A Night She Wired Shut

1. Prologue

The run light made a hard pool on the grass and left the ditch black. Mara was already down in it, yellow boots planted wide, canvas vest hanging open off her shoulders so the heat could leave her back. Shorts gone. Knees sunk. The chain-link threw a thin grid of shadow across the heavy hang of her breasts and the soft fold of her stomach, and every time she shifted, the grid moved with her.

Brunt’s breath hit the nape of her neck, wet and regular. The red collar rode her spine when he adjusted. A spike kissed skin, then left it. His chest covered her from shoulders to the swell of her hips, dark fur dragging sweat into lines. She had both hands in the grass. The blades were dry. They pricked her palms. She did not look at the outer fence. Looking would have given the phone a face.

“Brunt,” she said. Ordinary. A handler’s word.

He answered by mounting cleaner than the first nights, forelegs locking around the give of her ribs. Claws dimpled, did not break. The blunt heat of him slid along the inside of her thigh, missed, smeared her, came back. She reached under her own belly with one shaking hand and set him where her body had already opened for the wait. The sound she made at the catch was small and ugly and entirely hers.

Thick. Slow on the first push, then not slow. Her cunt took him in a burning give that climbed into her stomach, and the grass tipped closer to her mouth. She braced. He drove short, the way he always did once he was seated, hips snapping, tag knocking the collar, each stroke shoving her breasts forward and dragging them back. Sweat ran under the fold of her belly and into the crease of her hip. She heard herself, wet, and the low pant above her, and nothing from the ditch except the faint tick of a phone held too long.

She had a sentence for morning. Mouth. Latch. Cover. It would not fit in her mouth now. What fit was the stretch, the weight, the way her thighs shook and still pushed back because stopping had a price she had already counted in the office.

The swell started at her entrance, a pressure that stopped being a thrust and became a claim. She felt it grow against the rim of her, impossible, then past the rim, sealing. A tug to test it yanked a broken noise out of her chest. He stilled over her, tongue dripping on her shoulder, and pulsed. Heat flooded deep, beat after beat, held where she could not spill it yet. Her arms failed a fraction. Her cheek met grass. The knot kept them. Beyond the wire the light did not blink.

Her fingers tore a root loose and stayed clenched around it, mid-breath, the next surge already rising.

1. Chapter 1: The Rider

The group chat had already stacked three blue bubbles under her name by the time she set the phone face-down on the porch rail. Sick kid. Dead truck. Could Mara cover. She watched a fly work the lip of her glass and did not flip the screen back over. Heat sat in the boards. It sat in the waistband of her cut-offs, under the weight of her stomach, in the crease where her breasts met the damp cotton of a tank gone soft from wash. Thirty-one, and the porch still felt like a place where she was allowed to say no.

She said it. Typed it once, short, and put the phone down again.

The owner called anyway. Deposition boxes thumped in his back seat while he talked, latch this, rider that, her name on the line that kept the deductible off his desk. The other two were out. If nobody slept in the office trailer, the big dogs went a night without a person on the property. He did not raise his voice. He did not have to. The rider had her signature in a hand she barely remembered using.

“I already told them no,” she said.

“Tell them you’ll do the one night. Buyer’s coming after, and the near run looks like hell if nobody walks it.”

A moth battered the porch bulb. She shifted her hips and the chair creaked under her, a sound she had stopped hearing ...