Chapter 18 #3
The first stroke of my tongue along the length of her is slow and flat and deliberate, parting her folds, tasting the slick heat of her from entrance to clit.
She is swollen and wet and the taste of her hits my bloodstream with the force of something I am never going to recover from.
I flatten my tongue against her clit and she jerks, her hips lifting off the couch, and I press her back down with my forearm across her pelvis and hold her there.
The pressure is not gentle. It is the same hold I used on the briefing room floor, repurposed, and I feel the moment she recognizes it because her breath catches and her fingers twist in my hair with a sharpness that tells me she remembers too.
I circle the swollen nerve again, slower this time, with measured pressure, cataloging every response while I work.
I notice the small roll of her hips when I find the right angle, the way her thigh tightens against my shoulder when I increase pressure, the way she gets wetter with each pass of my tongue as her body opens for me in increments that I track with the focused attention I bring to everything that matters.
I slide two fingers inside her while my mouth works above, and the sound she makes is low and broken and holds my name in it like a word she didn't mean to say aloud.
She is tight around my fingers, hot and clenching, and I curl them forward and find the textured spot along her front wall that makes her whole body seize.
Her fist tightens in my hair hard enough that my scalp burns, and I hold the pressure steady, fingers stroking inside her while my tongue circles her clit with a rhythm I am building for her and her alone.
I take my time. I have spent years rushing through everything, running from one operational theatre to the next, staying ahead of the Committee and MI6 and the particular velocity of a life lived under false names in borrowed rooms. This is the first time I am choosing to be slow, and the discipline of it is its own reward.
Vix is moving against my mouth with an urgency that tells me she is close, her thighs trembling against my shoulders, her hips rolling in tight circles despite the pressure of my forearm holding her down.
I hold the pace steady, my fingers working inside her, my tongue maintaining the rhythm she is chasing, and I wait until I feel her walls clamp down around my fingers and her breath lock in her throat.
She comes with her back arched and her hand pressed over her own mouth, stifling the sound out of a habit built in safe houses and hotel rooms where the walls were thin.
I work her through it, easing the pressure as the contractions pulse around my fingers, her inner muscles gripping and releasing in waves I can feel to the roots of my teeth.
When she goes boneless and slack I press one last kiss to the inside of her thigh and rise to meet her.
She pulls me up and kisses me with the taste of herself on my lips, her tongue pressing into my mouth to chase the flavor, and the kiss is fierce and grateful and holds the hunger I have been waiting years to feel from her, the want stripped of combat, the need stripped of fury.
Her hands find my belt and work it open with the efficient speed of someone who is done waiting.
She pushes my trousers and boxers down together, and when her hand wraps around my cock the grip is sure and practiced, her thumb finding the sensitive ridge beneath the head without hesitation, and the contact hits my nervous system like a detonation.
I am harder than I have been in years, aching with it, and her thumb drags across the head where I am already slick, spreading the moisture down the length of me with a slow, deliberate stroke that pulls a groan from low in my chest.
"You're shaking," she says against my mouth, and there is no mockery in it.
She is right. My arms are trembling where they brace on either side of her, a fine vibration that mirrors the one she carried into this flat from the restaurant.
The difference is that hers was rage suppressed.
Mine is want, held in check since Budapest, finally permitted to exist in the presence of the only person who was ever capable of producing it.
"I know," I say, and kiss her again, because the admission costs me less than I expected.
Her hand guides me to her entrance. The head of my cock presses against her, nudges between the slick folds, and the heat of her there is staggering, wet and swollen from the orgasm and radiating warmth that I can feel before I am even inside her.
I have breached hostile perimeters with less resistance than it takes to hold still at the threshold of this woman's body and wait for her word.
"Now," she says against my mouth. "I want you inside me."
I push into her slowly. Her body resists for a fraction of a second and then yields, the tight heat of her parting around my cock in a way that sends a full-body shudder through my frame.
I have been inside this woman twice since I came back from the dead, once against a hotel wall in Vienna with adrenaline burning through us both, once on a briefing room floor with her teeth in my shoulder and neither of us willing to concede.
Both times I was too far gone to register the specifics.
This time I feel everything: the slick grip of her around the first inch, the way her breath fractures when I press deeper, the internal flutter of muscles still sensitive from the orgasm adjusting to accommodate me.
I seat myself fully and hold, buried to the hilt, and the tight, wet clench of her body around mine is the most comprehensive sensation I have experienced since Budapest, and I have been shot, stabbed, and drowned since Budapest, so the bar is not low.
Her eyes are open, locked on mine, and the intimacy of that is more exposing than any amount of skin.
This is not the frantic collision of Vienna or the combative urgency of the briefing room.
This is two people who have decided to be here, knowing exactly what the other is capable of and what they have done and what it will cost to stay.
"Move," she whispers. Her legs wrap around my hips, her heels pressing into the backs of my thighs, changing the angle, pulling me fractionally deeper, and the shift hits like a current through every nerve below my waist.
I could make her wait. I could hold still inside her until the whisper becomes a demand and the demand becomes begging, the way I would have in Vienna, the way I did on the briefing room floor when she fought me for every inch of control.
I give her what she asks for instead, and the giving is its own dominance because she knows, and I know she knows, that I am letting her have this.
I pull back slowly and push in again, and the drag of her around me, the slick resistance and release, is a physical fact I will carry in my body long after Prague becomes another city on the operational map.
I build a rhythm that is gradual and deep, each thrust drawing almost fully out before pressing back in, and Vix matches it, her hips rising to meet mine with a precision that speaks to muscle memory and present-tense want in equal measure.
Her hands are mapped across my back, her fingers pressing hard enough to leave marks, and the sting of her nails carries the faint signature of anger that has not fully transmuted into softer territory.
I welcome it. I would rather have Vix's fury scored into my skin than any other woman's gentleness.
My name leaves her mouth barely voiced, and the way she says it strips the syllables of everything I have built around them, every alias, every cover story, all the years of being someone else.
She said that name to a dead man for a long time.
She is saying it to a living one now, and the distinction lands in the base of my spine and coils there, hot and tight.
She says it again when I shift my angle, tilting my hips to grind against her clit on each stroke, and the second time it fractures into something breathless and raw.
I watch her face and she watches mine, and the sustained eye contact is the bravest thing either of us has done tonight, because we are hiding nothing and the habit of hiding is the only thing that has kept us alive this long.
I feel her tighten around me as she builds toward a second peak, her walls clenching with each inward stroke, the pressure increasing until every thrust is a fight against her body's grip.
I increase the depth and the pace, and the wet sound of our bodies meeting fills the flat alongside our breathing, and the obscenity of that sound in this still room is grounding in a way that reminds me this is real, this is physical, this is happening.
"Look at me," I say, because her eyes have started to close and I am greedy for what lives behind them. "Stay with me, Vix."
Her eyes open, dark and blown wide, narrowed to the precise point where our bodies are joined.
She reaches between us and her fingers find her own clit, working herself in tight circles while I thrust into her, and the sight of it, Vix's fingers working her own clit while my cock is buried inside her, is so explicitly trusting that it tears through my discipline like a round through glass.
I drive deeper. She gasps and her walls clamp around me and I feel her orgasm begin before she does, the rhythmic clenching that starts deep and radiates outward, her body locking around my cock with a force that drags me to the edge.
She comes with my name on her lips, not stifled this time, spoken into the space between us with an openness that is more naked than anything her body has offered tonight.
I thrust into her through the contractions, each pulse of her inner muscles pulling at me, and the sensation builds at the base of my spine and spreads upward until I can't hold it.
I bury myself deep and let go. The orgasm hits like a breach charge detonating behind my ribs, my vision whiting at the edges while my cock pulses inside her, each throb dragging a sound from my throat that I do not recognize as mine.
Her name is on my lips and her fingers are digging into my shoulders and years' worth of denied want is releasing at once, obliterating, total.
Her body draws out every last pulse, her walls milking me through the aftershocks with contractions that border on cruel, and I am shaking when it ends, hollowed out in a way that feels less like emptiness and more like space cleared for something I haven't earned yet.
Neither of us speaks for a long time. Our breathing fills the flat, ragged and gradually settling, and I hold my weight off her on my forearms and press my forehead against hers and we breathe the same air.
I am still inside her, softening, and I can feel the wetness of us both where our bodies meet, the slick evidence of what we just did pooling between her thighs.
Her hands trace patterns on my back, idle and warm, fingertips moving over the welts her nails left. The way she touches the marks is proprietary. She made those. She wanted to. The tenderness of her fingers retracing the damage is more dangerous than anything she has done with her fists.
"Stay," she says, when I shift to withdraw. Her heels press against my thighs, holding me in place. "Just another minute."
I stay. I hold my body against hers in the wet heat of the space between us while the hum of the Prague safe house settles into the small hours around us.
Her pulse beats against my chest where our skin is pressed together, and the rhythm is fast and gradually slowing, and I match my breathing to hers until we are synchronized in a way that has nothing to do with training.
When I finally ease out of her, the separation draws a small sound from both of us.
I find my shirt on the floor and clean the mess from her thighs with a care that is more intimate than it should be, and Vix watches me do it with an expression I cannot fully read.
I pull her with me as I shift to the side, and she settles against my chest with her head tucked under my chin, and the fit of her body against mine is a thing I have memorized and mourned and been given back.
"I don't know how to forgive you," she whispers against my sternum. Her voice is honest and holds no anger.
My arms tighten around her. "You don't have to. Just don't leave."
She is silent for long enough that the words settle into the space between us, and then she turns her head and presses her lips against my sternum, and the gesture holds an answer even before she speaks.
"I'm not going anywhere," she says.
She means Echo Base. She means this couch.
She means the safe house and the plum liquor and the vendetta that has become something larger than either of us planned, the team and the mission and the war that is coming, and the fact that she has decided to fight it beside a man she has not forgiven and may never fully forgive.
I pull her closer. She lets me. Prague hums outside the curtained window, and the intelligence is secure, and Volkov is hunting for an enemy he doesn't yet know is already inside his defenses.
The vendetta has changed shape. Vix has changed it, from personal revenge into operational purpose, and the woman lying against my chest is more dangerous now than she was when anger was driving her.
Purpose is a steadier engine than rage, and it runs longer.
I press my mouth against her hair and close my eyes and let myself hold her the way I have wanted to hold her since Moscow, completely, with nothing held back.
Her breathing has deepened against my chest, but her fingers are still moving, tracing idle patterns on my forearm, and I know that restless hand.
It is the hand of a woman whose mind is already three moves ahead, already sorting intelligence, already building the operational architecture of what comes next, even here, even now, even half-asleep against the chest of a man she cannot forgive.
Vix never stops running ops. And the op she is running now will tear Volkov's world apart.