15. Adrianos
Adrianos
She’s been wrong all day, and I’ve spent four hours pretending I haven’t built a file on it.
Elena answers Penelope in single words at lunch, which never happens, because Elena doesn’t own a single word, she owns paragraphs and follows them with footnotes.
She leaves a sentence hanging at the printer and doesn’t go back for the rest of it.
Twice this afternoon I’ve caught her looking at me, and both times she’s looked away first. By evening she’s in the kitchen with a glass of water in front of her that she hasn’t touched, staring at the marble, and I’ve had enough of waiting.
“You’ve had something sitting on you all day,” I say, crossing to the island. “I want to know what it is.”
“I’m processing.” She doesn’t look up. “Forensic accountants process. It’s basically the whole job description, right after ‘finds things other people miss’ and right before ‘gets shot at occasionally.’“
“You’re not processing. You’re somewhere else entirely, and you’ve been there since this morning.” I lean on the counter across from her. “Tell me where.”
Her hand goes to the phone next to the glass. Stops. Goes again, and this time she slides it across the marble like it’s heavier than it should be.
I read it.
Stop looking. You’re too good for your own good. Kalliopi was good too, right up until she wasn’t. You remember what they did to her. Walk away while it’s still an option.
The second message sits underneath, five words, and those are the ones that go through me colder than anything Stavros said standing in my own entryway nine nights ago.
Ask Adrianos about his son.
I set the phone down with more care than it needs. The alternative is putting it through the wall, and Elena’s already had enough scares this week.
“When did you get this?”
“Last night. After you left the office.” Her voice has gone quieter than I’ve heard it. “The first message I understood fine. But the second part—” She stops, and Elena Markides not finishing a sentence is its own kind of alarm. “I didn’t know you have a son.”
I look past her, at the gap in the cabinet where Penelope keeps the cereal with cinnamon that nobody’s eaten since Nikos went to Greece.
“His name was Nikos,” I say. “He was sixteen.”
Blood drains off her face the moment she hears the past tense.
“He was on a boat with my parents, off Cape Sounion, the same night I met you at Lux. There was an attack on the water while I was there with you. The boat burned to the line, and there was nothing left to pull out of it.” I keep my voice neutral.
“They found the wolf-crown burned into the deck plate where the fire didn’t reach.
The same mark that’s on the bodies Kalliopi died trying to trace. ”
Her hand comes up to her mouth. Not theatrical, just there, holding something back, and her eyes go too bright, and she blinks against it.
“You buried your whole family while I was sleeping down the hall,” she whispers.
“I was here. In your house. Eating your eggs and arguing with you about decimals and you’d just lost—” She doesn’t finish that one either.
“I sat across from you for days and missed the biggest thing in the room, again, exactly like before, exactly like Kalliopi, and I’m so tired of being the person who finds the fraud but misses the person. ”
“It wasn’t yours to find. I made sure of that.”
“That’s not the same as it didn’t happen.
” She comes around the island, and for a second I think she’s going to do the thing people do, the soft voice and the hand reaching for mine, like grief is something you can treat with a compress.
She gets halfway there and stops, reads whatever’s on my face, and her hand drops back to her side instead.
“I’m not going to tell you I’m sorry for your loss.
I got about forty versions of that at Kalliopi’s graveside and every single one of them slid off me like rain off a coat.
I know exactly how worthless that sentence is. ”
“Good. I’ve no use for it.”
“So what do you have use for?” she asks. “Is there something I can actually do? Real question. You don’t have to answer it the way people answer that question, with the thing they think you want to hear.”
I look at her properly then, at the curls that gave up on whatever she did to them this morning, at the eyes still too bright and refusing to spill, at the mouth that’s argued with me in every room I’ve put her in since the night a stranger handed her a drink at a bar.
“You can give me somewhere else to be,” I say. “For a while. That’s the entire request.”
“Somewhere else.” She tilts her head, and even now, even with her face still wet around the edges, the corner of her mouth twitches like she can’t help it.
“You do realize there’s a whole category of options that don’t involve me.
Television. A long walk. I’m told some men enjoy wine for this exact purpose, and you have an entire cabinet of it that I’ve personally watched you not drink. ”
“I don’t want wine.”
“Of course you don’t. Wine doesn’t argue back.
” She’s closer now, and the wet shine in her eyes is already losing the fight to the look that gets her into trouble, the one that had her halfway into Berezin’s office before her fear caught up with her.
“You skipped a lot of perfectly functional grief management techniques and landed on me. I’m choosing to take that as a compliment, mostly because the alternative is that I’m cheaper than therapy, and I refuse to be cheaper than anything. ”
“You’re not cheap. You cost me a fortune in pants alone.”
“You had me kidnapped in my pajamas, so that one’s all on you.
” She’s an arm’s length away now, and her gaze drops to my mouth for half a second before she drags it back up, annoyed at herself for it.
“For the record, I know what I’m doing right now, and usually by this point I’ve got six reasons lined up for why it’s a bad idea.
Tonight I’ve got nothing. Not one. So either I’ve lost my edge or I just don’t care, and honestly I’m too tired to find out which, so you should feel honored. ”
“I’m overwhelmed.”
“You are not, you’re standing there being unbearable, but I’ll allow that too.
” She closes the last of the distance herself, and when she kisses me it isn’t gentle, not the careful thing I half expected for a man who just told her his son is dead.
She kisses me like she’s furious, at the message, at whoever sent it, at not seeing what was sitting across the table from her, and I get a hand into her hair and the rest of it goes quiet, all at once, the wolf-crown and the wall and the empty room down the hall replaced entirely by the heat of her mouth and the small sound she makes when I pull her in closer.
“For the record,” she breathes against my jaw, “this is going under ‘distraction,’ not ‘comfort.’ I want to make that clear.”
“Noted.”
“You’re not noting anything, you’re already—” Whatever she was going to say goes when I lift her onto the island, her back meeting the marble through her shirt with a gasp, her knees coming up around my hips before she’s decided to let them. “Okay. The counter. We’re doing the counter.”
“Problem?”
“No, just, Penelope makes eggs here, that’s all I’m saying, I’m simply noting it for posterity.
” But she’s already pulling at my belt, sure and fast, and I get her shirt up and over her head, the bra following, and for a long moment I just look at her.
Sitting on my counter, half undone, breathing hard, hair everywhere.
“You’re doing the staring thing,” she says. “Where you go quiet and look at me like I’m a number that won’t sit still.”
“You don’t sit still. Your ass is shaking. I checked.”
“I’m going to take that as a compliment because I’ve had a day.
” Her breath catches when my hands find her waist and drag her to the edge of the counter, and for a second the words actually leave her, just a second, before she finds them again.
“Are we really doing this in the kitchen? With the lights on? Where anyone could—”
“Stavros is in the city. Evander’s with him. Penelope’s gone for the night.” I get her out of the leggings, and she’s already soaked. I run two fingers through her once, and her head drops back against the cabinet.
“That’s cheating,” she manages.
“What is?”
“You know exactly what you’re doing to me, and I haven’t even started yet, and I’m already—” Her hips roll into my hand on their own, small, involuntary, the kind of thing her body does before her mouth catches up to defend it.
I don’t draw it out tonight. There’s nothing in me built for slow, and I don’t think there’s much in her for it either.
I get my pants open, and she pulls me in by the back of the neck, legs locking, and I push my cock into her in one stroke that doesn’t stop until I’m fully seated, and the sound she makes against my throat is half my name and half something with no shape to it at all.
“Okay,” she gets out. “Okay, I had a whole comment ready, and it’s just gone, completely gone. I’ll find it later.”
“Don’t bother.”
“Don’t gloat, I will find it.”
I start to move, and she meets every stroke, hands braced behind her on the marble, hips rolling up into mine, and I get a fist in her curls and pull her head back to put my mouth against her throat.
She’s gripping me on every drag, slick, tight, and for the first time in nine days something is filling the space instead of widening it.
“Harder,” she says, and I give it to her.
The sound of it fills the kitchen, and she’s not quiet, doesn’t try to be, nails digging into my shoulders, breath coming in short pulls between sounds that stopped being words two strokes ago.
I feel her start to climb, the way she clenches tighter on every other thrust, and I slow down on purpose, just enough that she growls in frustration against my jaw.
“Don’t,” she warns. “Whatever that was. Do not do it again.”
“You’re close.”
“I’m aware of my own condition, we covered this days ago. Now finish what you—”
I lift her off the counter mid-sentence, her legs locking tighter around me, and carry her the few steps to the table, setting her down on her back. I push back in, deeper from here, and her hands fly up to grip the far edge of the table, her spine arching off the wood.
“New venue,” she manages. “Bold.”
“You had opinions about the counter.”
“I had observations, there’s a difference, and now you’ve relocated us to the table, which Penelope also—” Whatever objection she had left disappears completely when I hook one of her legs over my shoulder.
I drive into her from this angle and watch her hands fist in the tablecloth, watch the color climb her chest and throat, and I get my thumb against her clit and work it in time with every stroke until that’s the thing that finally ends the argument for good.
She comes with her head tipped back and her whole body drawn tight, a sound tearing out of her that bounces off the kitchen tile, and I feel it grip around me in waves, but I don’t stop, driving through it, chasing my own a few strokes behind.
I come deep inside her, filling her, hips pressed flush to hers, and for a long moment neither of us moves, her chest rising fast under my hands, my forehead dropping to her collarbone.
“Okay,” she says eventually, to the ceiling, voice wrecked through. “I take it back. The table was the right call.”
I pull out slow, and she props herself up on her elbows to look at me, flushed, hair a complete mess.
“That helped,” I tell her, and it’s the truest thing I’ve said all day.
“Glad to be useful. Put it on the books somewhere, under operating expenses.”
I lean in and kiss her once, quick, nothing like what just happened on the table, and I’m out the door and straightening my jacket before she can try to read me.