Chapter 8
EIGHT
Mateo
I stood by the heavy velvet drapes of the safehouse study, leaving a two-inch gap to watch the street below. My pulse was resting at fifty-eight beats per minute. Steady. Operational. But the air inside the room was vibrating, thick with the scent of Rowan's stressed peppermint.
Rowan Quill was tearing herself apart at the desk behind me.
It was 2:00 AM. She had been staring at the encrypted files Stephen pulled from the Aegis server for six hours. She was muttering, her fingers flying across the keyboard with a violence that threatened to crack the plastic.
"The routing numbers loop," she hissed to herself, the sound of a woman arguing with a ghost. "He’s using a charitable trust in the Caymans to pay the scouts. It’s messy. It’s so fucking messy."
I turned from the window.
She looked wrecked. Her hair was a disaster, a bird’s nest of golden-brown escaping the severe bun she tried to maintain.
She was wearing one of Juno’s oversized hoodies, but she still looked sharp, angular, dangerous.
The mismatched hoodie and pencil skirt just highlighted how much of a mess she was.
The blue light of the monitor hollowed out her cheeks.
She wasn't running on fuel anymore. She was running on fumes and spite.
"Quill," I said. My voice was a low rumble in the quiet house.
She didn't look up. "Not now, Mateo. I’m tracing the payment for the surveillance team. If I can link the scout who filmed me to Vance’s personal account, we bypass the corporate veil."
"You need to sleep."
"I need ten more minutes," she corrected, highlighting a column of data.
I looked back out the window. The street was empty. A black cab splashed through a puddle. A delivery driver on a moped skidded around the corner.
And then I saw it.
Across the street, three floors up in the tenement building facing us. A glint.
It wasn't a light turning on. It was a reflection. A lens catching the streetlamp.
My heart rate didn't spike, it just shifted gears. Combat pace.
"Rowan," I said. "Kill the screen."
Something in my tone cut through her administrative fog. The typing stopped instantly.
"What?"
"Kill the screen. Now."
She slapped the laptop shut. The room plunged into darkness, save for the faint orange glow of the streetlights filtering through the gap in the curtains.
"Someone’s out there?" Her voice was a whisper, stripped of the bravado.
"Third floor. Brick building. Forty degrees left." I didn't move from the gap. "Long lens. Maybe a directional mic. They’re looking for a heat signature."
I heard the scrape of her chair. She was moving toward me.
"Stay back from the window," I ordered.
"I want to see," she whispered, disobeying me immediately. She came up beside me, keeping to the shadows. She smelled of peppermint and the stale, electric scent of anxiety. "Who is it?"
"Freelance," I assessed, watching the shadow shift in the window across the way. "Vance hires professionals. This guy is sloppy. He’s using a flash suppressor, but he’s shifting his weight too much."
I let the curtain fall shut, sealing us in absolute blackness.
"They found us," she said. The vibration in her voice wasn't fear; it was fury. "We’ve been here twenty-four hours. How did they find us?"
"You lit a signal fire," I said, turning to face her in the dark. "You broke the internet, Rowan. People are looking."
I could feel her trembling. Not the shivering of a cold person, but the structural shaking of a machine redlining. She was terrified, but she was trying to convert it into data. She was trying to solve being hunted.
"I need to move," she said, taking a step back toward the desk. "If they know we're here, the data could be compromised. I have to reroute the—"
I reached out.
I caught her arm. She was solid muscle and tension under the soft cotton of the hoodie.
"Stop," I said.
"I can't stop," she snapped, trying to wrench free. "If I stop, they win. If I stop, I'm just a Beta waiting to be collected. I have to work, Mateo. I have to make it expensive for them to come through that door."
"You're vibrating."
"I am processing!"
"You're crashing."
I pulled her in. She hit my chest with a soft thud. She tried to push away, her hands flat against my t-shirt, pushing against the wall of me.
"Let go," she hissed. "I have protocols to run."
"Fuck the protocols."
I backed her up until her hips hit the edge of the heavy oak desk. She gasped, trapped between the wood and my body. I didn't crush her. I just removed the space she was using to hide from herself.
"Mateo," she warned, her voice breathless. "This is not in the contract."
"Then sue me."
I reached up. My hand was large, rough, and scarred from a decade of violence, but I cupped her jaw nonetheless. My thumb brushed her cheekbone. Her skin was burning hot.
She froze. The frantic energy didn't leave, but it changed frequency. It stopped being about the files and started being about the heat in the room.
I leaned down. I was a mountain looming over a fault line.
"You're trying to outrun a bullet, Rowan," I murmured, my face inches from hers. "You can’t paperwork your way out of this feeling."
"I don't... I don't know what you mean."
"The adrenaline," I said. "It's eating you alive. You're looking for a fight in that laptop because you're scared to feel what's happening in your body."
I stroked my thumb over her lower lip. She shuddered, her breath hitching.
"I'm offering you a different fight," I whispered.
Her pupils were blown wide, swallowing the hazel. I could smell the shift in her scent. The chemical tang of anxiety was fading, replaced by something heavier. Something sweeter and wetter.
"Mateo," she breathed.
"Tell me no," I said.
I held her gaze. I put the weapon in her hand. I gave her the power of the veto, the one thing she thought she’d lost when the world turned on her.
"Tell me to back off," I rumbled. "Tell me this isn't professional. Tell me to go guard the door."
Rowan stared at me. She looked at the scar cutting through my eyebrow. She looked at the size of me. She looked at the danger I represented, and the safety I promised.
She didn't speak.
Instead, her hands moved from my chest up to my shoulders. She gripped the fabric of my t-shirt. She pulled.
She stood on her tiptoes.
"Don't you dare go to the door," she whispered.
The control snapped.
I didn't kiss her gently. I crashed into her.
I took her mouth like I was kicking in a door. It was a reclaiming. It was violent and starving. She met me with the same ferocity, her mouth opening, her tongue tangling with mine. She tasted of coffee and defiance.
I groaned, the sound tearing out of my throat, and lifted her.
She wrapped her legs around my waist instantly, locking her ankles with her skirt practically up around her waist. I slammed her down onto the desk as that sweet scent that had just been a hint before now flooded the air around us.
Paperwork flew. The quarterly reports, the Aegis files, the indictments she had been drafting, they scattered across the floor like leaves.
"The files," she gasped against my mouth, but her hands were digging into my hair, pulling me closer.
"Let them scatter," I growled.
I stepped between her thighs, pressing the heavy ridge of my erection against her center through our clothes. The friction was electric. Immediate.
This wasn't romance. This was survival. We were two people being hunted, and the only way to prove we were still alive was to burn this room down with us inside it.
She arched her back, grinding against me. "Mateo... heavy. Be heavy."
"I've got you."
I shoved the hoodie up. I didn't have patience for buttons or zippers. I needed skin. My hands found her waist, rough against the silk of her skin. She wasn't delicate. She felt strong, taut, alive.
She shoved my hands down. She went for my belt.
"Hurry," she demanded, her voice a broken sob. "I need... I need to feel it. Now."
I caught her wrists before she could undo the buckle. Her pulse hammered against my palms, frantic and bird-like, a erratic beat trying to escape the cage of her skin.
"Not like that," I grunted.
I pinned her hands above her head against the dark wood of the shelves, using my left forearm to hold her fast. I needed to anchor her. With my free hand, I cupped her pussy.
She was already soaking wet. The scent of her was a sharp peppermint now drowned in lust.
I didn’t tease. I shoved her panties to the side and drove two fingers into her, deep and rough.
Rowan cried out, her head falling back, knocking against the desk. She tried to buck, to chase the sensation, but I locked my thigh between hers, pinning her against the edge of the desk. I forced her to take the friction exactly how I gave it.
"Stay here," I ordered, my voice a low growl near her ear. "Get out of your head, Quill."
I curled my fingers, grinding upward, targeting the bundle of nerves she usually kept buried under layers of sarcasm and contracts.
She unraveled instantly. It wasn't a slow burn; it was a demolition.
Her interior muscles clamped down on my hand, tight and hot, trying to milk me for everything I was worth and just the thought of her doing that to my cock nearly had me coming undone.
She sobbed, a jagged, broken sound, and shuddered violently against the desk.
I held her through the tremors, keeping the heavy pressure steady until her breath hitched and stalled.
When the spasms faded, I started to withdraw, my breathing heavy but controlled. I went to pull my hand away, ready to fix her skirt, ready to re-secure the perimeter. We had crossed a line, but the release should have bought her clarity, given her some breathing room from the flood of panic.
She lunged.
Her hands, freed from my grip, didn't go for cover. They scrambled for my belt again, frantic, claws digging into the heavy canvas.
"No," she gasped, her eyes wild, pupils swallowing the hazel. She looked wrecked, damp with sweat, and absolutely terrified of the silence returning.
I grabbed her wrists again, holding them away from my fly. "Rowan. You're done. Breathe."
"I'm not even close to done. Do you know how long it's been since I let myself have an orgasm?
" she panted, the demand in her tone doing things to me that it definitely shouldn't have.
"I haven't had one in months. I haven't had sex in years.
All because I've been too focused on work, and what good did it do me?
My career is still in tatters, I'm still being hunted…
" She trailed off, her breath coming in rapid pants that had nothing to do with the orgasm I'd just given her and everything to do with her about to hyperventilate.
I locked my hands over hers, halting the frantic clawing at my belt. Her fingers were cold, despite the flush heating her skin, and they were shaking so hard the brass buckle rattled against the silence of the room.
"Stop," I rumbled.
"Don't tell me to stop," she gasped, trying to wrench her wrists free. She didn't look like a high-powered manager anymore. She looked like a raw nerve ending. "I need this, Mateo. I need to not think for ten minutes. Just let me—"
"No."
I didn't yell. I didn't need to. I just applied pressure, squeezing her wrists gently but firmly until the fight drained out of her arms. She slumped against the desk, her chest heaving, her eyes wide and wet.
The scent coming off her was confused, sharp peppermint spiked with the heavy, musky sweetness of arousal, but underneath it, that acrid smoke of panic was still burning.
"You're trying to eject from your own brain." I leaned in, forcing her to look at me, to see the scar on my face, the stillness in my eyes. "I'm not going to fuck you while you're trying to outrun a panic attack. That’s not safety. That’s just another crash."
She let out a frustrated, jagged sound, dropping her forehead against my chest. "Then what do I do? I can't turn it off. The code, the camera across the street, Vance... it’s all screaming."
"We move locations." I released her wrists and slid my hands down to her hips, grounding her. Big, heavy touches. "We go to the bedroom. I get you off one more time. Properly. Not against a desk while you’re thinking about spreadsheets."
She looked up, blinking. The frantic energy stuttered. "And then?"
"And then you sleep," I said. "That’s the price. You come, you black out. No laptops. Nothing."
She hesitated, her teeth sinking into her lower lip. She was weighing the negotiation. It was the only language she spoke fluently.
"Deal," she whispered.
I didn't wait for her to change her mind.
I bent down, ignoring the protest of my own knees, too many years of jumping out of planes, and scooped her up.
One arm under her knees, the other around her back.
She gasped, instinctively wrapping her arms around my neck, burying her face in the junction of my shoulder.
She felt light. Too light. She’d been skipping meals to create crisis management plans instead.
I carried her out of the study, leaving the scattered papers and the laptop behind in the dark. The hallway was quiet, the only sound my boots on the hardwood. She smelled like sex and exhaustion, a dangerous cocktail that was wreaking havoc on my own biology.
My cock was throbbing, a dull, heavy ache against the rough canvas of my tactical pants. Carrying a warm, willing woman who tasted like trouble was testing every frantic scrap of discipline I had left.
I did the math as I walked. It was going to be a long night.
I was going to have to take care of this myself, probably more than once, before the adrenaline settled enough for me to even think about resting.
Cold showers were a cliché for a reason, but tonight, I had a feeling I’d be testing the water pressure.
But not with her. Not tonight. Tonight she needed an anchor, not an Alpha losing control.
As we passed the landing window, I didn't look out. I didn't need to.
My mind flicked to the glint I’d seen across the street. The freelancer. He was sloppy, but he was there. Tomorrow, I’d go hunting. I’d find that room, break the camera, and have a very quiet, very physical conversation with whoever was holding it. I’d strip the data and burn the bridge.
But for the next six hours? The safehouse was a vault.
The biometric locks were engaged on the outer doors.
The pressure sensors were active on the windows.
Nothing got in or out without me knowing.
The world could burn down outside, Vance could send his lawyers and his bots, but inside these walls, on this shift, Rowan Quill was untouchable.
I kicked the bedroom door open and carried her into the dark.