Chapter 10 #3
The team disperses. Vix disappears down the corridor toward the quarters Kane assigned her without a backward glance, and I watch her go because I always watch her go, and because she moves differently when she thinks no one is looking, the stride loosening by a fraction, the armor settling into something closer to exhaustion.
My quarters are sparse and functional, the way everything inside this mountain is sparse and functional: concrete walls, a narrow bed bolted to the floor, a metal desk, a locker.
The shower is a steel box barely wide enough to turn around in, and the water takes long enough to heat that the cold has time to bite, because the pipes run through the mountain's core and the rock doesn't give up its chill easily.
I strip and step under the spray before it's warm enough, because the shock is useful, the cold a blunt instrument against the tension that has been building in my body for days.
Days of sharing a room with Vix, of watching her sleep, of the precise torment of proximity without permission, and my body has been keeping a tally that my mind has been ignoring.
I'm half hard already, and the cold water does nothing to change that, because what's driving it isn't physical comfort.
It's her, the accumulated pull of days spent breathing the same air, hearing her voice through an earpiece while she charmed a Swiss banker, watching her fasten a strand of pearls against skin I used to know by taste.
The water heats. Steam fills the steel box and the cold retreats, and the muscles across my shoulders start to loosen, and the loosening is a mistake because control lives in tension and the moment the tension goes, everything I've been holding back floods in.
Vix in that hotel room. The sound of her breathing in the dark.
Her throat moving when she swallowed her coffee this morning, the column of her neck and the hollow at its base where her pulse sits, and I know exactly what that pulse feels like under my mouth because I've had my mouth there, years ago, in a Moscow hotel room that smelled like rain and her skin and the warmth of a bed that had been occupied for hours by two people who couldn't stop touching each other.
I brace one hand against the steel wall and wrap the other around my cock, and the groan that comes out of me is low and rough and tastes like surrender.
I don't fight it. Fighting it is what I do every hour of every day in her presence, maintaining the careful distance, keeping my hands still and my voice neutral and my eyes where they belong instead of where they want to be, and the effort of that restraint has a cost, and this is where I pay it.
Alone, in a steel box, inside a mountain, with the water loud enough to cover what my voice won't.
My grip tightens and I let the memory unspool.
Moscow. The weight of her settling across my hips, the heat of her through the thin cotton she slept in before I pulled it over her head and put my mouth on her breast and felt her fingers twist into my hair hard enough that my scalp burned.
The sound she made when I sucked, a sharp intake that she tried to swallow and couldn't, and her hips rolling against me, searching, finding the angle where my cock pressed along the length of her through the fabric still between us, already wet enough that I could feel it.
My hand finds the rhythm she set that night.
Slow. Deliberate. The controlled roll of her hips once she'd pushed my boxers down and taken me inside her, inch by inch, her thighs flexing against my ribs as she lowered herself and her lips parted and her eyes went unfocused for a fraction of a second before she locked them back on mine.
She watched me with the same precision she brings to everything, and the look on her face when she'd seated herself fully and I was buried to the hilt inside the tight, slick heat of her was the most honest thing I have ever seen her wear.
No composure. No armor. Just need, naked and specific and directed entirely at me.
My thumb drags across the head on the upstroke, spreading the slick that the water hasn't washed away, and the pressure builds low in my gut, a gathering weight that pulls my balls tight and makes my feet tense against the shower floor.
I think about the pace she set, slow enough to be cruel, her hands braced on my chest with her fingers spread wide, each roll of her hips a complete sentence, deliberate and grinding, taking me deep and holding there before lifting and letting me feel every inch of the drag.
I reached for her hips to drive the pace faster and she caught my wrists and pinned them, leaning forward so that her hair fell across my face and her mouth hovered above mine without touching.
My pace, she said, and the authority in her voice, the absolute certainty that she was in command of my body, made my cock throb inside her hard enough that she felt it and smiled, slow and knowing, and ground down harder.
The water hits my shoulders and my hand moves faster.
I'm gripping the base, squeezing on the downstroke, working myself the way I've worked myself in borrowed showers in foreign cities for a decade, always to her, always to this same memory that plays behind my eyelids like footage I've memorized frame by frame.
The Moscow Vix fractured eventually. Her control cracked not all at once but in stages, the rhythm going ragged, her breathing shortening into sharp, bitten-off sounds that she pressed into the curve of my neck.
I broke her grip on my wrists and got my hands on her hips and drove up into her, hard, and the sound she made was guttural and unguarded and I felt her clench around me so tight my vision blurred.
I think about what she looks like now. The silver in her hair and the lines around her eyes and the scar on her collarbone that I want to trace with my tongue until she tells me who put it there.
I think about peeling that composure off her the way I'd peel her clothes off, layer by layer, until there's nothing left but the woman underneath who wants things she won't admit to wanting.
I think about pressing her against this wall, the steel cold against her back and my chest flush against hers, her leg hooked over my hip and my hand between her thighs finding out whether the decade has changed anything, whether she's still slick and swollen the moment I touch her, whether she still gasps on the first stroke or whether she's learned to hide that too.
I think about sinking into her standing up, her back arching off the wall and her nails cutting into my shoulders and the sound of the water covering the sounds she'd make while I fucked her slow enough that she'd beg me to finish it.
Whether the catch in her breathing still starts the same way.
Whether she still grips the sheets or grips me.
The orgasm builds from the base of my spine, a slow detonation that gathers momentum faster than I can brace for it.
My hand moves in tight, fast strokes and my forehead drops against my braced arm and my breath comes in ragged pulls through my teeth.
I come hard, harder than I've come in months, the release pulsing through my cock in waves that buckle my knees and pull a sound out of my chest that I crush against my forearm.
My hips jerk forward into my fist and the aftershocks roll through me, each one pulling another thick spill across my fingers while the water sluices it away, and for a handful of seconds there is nothing in my head except the ghost of her body and the memory of her voice saying my name in the dark.
The water runs. The steam thins. My breathing comes back in ragged increments, and I stand under the spray with my forehead pressed against steel and wait for the shaking in my thighs to stop.
It doesn't solve anything. It never does.
The body empties and the want refills immediately, because what I want from Vix isn't something my hand can approximate.
I want her voice. Her anger. The look she gives me when she forgets to hate me.
I want the right to touch the scar on her collarbone and hear the story.
I want to earn back the version of her that came apart around me in Moscow, shaking and raw and unashamed of it afterward.
I shut off the water and dress. The control reassembles itself the way it always does, piece by careful piece, each layer of clothing a layer pulled back into place over skin that still carries the memory of what I just did and who I did it thinking about.
I eat in the communal kitchen and exchange a few words with Dylan about Committee activity in Eastern Europe.
I spend an hour reviewing Tommy's preliminary analysis on the operations center screens while the flat LED glow hums overhead and the mountain settles into its nighttime quiet.
Every corridor I walk, I'm aware that Vix is somewhere in this facility, behind one of these doors, breathing the same recycled air, and the awareness is a constant hum beneath my skin that rest does nothing to diminish.
The corridors empty. The mountain takes on the hush of people sleeping underground.
I'm heading for my quarters when I hear it, the muffled, rhythmic report of a handgun, dampened by the acoustic insulation that lines the shooting range carved into the mountain's lower level.
The range is lit by overhead floods that cast the space in harsh, shadowless glare. Vix is in the far lane, ear protection on, stance set, emptying a magazine into a target silhouette with the mechanical focus of someone working something out of her system that conversation can't reach.
She doesn't acknowledge me. Her rounds land in a tight cluster at center mass, consistent and controlled, each shot placed with the deliberate patience of someone who learned to shoot from people who considered marksmanship a moral virtue.
I take the lane beside her, select a sidearm from the range rack, load a magazine, and settle into my own stance without speaking.
The first round punches through the target with the familiar recoil that travels up through my wrists and into my shoulders, and the sound fills the concrete space with the percussion of contained violence.
We shoot side by side. The rhythm finds itself without negotiation, her shots and mine falling into a pattern that isn't synchronized but isn't random either, two people channeling the same tension into paper silhouettes that absorb what words cannot.
The range smells of burnt powder and hot brass and the cold stone of the mountain.
Less than an hour ago I came in a steel shower with her name behind my teeth, and now she is close enough that I can smell her shampoo between reloads, standing with a weapon in her hands and her shoulders squared and her breathing timed to her trigger pull, and the proximity after what I did is its own form of punishment. Or its own form of reward.
The line between the two has been blurred where Vix is concerned since the first time I heard her voice in an Istanbul bar and understood that I was finished.
Vix reloads without looking at me. I reload without looking at her.
She empties another magazine. The grouping is tight, professional, every round inside the inner ring. I match it because matching her is what I do, in everything, always, whether she wants me to or not.
The last round lands and the quiet rushes back in, thick and sudden after the percussive rhythm that preceded it.
Vix sets the weapon down, removes her ear protection, and stands in the fluorescent glare with her jaw set and her breathing steady and her eyes fixed on the shredded target at the end of her lane.
She still doesn't look at me. She doesn't need to.
This is the most honest we've been with each other since she arrived at Echo Base, and the honesty lives in the things we're not saying, in the gun smoke and the shared space and the choice to stand next to each other without demanding anything more.
I set down my own weapon. The range holds us in its flat, unforgiving light, and the distance between us feels different than it has since London, less like a cage, more like a line we're both choosing to stand on.
Vix turns and walks toward the door. At the threshold, she pauses, just long enough that the pause itself says I know you're here without the complication of saying it aloud.
Then she's gone, and I am standing in a shooting range inside a mountain with the smell of her shampoo cutting through the cordite, and the cracks in her walls are spreading in directions she can't control.
I can wait. I've been waiting for a decade, and patience is the one weapon she has never learned to defend against.