts sharpened by fear and determination, her muscles taut with the certainty that hesitation meant death.
When a merc lunged from Trace’s blind side, weapon raised, Macy’s pulse spiked but her hands were steady. She yanked Trace's backup Glock from the holster at his hip.Front sight. Cut the noise. Elbows in. Press. Reset. Press.She leaned over his back, and squeezed the trigger, the recoil jolting up her arm as the weapon thundered. The crack of the shot rattled through her bones as the man pitched forward in a brutal collapse. Trace spun toward her, eyes wide, and for the first time she saw something brighter than his instinct to shield her—pride, raw and consuming, etched into every hard line of his face.
“Don’t look at me like I guessed,” she said, breath steadying. “Center mass is what I do at the range.”
When the smoke finally thinned, Kells sagged to his knees, wrists lashed tight, the damning evidence streaming live across secured feeds. The shattered conspiracy lay exposed at their feet, every lie dragged into the light. Macy’s name was no longer a stain but a banner reclaimed, her life pulled back from the edge.
But victory carried its own price. Reed was bleeding from a graze along his ribs, Hawke hobbled with a bruised leg, andTrace had been grazed high in the shoulder when he shoved her out of the path of a second shot. She pressed her hands against the wound, anger and terror twisting together in her chest.
“Don’t you dare leave me,” she hissed.
His grin was weak but defiant. “Not a chance. You’d never let me rest in peace.”
She kissed him, fierce and unrelenting, her tears hot against his cheek. “Damn right.”
Later, in their secure room at the club, when the adrenaline ebbed and silence replaced chaos, Macy tended his wound herself. The intimacy of it broke something open between them. He let her undress him, let her clean and wrap the injury, let her hands linger not just in care but in claim. When he finally pulled her against him, it wasn’t dominance that guided him but devotion.
“I failed someone once,” he said, voice low. “I keep waiting for that day to circle back. It will not be you.”
Their lovemaking was slow and reverent, every touch steeped in heat and fragility, the kind that blurred the edges between triumph and surrender. Trace’s hands quivered as he whispered her name against her throat, the sound raw with need. Macy’s voice broke on a whisper of love, her own fingers trembling as they traced the lines of his back.
They clung to each other with desperate urgency, bodies pressed tight as if the room itself might shatter around them and only their embrace could keep the world from breaking apart.
When sleep finally came, Macy’s last thought was not of fear but of triumph. She had walked through fire, faced monsters, and saved the man she loved. She was no pawn. She was hislover, his submissive, but also his equal and together they had burned Meridian’s empire to the ground... with a little help from their friends.
