Chapter 13 Adrian #2
He breaks the kiss. His mouth moves to my jaw, my throat. His teeth find the tendon that runs from my ear to my clavicle and he bites. The pain detonates down my spinal column. My hips jerk forward involuntarily, grinding against his thigh. The sound I make is not clinical.
"Say it." His mouth is against my ear. His voice is wrecked—shredded, guttural, a register I’ve never heard from him. "Tell me what you want."
"I want you to stop talking and take what you came for."
He growls. The sound vibrates through his chest and into mine. His hands drop to my hips and he spins me—fast, controlled. Fast, controlled—leverage and body mechanics, second nature. My chest hits the wall. My palms slap the plywood.
His body presses against my back. His cock is hard against my ass through the fabric. His hand comes around to the front of my waistband and pulls.
The borrowed sweatpants come down. The cold air hits my skin for half a second before his body covers me. His heat obliterates the chill. His chest against my back. His mouth on the nape of my neck.
His hand wraps around me. The contact of his calloused palm on my cock sends a convulsion through my body so violent that my knees nearly give.
"You like this." Not a question. His grip tightens. His hand moves—slow, deliberate. His calloused thumb drags across the head. "You like being pinned against a wall by the monster who kidnapped you."
I should deny it. The clinical part of my brain—whatever’s left of it—is screaming at me to deny it. To push back. To reassert the boundary that separates the surgeon from the patient, the captive from the captor, the man who fixes from the man who breaks.
"Yes."
The word falls out of my mouth and lands between us and detonates.
His hand leaves my cock. I hear the rustle of fabric. His waistband pushed down. His hand on himself, positioning. He spits into his palm. The crudeness of it sends a shudder through me that has nothing to do with cold.
"This is going to hurt."
"I know what pain feels like."
He pushes in.
Slow. Relentless. The pressure builds from impossible to unbearable to something beyond either. A fullness that rewrites the architecture of my body. It rearranges the internal landscape around the reality of him.
I press my forehead against the plywood. My fingers claw at the wall. The sound that comes out of me is unrecognizable—guttural, broken. The noise a body makes when it’s being dismantled and rebuilt at the same time.
He stops. Fully seated. His forehead drops against the back of my neck. His breathing is ragged, each exhale a hot pulse against my skin. His bandaged hand grips my hip, the gauze rough against my skin. His good hand braces against the wall beside mine, the fingers spread, the tendons standing out.
"Move," I say.
He moves.
The pace is not gentle. It’s not measured. It’s the rhythm of a man who has been denied this for so long that the permission has overloaded every circuit designed to regulate force.
Each thrust drives me into the wall. The plywood shudders.
My palms slip against the surface. His hand finds my cock again and strokes in counterpoint—hard, fast. His grip is tight enough to border on pain.
The friction of his calluses against my skin is a sensation so raw it strips the clinical vocabulary from my mind and replaces it with nothing.
Nothing. For the first time in three years, my mind is empty. The numbers are gone. The diagnoses are gone. The counting, the measuring, the endless cataloguing of damage and risk and probability—all of it has been burned away by the simple, savage physics of his body inside mine.
His hand on my cock. His mouth against my shoulder. The sound of our breathing filling the plywood box like a detonation contained.
"You feel this?" His voice in my ear. Raw. Barely words. "This is what’s underneath. Under your white coat and your counting and your clean fucking hands. This is what you are."
He’s right. He’s wrong. He’s both. I don't care. I push back against him, meeting each thrust. The angle changes. He hits something inside me that turns my vision white and my voice into a sound I will never be able to take back.
His pace fractures. The rhythm breaks. His hand on my cock tightens, accelerates. His grip is possessive and desperate. I feel him swell inside me, the pressure building, his breath going ragged and short.
I come first. The orgasm rips through me from the base of my spine outward—an obliteration. A systemic failure of every controlled system in my body.
My vision goes. My knees go. His arm catches me around the waist, holding me upright, holding me against the wall. I spill over his fist in pulses that feel like they’re coming from somewhere deeper than my body. Somewhere I sealed off. Somewhere I thought was dead.
He follows. A sound tears out of him—not a groan, not a shout. Something more primal. More wrecked. The sound of a man breaking a promise he made to himself a long time ago.
His hips stutter. His body locks against mine. I feel the heat of him inside me, the final, irreversible evidence that the line between us no longer exists.
We don't speak.
He pulls out. Steps back. The cold air rushes into the space where his body was. I feel the absence like an amputation. I pull my sweatpants up. Turn around. Lean against the wall because my legs won't hold me without it.
He’s standing in the center of the room. His sweatpants are pulled up. His chest heaves. His bandaged hand hangs at his side, the gauze spotted with fresh blood—he gripped too hard, reopened something.
His face is unreadable. Not the clinical mask I wear—something heavier. A door slamming shut behind his eyes.
Garrett hasn't moved from his position outside the door. If he heard, he gives no indication. Killian is unconscious on the bench. The cabin is silent except for our breathing and the wind against the metal roof.
I bend to pick up my medical bag. My hand closes around the strap. My fingers brush the shelf above it—the one with the canned goods. The blank-labeled cans.
I pull one down. Turn it in my hand.
The label isn't blank. It’s been bleached by moisture. The ink is running. But up close, I can make out Cyrillic characters. Russian.
I check the next can. Cyrillic. I check the shelf itself—bolted to the wall with hardware-store brackets. The screws are new. The metal is bright against the aged plywood.
I look at the shelf’s underside. A small black box is zip-tied to the bracket. An LED blinks red. Slow. Regular. Metronomic.
A transmitter.
My blood goes cold. Not the gradual chill of the cabin—a sudden, total plunge. The vascular response to catastrophic recognition.
I know what this is. I’ve seen these in the Bratva’s supply caches—the dead drops and forward staging points they use to resupply operatives in the field. Each one has a passive transmitter that activates when the door is opened. It alerts the nearest handler that the cache has been accessed.
We didn't find shelter. We found a trap. And we’ve been broadcasting our position since we walked through the door.
"Rocco."
He looks at me. Whatever he sees on my face wipes the post-sex blankness from his and replaces it with something sharp and immediate.
I hold up the can. Turn it so he can see the Cyrillic label. Then I point to the blinking LED under the shelf.
His jaw tightens. His hand reaches for the Makarov.
"Get Killian up," he says quietly. "We’re leaving. Now."
The LED blinks. Red, dark, red, dark. A heartbeat in the wall of a room that was never meant to shelter us. A pulse that has been calling out into the dark since we arrived, telling the men in the woods exactly where we are.
I pick up my medical bag. My legs are steady. My hands are steady. The tremor is gone.
Somewhere between the wall and the shelf, between his body and the blinking light, the mechanic came back online.
I don't look at the wall where it happened. I don't look at him. I shoulder the bag and I move.