I know the main event was epic but we have to celebrate this because that match between Fénix and Laredo Kid was amazing. How many Mexican muscle busters did it take to end Laredo kids' reign?
Can't wait to see what happens next and who he's gonna defend the title with.....maybe Master Gable will be a part of that 🤷🏻♀️
8 title defences in 84 days. Next one with Rey Mysterio and Dragon Lee is back 👏🏻👏🏻
By the way if they are gonna make Je'von the next IC champion they should do it at a ple especially if they make him the youngest ever. That's just my opinion.
Catch up here: Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Part 7
Two days later, the heavy doors of the clinic opened, and Tama walked in. He looked at his son, pale but breathing steadily on the monitors, and then looked at Cameron. The dark circles under his eyes spoke of a man fighting a war on two fronts. "I'm transferring him to the hospital today," Tama said, his voice flat, leaving no room for argument. "My men have secured the entire top floor of Mercy General. The doctors there are on my payroll."
Cameron paused, checking Kiko's IV line. "He's stable enough to move, but the transport is risky."
"He can't stay here. The estate is a fortress, but it’s also a target," Tama replied heavily. He stepped closer, his gaze dropping to where her hands rested on the rail of the bed. "I need you to take him, Cameron. Ride in the transport. Make sure he stays breathing until he’s behind their doors."
For a moment, Cameron thought he might refuse to let her out of the house, might retreat back into the old violence, the old certainty of keeping his possessions locked away. But he was trusting her with his legacy outside his walls.
The transport was a blur of tactical vests, black SUVs, and blinding ambulance lights. Cameron sat in the back with Kiko, monitoring his vitals like a hawk while heavily armed enforcers flanked them on all sides. When they finally rolled him through the secure, private entrance of the hospital, Kiko opened his eyes groggily.
He looked at Cameron, the practiced sneer and cultivated boredom of his teenage years washed away, replaced with something raw and naked. He looked like a child, lost in a world he’d only pretended to understand. His lips were parched and cracked; his skin, once the tawny gold of someone who lived outdoors, looked sallow and almost translucent under the fluorescent lights. The monitors above his bed charted the faltering stutter of his heart, the shallow draw of each breath, as if his body still wasn’t convinced it was allowed to keep living. “Where’s my mom?” he rasped, voice barely clearing the phlegm in his throat. The syllables sounded wrong in his mouth, as if he’d never practiced saying them before.
Cameron felt her own face tighten, a cold knot twisting behind her sternum. “Just rest, Kiko,” she said, and smoothed the rumpled blanket over his legs. Her hand lingered for a moment, as if the mere act of tucking him in could shield him from the layered betrayals unfolding outside.
———
Two weeks later the rain fell in sheets, a cold, biting downpour that turned the manicured lawns of the cemetery into a sea of grey and green.
It was a stark, brutal contrast to the opulent, gilded cage of the syndicate. A sea of black umbrellas surrounded the gravesite, held by dozens of massive, silent men in dark suits. The Italians had drawn blood, and the entire underground was watching to see how the Tama would bury his dead.
Cameron stood near the front, wrapped in a heavy black wool coat Elena had left in her room that morning. She wasn't hidden in the back, and she wasn't treated like a prisoner. Tama had placed her exactly two steps behind his right shoulder. It was a silent, terrifying message to everyone present: She is mine, and she is untouchable.
Tama stood sentry at the edge of his Kalina’s grave, motionless against the relentless rain. The deluge soaked through his tailored jacket and sheeted over his face, but he didn’t flinch or blink, didn’t so much as reach up to wipe the water from his eyes. He simply looked down, one hand wrapped around the other wrist in a white-knuckled grip as the casket began its slow descent. The people assembled behind him saw a pillar of control, an architect of violence rendered immovable in the rawness of loss. If any of them wondered at the absence of sorrow on his face, they kept it to themselves. All were careful not to meet his eyes too long, as if each expected him to mistake their curiosity for treachery and answer it accordingly.
Cameron, standing in the shivering crowd , watched him with a kind of anthropological fascination. There was nothing performative in his grief, it was not the public keening of a man undone, but something so private and well-defended that even he seemed unsure where to find it. If his wife’s passing had left a mark, it was only in the way he’d begun carrying himself. The world had demanded so much hardness from him that he’d stopped noticing when it calcified around the softer places.
Kiko sat to his father’s left, the wheelchair angled so the boy could see the casket’s descent without obstruction. The black of his jacket and trousers matched the ceremonial austerity of the day. His eyes tracked every movement; the lowering of the casket, the priest’s hands, the workers fitting their winch to the ropes with brisk, impersonal efficiency, yet none of it seemed to register as fully real. He looked like a boy who had wandered into a tableau of his own life, tasked with observing every detail for later interrogation by men who never smiled.
There was a point, midway through the service, when Tama’s hand twitched at his side. The movement was so slight it could have been mistaken for a shiver, except that he was the only one not shivering, the only one immune to the cold that had everyone else stamping their feet and blowing into their fists. He did not reach for his son, not then. Instead, he clenched his left hand into a fist and kept it locked behind his back, the tendons in his forearm drawn tight as cables. It was the closest he would come, Cameron realized, to falling apart.
The crowd was an ecosystem unto itself: his lieutenants, their wives and children, a handful of business associates whose faces Cameron recognized. There were also two or three women who might, in another context, have been called mistresses; here, they watched the proceedings with impassive eyes, their lips pressed into identical lines of grief. In the very back, near the open gate, stood a group of men whose clothes and posture marked them as outsiders. Rivals, maybe. Or scavengers. The rain made it impossible to see their faces, but Cameron could feel their attention pulsing through the crowd, a collective, silent calculation of what this death would mean for the balance of power.
The rite neared its conclusion. The priest, an elderly Tongan man, stepped forward and recited the ancient prayers, his words swallowed by the roar of the downpour. The first handful of dirt struck the lid of the casket with a sound like a single drumbeat, and Kiko flinched, just once, just enough for Cameron to see it. Tama’s eyes flickered to the boy in that instant, and for a fraction of a second, something gentled in his expression. Not softness, exactly, but the recognition of a wound identical to his own.
Cameron felt her breath catch at the sight, as if she’d witnessed a rare animal step into the open, heedless of the hunters all around. She wanted to look away, to give the moment its privacy, but Tama’s gaze was locked on his son, and the boy, sensing it, stared straight ahead with the unyielding stare of someone daring the world to pity him.
The priest finished his prayer. Another handful of earth. The sound was duller this time, muted by mud and moisture. Kiko’s hands gripped the arms of the wheelchair so tightly that the knuckles went white. Tama’s fist relaxed, and after a moment, he stepped forward. The crowd parted for him, reflexively, as if intimidated by his proximity to active grief.
He stopped at Kiko’s side. For a long time, he simply stood there. Cameron could see the internal struggle play across his profile: a man at war with himself, desperate for a gesture that wouldn’t betray the severity of his loss. Finally, with a deliberateness that made the entire gathering hold its breath, Tama placed his palm on his son’s shoulder. The contact was brief but unyielding, as if staking a claim on the boy’s remaining strength, or perhaps lending him some of his own.
When the ceremony ended and the sea of black umbrellas began to disperse toward the idling motorcade, Tama finally turned. His dark eyes met Cameron's through the rain. The exhaustion and the violence in his gaze were warring with something else; a dark, desperate need for the woman who had kept his son from being the one in that grave.
He held his hand out to her, palm up, waiting in the rain.
When she took it, his hand was cold and damp, the skin rough. Not the hand of a monster, but of a man who had destroyed and built, sometimes in the same gesture.
Tama’s grip tightened, and Cameron realized he was steadier with her than without. He leaned in, lips close to her ear, voice a hoarse, battered whisper. “I’m putting him on the plane to New Zealand tonight.”
They stepped together through the throng of mourners, people shuffling aside to let them pass. Each face turned away, some with sympathy, others with curiosity, but none dared linger on the pair. What would they see if they stopped to look? Perhaps a dangerous man and the woman in his orbit, or two people finding balance in each other’s gravity when the world had knocked them both askew.
———
A sleek, unmarked Gulfstream jet idled on the runway, its engines whining over the sound of the storm. Two enforcers stood by the stairs, waiting to help Kiko board. The teenager was leaning heavily on a pair of sleek crutches, his face still pale from the blood loss, looking incredibly small against the backdrop of the massive aircraft.
Tama stood in front of him, the rain soaking into the shoulders of his dark suit. His rigid posture was gone, replaced by the heavy, slumping burden of a father who was amputating a piece of his own heart to save it.
"I should stay," Kiko argued, his voice cracking, trying to muster the arrogance of the heir he had been raised to be. He gripped the handles of his crutches tightly. "I'm seventeen. I can hold a gun. I should be here to help you kill the people who did this to Mom."
"No," Tama said. His voice was a low, definitive rumble that cut through the whine of the jet engines. "You don't pick up a gun. You never pick up a gun."
"Why?" Kiko shot back, tears of grief and frustration welling in his eyes. "You did! Uncle Loa did! This is our family!"
Tama took a step closer, placing his massive hands on his son's shoulders. The sheer size difference between them was staggering.
"Look at me," Tama commanded gently. When Kiko finally met his eyes, Tama’s face was completely bare of its usual terrifying mask. "I picked up a gun so you would never have to. I built this empire in the dark so you could stand in the light. But your mother and I… we were arrogant. We thought distance and money could keep the blood off your hands. We were wrong."
Kiko swallowed hard, his jaw trembling.
"They looked at you and saw a vulnerability they could exploit to break me," Tama continued, his voice thick with a devastating mixture of guilt and resolve. "As long as you are here, you are a target. And I will not bury you."
"So you're just banishing me?" Kiko choked out. "I'm just supposed to run away and pretend none of this happened?"
"I am not banishing you. I am freeing you," Tama corrected, his grip tightening on the boy's shoulders. "The property in New Zealand is a fortress, but it’s not a prison. You have a new name waiting for you there. A clean slate. You’re going to finish your education. You are going to live a quiet, boring, life. And you are going to forget any of this ever existed."
"I can't forget her," Kiko whispered, finally breaking. A sob tore from his throat, his head dropping forward. "I can't."
Tama’s own eyes squeezed shut for a fraction of a second. He pulled his son forward, wrapping his massive arms around the boy in a fierce, desperate embrace, ignoring the awkward angles of the crutches. He buried his face in Kiko's dark hair.
"I know," Tama rumbled, the sound vibrating in his chest. "But you’ll survive it. Because you are my son. And you are stronger than this."
He held Kiko for a long moment.Finally, he pulled back, his hands resting on the boy's face, his thumbs wiping away the mixture of rain and tears.
"I love you. Now go," Tama ordered softly, stepping back to clear the path to the stairs. "Don't look back."
Kiko nodded, his face pale and wet, but his jaw set with a new, somber understanding. He didn't argue again. He turned and, with the help of the enforcers, slowly made his way up the stairs of the jet. He didn't look back before the heavy cabin door sealed shut behind him.
Tama stood on the tarmac, absolutely motionless in the driving rain, watching the jet taxi down the runway and lift into the dark, storm-filled sky. He watched until the blinking lights disappeared entirely into the clouds.
Only then did he turn around.
He looked exhausted. Stripped raw. The empire was crumbling, his family was shattered, and the only thing left standing on the board was the woman waiting for him by the SUV. He walked slowly toward Cameron, the rain running down his face, his eyes seeking hers like a man looking for a lifeline in a dark ocean.
The heavy thud of the SUV door closing was like a guillotine blade, severing them from the world of tarmac, rain, and Tama’s son. Inside, the cabin was a tomb of leather and silence.
For a long beat, Tama didn't move. He sat rigidly on the bench seat, his hands resting on his thighs, his head bowed. Water dripped from his suit jacket onto the floor mats, a steady, rhythmic sound that was the only thing filling the space.
Then, the armor simply disintegrated.
It wasn't a loud collapse. There were no shouts, no dramatic displays of grief. It was just a sharp, jagged hitch in his breathing, followed by the sight of his massive shoulders beginning to shake. The King who had just exiled his own blood to save him was suddenly gone, replaced by a man who looked like he was drowning in the middle of a dry room.
He didn't look at her, but he reached out. His hand found Cameron’s arm in the dark, his fingers digging into the wool of her coat with a terrifying, desperate strength.
"Cameron," he rasped, his voice breaking on her name.
She didn't wait for him to ask. She slid across the seat, closing the distance until she could wrap her arms around his broad, rain-soaked shoulders. The moment she touched him, Tama folded. He turned into her, burying his face in the crook of her neck, his hands fumbling to pull her flush against his chest.
He was trembling, a deep, rhythmic shudder that felt like tectonic plates shifting. He didn't cry, but he held her with a frantic, suffocating intensity, his fingers tangling in the hair at the back of her head. He was breathing her in, using her to anchor himself to the present.
"He's gone," Tama whispered against her skin, the words vibrating with a raw, agonizing hollow. "I sent him away. My son is a ghost now. I’ve made him a ghost."
Cameron held him tighter, her cheek resting against the damp silk of his hair. She could feel the rapid, frantic thud of his heart against her own ribs. In the dark, private safety of the car he was finally letting himself drift.
"You gave him a life, Tama," she murmured, her hand tracing the tense muscles of his back. "That isn't a ghost. That's a future."
He didn't pull back. He just stayed there, a broken warlord clinging to the only person left in his world who didn't want a piece of his crown. The adrenaline that had carried him through the burial and the airport had completely bled out, leaving nothing but the crushing weight of his choices.
For the first time since she had arrived at the estate, the power dynamic was gone. He wasn't the King, and she wasn't the captive. They were just two people finding balance in each other’s gravity when the world had knocked them both askew.
As the SUV pulled away from the airfield and began the long, silent trek back to the fortress that was now empty of everyone but them, Tama finally let out a long, shuddering breath. He pulled back just enough to look at her, his eyes bloodshot and weary, searching her face in the intermittent glow of the passing streetlights.
"Don't leave," he whispered, his thumb dragging across her cheekbone. It wasn't a command this time. it was a plea. "Stay until the end."
They left the SUV and entered the house together, side by side, as though they had lived this way for years. The guards at the front entrance tried not to meet their eyes, heads lowered, their shoulders hunched in the posture of men who had witnessed too much and could not unsee.
On the marble-floored foyer, water pooled at their feet, their footsteps echoing up the staircase. Cameron hesitated at the landing, thinking he would let go, retreat to the library or his bedroom to drown in whatever old world rituals kept his mind from collapse. But Tama’s hand was relentless. He took her by the hand, his grip gentle but inescapable, and drew her down the corridor, not toward the west wing, where she spent her nights, but to the far end where the master suite loomed.
She felt every inch of hallway as a procession, a funeral march for the life that had existed here just days ago. At the threshold to the master suite, Tama paused and looked down at her, some question flickering in his eyes, as if even now he wasn’t sure how to ask for comfort, or if he deserved it.
Cameron answered by stepping forward, her palm pressed flat against his chest, feeling the tremor of his heart through the fine cotton of his shirt. She pushed gently, guiding him through the double doors.
Tama sat on the edge of the bed and, for a moment, simply stared at the floor, hands braced on his knees. Cameron watched him, seeing the exhaustion in his posture, the way his body seemed to be held together now by willpower alone. Without a word, she knelt before him, tugging at his shoes, peeling them from his feet one by one. He let her do it, head bowed, as if the ritual was sacred and she its only priest.
She moved to stand between his knees, Tama reached for her then, pulling her into his lap and folding her into his arms. This time, the embrace was not desperate, not a drowning man clinging to driftwood, but something softer, more human; a slow recognition that, for all he had lost, he still had the capacity to hold and be held.
They stayed that way through the hush that followed, his face pressed into her shoulder, her arms wrapped around his neck. She stroked the back of his head, feeling the coarseness of his hair, the heat of his scalp beneath her fingers, as if she could touch the storm still raging inside him.
Finally, Tama pulled back, his eyes searching hers for something she could not name. He pressed his forehead to hers and closed his eyes.
“Stay,” he said quietly, his voice stripped bare. “I don’t wanna wake up alone.”
Cameron nodded. She didn’t trust herself to answer out loud.
She slipped her clothes off and drew back the comforter then crawled into the bed. Tama hesitated for a second, then followed, stretching out beside her, his long body a shield at her back. He arranged the blankets around them with a care that bordered on reverence, as though building a cocoon in which the world could not intrude. He pulled her close, his arms a cage that felt more like sanctuary than captivity.
They lay in the dark, listening to the wind rattle the windows, the sound of the storm outside a reminder that the world was still spinning, no matter how broken it felt. For a moment, nothing hurt. Not the bruises, not the grief, not the empty spaces. Just the quiet, impossible fact of survival.
And that was enough.
----
Cameron woke to the peculiarly gentle sensation of warmth brushing the side of her throat. It took a moment for her to realize that the soft, almost reverent pressure was not a part of some lingering dream, but belonged to the world beyond sleep. She surfaced slowly, her awareness moving from the weight of the duvet against her legs to the sleep-heavy ache at the base of her skull, then finally to the precise locus of contact; the faint, damp pressure of lips at her collarbone.
Tama’s mouth.
She became aware, in a rippling sequence of revelations, that her body had curled itself backward during the night, nestling her into the dense wall of heat that was Tama’s chest. His arms were still wrapped around her midsection, a loose but unyielding loop, his breath a steady current against the shell of her ear. Even more disorienting was the realization that he had not slept, or if he had, he had returned from it before her and spent the intervening time simply holding her, his thumb absently stroking the bare skin of her hip as though reminding himself she was real, that both of them were.
She half-expected the embrace to break, for Tama to recollect himself and reassemble the day’s armor before she opened her eyes. Instead, his lips pressed a second, longer kiss into the angle where her neck met her shoulder. His beard scratched lightly at her skin, tugging her more fully into waking. Cameron’s eyelids drifted open to the slate gray twilight of morning leaking through the balcony doors. The sky outside was still heavy with remnants of the storm, but inside, the world was all body heat and the lingering scent of his skin.
She dared a glance, tilting her head just enough to see him above her. Tama’s eyes were open, but unfocused, staring at some point beyond the horizon of the bedroom, as if he was still trying to make sense of the day before. There was a rawness to his features that made him almost unrecognizable from the man who had commanded entire rooms with a word. Even now, he looked like a king caught in the crossfire of his own grief, but there was no trace of self-pity in his face; only the stunned, quiet awe of a man who had survived a storm by washing up on a stranger’s shore.
She was not sure whether to speak or simply exist in the strange, beautiful quiet. She opted for the latter, letting herself be held, letting his hand rest heavy on her stomach, letting the world narrow to the places where his skin met hers. The vulnerability was staggering.
Tama finally blinked, the movement slow and deliberate. He shifted behind her, his arms pulling her back more tightly, and when he spoke, his lips were so close to her ear she felt the words before she heard them.
“Mornin’,” he said, voice roughened by sleep and something more elemental.
She twisted in his grasp, moving with the slow, psychological caution of someone approaching a fragile animal, or a sleeping child, careful not to startle him or herself. She felt the resistance, the momentary tightening of Tama’s arm around her ribs as if he feared she was trying to escape, and then the reluctant, yielding slack as he allowed her to roll over and meet him face-to-face.
Their bodies reoriented with new symmetry; her thigh brushing his, knees bumping under the sheet, her hands braced against the warm, living plane of his chest. The intimacy of the moment threatened to dissolve her, but she kept her eyes open, absorbing the sight of him in this unguarded state.
Tama’s face was a study in exhaustion and something else, something like devastation. The corners of his mouth were downturned, lips pressed in a line that seemed to beg for reprieve. He blinked as she turned, and for a moment she could see the man as he had been as a boy; lonely, unsure, aching for an anchor.
She reached up and, without thinking, tucked a lock of his wild morning hair behind his ear. His eyes tracked her hand the way a stray might, wary but hopeful. For a few beats, neither said anything. They lay in the hush, listening to the wind, the soft shush of their own breathing, the creak of the headboard as their bodies flexed toward each other and held.
Then, as if rehearsed, she mirrored his gesture from the night before, pressing her forehead to his and closing her eyes. She felt the bridge of his nose against hers, the heat of his breath. In that proximity nothing could be hidden; not the bitterness of loss, not the need for comfort, not the almost-embarrassed hope that this could be enough, at least for a morning.
She pressed her lips to his, tentative at first, as if testing the bounds of their reality. The contact was a question and an answer at the same time, a silent admission that the ache inside her could be lessened, if only for this fractured moment. His mouth was warm, slack with fatigue, but he answered her in kind, a gentle, almost startled reciprocity, as though he’d forgotten this was allowed, this simple, desperate seeking of closeness. Her hand slid to his jaw, she felt him tense, then soften under her touch.
For a heartbeat, neither of them moved beyond the kiss, just the press of lips, the mingling of breath, the measured uncertainty of two people who had run out of language and now spoke in the grammar of skin. Tama’s hand, still braced at her waist, flexed, drawing her fractionally closer. There was hunger here, yes, but it was the hunger of the bereft, the last meal before a famine, not the frenzied rush of easy infatuation. In the small, bright pocket of morning, they let themselves be two bodies with nothing left to prove, nothing left to promise.
She parted from him, searching his eyes but found only that same raw yearning mirrored in dark, almost astonished eyes. He looked at her like a man newly acquainted with the possibility of peace. For the first time she could remember, Cameron felt herself settling, not into certainty, but into the strange, persistent hope that survival was more than just inertia, that it could be a kind of quiet grace.
Tama exhaled, a slow, deliberate release, and rolled on top of her with a heaviness that was less about lust than gravity, as if their bodies, untethered from the rationale of waking life were submissive to a new physical law that drew them together cell by cell. The shift in weight startled a gasp from Cameron, not of protest, but of relief, as if she’d been holding her breath since sleep and only now remembered how to let go. She felt him settle above her, the breadth of his body eclipsing hers completely, a full-body shadow more comforting than oppressive.
He braced himself on his forearms, one on either side of her head, and for a moment looked down at her like he was memorizing the exact geometry of her face. He kissed her again, more deeply this time, mouth opening to taste her, but still with that almost reverent gentleness, like he remembered too well how easy it was to destroy something fragile. She reached up to touch his face, her thumb tracing the faint indentation of a bruise at his chin, the smallest shudder running through him at the contact. Every part of him was a map of damage; cuts, scars, the distinct ache of muscles asked to do too much, but when he entered her, all Cameron could feel was the clean, singular heat of his want, stripped of pretext or bravado.
His hand slipped to her hip, fingers splayed as if to anchor himself, and she arched up instinctively, desperate to fill whatever absence the night had left in her. Their bodies fit together not with the practiced ease of lovers, but with the surprise of two castaways finding, by accident, the same shore. Each movement was a negotiation, her knees bracketing his thighs, his hand gripping her breast, her breath catching at the hollow of his throat, until there was no longer any question of where one ended and the other began.
It was not a fevered rush, but a slow, echoing communion, like two prayers recited back and forth, each word an offering. Neither of them shut their eyes, unwilling to lose even a second of the other’s unguarded gaze. In this way, they held each other, the certainty of their clasp as absolute as gravity.
You must have gotten a concussion, she wanted to say, or I’m dreaming, or maybe we’re both just ghosts, refusing to leave the world no matter how much it hurt to stay in it. But the words died at her lips, replaced by the certainty of his hands, the measured insistence of his mouth, the unspoken promise that, at least for this morning, they were neither broken nor alone.
He canted her hips higher up, shifting the angle with a deftness that made her pulse stutter, and suddenly every point of contact between them was magnified, a circuit of heat and pressure that left her gasping. She could feel the bruising tenderness of his grip, the raw urgency in the way his fingers dug into the small of her back, but there was also a carefulness, as if he was afraid of both hurting her and letting her go. His body formed a shield around her, a cocoon of muscle and bone and battered skin, and though she’d never thought of herself as small or needing protection, in that moment she surrendered to it, letting the span of his shoulders and the rough exhale of his breath define the boundaries of her world. She arched instinctively, the motion met by a slow, deliberate thrust that sent a shockwave of sensation up her spine.
Her hands clutched at his arms, searching for leverage, for something solid to anchor herself to, but instead found the slick slide of sweat, the erratic jump of his pulse beneath her palms. The headboard tapped rhythmically against the wall, a quiet percussion that marked time in a language older than words. She closed her eyes, only for a heartbeat, and let herself dissolve into the ebb and swell of their bodies together, the shivering build of pressure, the quicksilver flicker of pleasure and need.
Each movement was a request, each gasp a response. It felt less like fucking and more like an argument, or a negotiation; two people fighting to prove that their bruises could coexist, that the sum of them might amount to a whole. Tama’s head dropped to the curve of her shoulder, and she felt his teeth graze the skin there, an engraving of sensation that made her arch again, desperate for more. His breath came in ragged bursts, every exhale laced with her name, or what almost sounded like it, spoken half in prayer, half in warning.
She was distantly aware of the world outside the bed; the brittle gray sunlight, the faint roar of traffic far below, the last remnants of rain streaking the glass of the balcony doors. But here, in the hush between heartbeats, time compressed and expanded at once until nothing existed except the press and yield of their bodies, the slide of his hands up her ribs, the moment he laced his fingers through hers against the pillow as though they’d done this a thousand times. And when she finally tipped over, it was not with the violence she expected, but with a quiet, shuddering surrender, like falling asleep mid-sentence and trusting the story would continue without her.
A sound shattered the rhythm, a sharp rapping at the bedroom door that might as well have been a gunshot for the way it torqued the moment. In a split second, every muscle in her body seized, and for a moment it was unclear if the knock belonged to the world outside or was just the echo of her own heart, slamming against the cage of her ribs. Tama jerked his head upright, face contorted with the primal fury of a beast startled in its den, eyes wide and white in the dim light as if already calculating whether to fight or flee. He kept moving, hips refusing to cede their momentum, but the violence of the interruption was palpable in the way his jaw set, in the way his hands, once gentle, now gripped with a desperation that bordered on panic.
Cameron could smell the sweat on his skin, feel the tremble in his thighs as he struggled to straddle the gap between animal need and alpha discipline. She reached for the sheets out of a half-formed instinct to cover herself, but Tama’s arm pinned her with a protectiveness that was almost possessive, as if by holding her body down he could hold the world at bay. The knock came again, louder this time, insistent, and she could hear the muffled sound of voices on the other side; low, urgent, the cadence of men who would only disturb him if something truly mattered.
“Mother fucker!” Tama bellowed, voice muffled against her shoulder, the raw edge of the curse vibrating through both their bodies. He didn’t stop. If anything, he doubled down, as if to assert by force of will that nothing, not even the end of the world, would strip him of this one, stolen moment. The headboard slammed harder against the wall. Cameron bit down on her lip to keep from laughing, or screaming, or both. She felt the surge of adrenaline claw through her chest, the sudden shift from intimacy to siege so abrupt it left her lightheaded.
He raised his head just enough to fix the door with a look of such lethal contempt that Cameron almost pitied whoever was on the other side. “What?” Tama roared, the word weaponized, calibrated to wound. Silence, then a rustle, as if someone was parsing the wisdom of answering.
There was a beat of silence, just long enough for Cameron to hope the knock had been a hallucination, then a reply shot through the wood as if the voice itself had teeth: “Boss, need you downstairs.” Even through the muffling of the door, she heard the brittle edge of fear in the messenger’s voice, the way it sawed at the vowels, at the word “need.” It wasn’t a request, this was something more jagged, like a cry of warning masked as an order. The voice didn’t belong to any of the regulars, none of the surly, veteran lieutenants who would threaten a slow death to anyone who interrupted Tama mid-fuck unless the building was actively on fire. This was a lower register, one of the new kids, probably, not yet fully aware that the only thing more dangerous than a bullet in this house was Tama Tonga in the morning, naked and deprived of sleep.
Cameron’s first impulse was to shrink, to become as small and invisible as possible, to fold herself into the mattress and let the whole thing blow over. But Tama’s body remained a barricade above her, tense and unmoved, his single-minded focus undiluted by the outside threat. He made no move to release her, if anything, his weight settled more heavily atop her, so that she felt the inevitability of him not as an act but as a state of nature. His hands, once so measured, dug into the sheets at her shoulders with a force that bordered on violence, and for a moment she wondered if he even remembered the world beyond the bed, or if it had simply ceased to exist.
There was another tremor of footsteps in the hallway, a nervous shifting of weight that suggested the messenger was still lurking just out of sight, maybe cycling through a mental list of all the ways he could die for this intrusion. Tama didn’t look at the door. He looked at Cameron. He bared his teeth in a silent snarl and began to move again, thrusting with a raw, rhythm that spoke less to pleasure than to punishment, as if he could fuck the interruption out of existence. The air in the room grew thick, electric; Cameron could feel her own heart pounding, a war-drum counterpoint to the headboard’s renewed assault on the wall.
She realized, with a flicker of shame, that the urgency outside only heightened the intensity inside, that the threat made every sensation sharper, every collision of their bodies a dare. She tried to keep quiet, to tamp down the noise of her own breath, but Tama’s name escaped her lips in a hiss. He shuddered above her, the muscles in his back rippling with the effort to contain some rage that had nothing to do with her, and everything to do with the world pressing in on all sides.
He came apart with a strangled sound, a shiver that ran the length of his body, and collapsed onto her, bearing her down into the mattress with all the spent weight of a man who had resisted surrender and lost. His face pressed hard against hers, forehead to cheek, mouth near her ear and exhaling a tremulous staccato of breath, equal parts relief and disbelief. For a moment, he didn’t move, not even to shift his weight or catch himself on an elbow, as if the only thing holding him together was the shape of her body beneath his.
She lay pinned beneath him, chest fluttering with the aftershock, feeling every inch of his heart’s wild percussion through the tight crush of their bodies. His arms boxed her head, fists clenched in the pillow at either side of her skull. His jaw abraded the delicate skin at the edge of her jaw, and she realized that if she tried to move, even a little, she might shatter him.
His breath ghosted across her cheek, slow and uneven, like he was at the edge of weeping or laughter, and she felt in the tremor of his ribs that there was no civilization left to either of them in this moment. Only exhaustion, and the dense, collapsing gravity of desire spent but not stilled.
She waited. Waited for him to roll off, to collect himself, to become once again the man she only half-knew. Instead, he stayed, refusing even this small mercy of separation, and after a minute she realized he was not gathering strength but simply anchoring himself on her, using her warmth and nearness as a tether to prevent drifting back into the violent chaos of the waking world. The line between domination and solace blurred, his weight, once a siege, became a balm, a rough embrace against the cold that pressed in from all sides.
Her hand crept up around his neck, fingers winding into his curls. She felt him swallow, hard, and when finally he shifted to look at her, his eyes were wet with exertion and something else, something raw and grateful and wordless. There was nothing left in her, not even a quip or a protest, only the sense that this, whatever it was, had changed the shape of the morning.
They stayed knotted together, immobilized not by fatigue but by some unspoken, mutual understanding that neither dared be the one to break the spell first. Beneath the thin sheen of sweat that slicked their bodies, Cameron felt the slow return of her own senses, the way the world, once muffled and distant, began to leak back into the hollow left by adrenaline. She tried to fix the moment in memory, Tama’s weight heavy and familiar on top of her, his breath still hot against her skin, as if by holding perfectly still, she could prolong the fragile détente between what they were inside this room and what waited for them on the other side of the door.
Eventually, time forced its way back in, first as a twitch in Tama’s thigh, then as a tightening of his grip on her shoulder. He nuzzled her cheek, the scrape of his beard almost tender now, and pressed his lips to the angle of her jaw. The kiss was softer than any before, less an act of seduction than a supplication, as if he needed her forgiveness for what he had just taken or for what he was about to leave behind. Slowly, he dragged his mouth across her cheekbone, then captured her lips with a practiced care that was at odds with his earlier ferocity, a silent apology for all that was about to be lost.
“Stay here,” he ordered, the consonants thudding against her skin, not a plea but an expectation. His voice was thick with the last dregs of heat and need; even the imperative felt like an act of intimacy, as if by willing her to remain he could keep some part of himself anchored in this bed, in her. Then the line between them gave way. He rolled off in a single, practiced movement, the mattress sighing beneath the subtraction of his weight, and for a brief second she felt the chill creep in where his body had been. He stood at the edge of the bed, back to her, muscles cut in high relief by the weak morning light, and fumbled on the floor for his pants.
His hands moved with the urgency of a man trained to readiness; in less than a heartbeat, he’d located the crumpled heap of pants and hauled them up over his hips. He glanced up at the door, expression already recalibrating from lover to warlord, and ran a hand through his hair, taming the wildness into something more suitable for command. For the first time since the knock, he looked at her as if seeing her from a distance, the distance of a man who knew the next moment could be his last and Cameron felt the rawness of abandonment bloom inside her, sharp and unaccountable.
Tama hesitated, one hand on the doorknob and the other bracing himself against the wall. His breathing had slowed, evened out, but the tremor in his shoulders betrayed the effort it took to keep the mask of composure in place. He glanced back at her, eyes narrowed and searching, as though he’d left something important behind or had to memorize the shape of her for later.
Then the door, and the waiting world. He cracked it just enough to peer through, voice pitched low and lethal: “What’s so goddamn urgent?”
Cameron curled onto her side, drawing her knees to her chest, and listened as the commotion in the hall ramped up, the messenger’s voice barely audible but desperate in its haste.
She closed her eyes and waited for the next impact.
tangentwithtanner
stormborns
