Chapter 18 The Price #2
The penthouse. Midnight. The elevator opened and she was there. On the couch. In my shirt. The white Oxford. Camus in her lap. The reading glasses on her nose. A glass of wine on the side table. Red. The color she was learning to wear.
She looked up.
"You're late."
"I had a meeting."
"You always have meetings." She closed the book. Studied my face. She was getting better at reading it. The weeks of proximity teaching her the topography of my expressions the way immersion teaches language. She couldn't speak the language yet. But she was starting to hear it. "This one was bad."
"They're all bad."
"This one was worse."
I took off my jacket. Dropped it on the chair. Loosened my collar. Walked to the bar. Poured vodka. Didn't drink it. Stood there holding the glass, looking at the city through the windows, counting the lights the way I counted everything. The floors. The seconds. The days I had left.
Twenty-nine now.
"Viktor."
I turned. She was standing. The book on the couch.
The glasses off. Her hair loose. The shirt hitting her mid-thigh.
Bare legs. Bare feet on the marble. The woman who had been an oatmeal cardigan six weeks ago, standing in my penthouse at midnight looking like the thing I was going to lose if I couldn't prove her value in twenty-nine days.
"Come here," I said.
She came. Closing the distance between the couch and the bar in six steps. I counted those too. Everything was counting now. Everything was a clock.
I kissed her. Hard. The glass hitting the bar behind me.
My hands on her face. Her jaw. Her neck.
Pulling her mouth against mine with the urgency of a man who has just been told he has thirty days to justify the only thing he's ever wanted and the wanting isn't enough.
The wanting has to produce results. Revenue.
Closed deals. Restored channels. The wanting has to be converted into the language the Council speaks, which is the language of profit, which is the only language in the world I've never been fluent in because profit requires the ability to assign value and the thing I value most is standing in front of me in my shirt and she is priceless, which means she has no value the Council can measure, which means I'm fucked.
She kissed me back. Her hands on my chest. Gripping the shirt. Pulling me closer.
"What's wrong?" she said against my mouth.
"Nothing."
"Liar."
"Yes."
I picked her up. Her legs wrapping around my waist. Her arms around my neck. I carried her to the bedroom. Dropped her on the bed. She bounced. Hair fanning out. Green eyes looking up at me with the expression of a woman who can feel a storm coming but can't see the clouds.
I stripped her. The shirt. Over her head.
Gone. She was bare underneath. No bra. No underwear.
She'd stopped wearing them to bed. A small victory that felt massive.
The woman who had hidden her body under three layers of oatmeal was sleeping naked in my sheets.
Progress measured in fabric removed. In walls dismantled. In flinches that no longer happened.
I didn't undress. Unbuckled. Unzipped. Freed my cock.
That was enough. The rest of the suit stayed on.
The urgency didn't allow for ceremony. The clock was ticking and I could hear it in my chest, in my pulse, in the rhythm of my blood that was pumping faster because twenty-nine days is nothing, twenty-nine days is a death sentence delivered in calendar format, and I needed to be inside her the way drowning men need surface.
I spread her legs. She opened for me. Wet already. Always wet for me now. Her body having made its permanent decision weeks ago while her mind was still catching up. I drove inside her. One stroke. Hard. Deep. She cried out. Her back arching off the bed. Her hands fisting the sheets.
I fucked her like the clock was ticking.
Because it was.
Fast. Hard. My hands pinning her hips to the mattress.
My cock driving into her with a rhythm that had nothing to do with pleasure and everything to do with desperation.
The desperation of a man who has just been told that the woman underneath him has thirty days to prove she's worth keeping alive, and the proving depends on him, and the failing ends with her disappearing quietly and him falling with her, and the falling is fine, the falling he can handle, but the disappearing.
The quiet disappearing of Maeve Brennan.
Her green eyes and her freckles and her Gaeilge phone calls and her Camus novels and her three languages and her terrible ramen and her succulent and her four locks.
All of it. Gone. Quietly. Without a trace.
"Viktor." Her voice strained. Her body taking every thrust. Her cunt gripping me so tight it hurt. The good hurt. The hurt that means alive. "Viktor, what's wrong? You're... you're different tonight."
"Quiet."
"Talk to me."
"I said quiet."
I drove deeper. Harder. She moaned. Her nails digging into my forearms. Her legs wrapping tighter around my waist. I could feel her trying to read me through the fucking.
The way she read contracts. The way she read faces.
Looking for the clause that explains the urgency.
The pronoun that shifts the liability. The discrepancy on page forty-two that tells you someone is hiding something.
She wouldn't find it. I buried it too deep. Behind the thrusts. Behind the speed. Behind the grip on her hips that would leave bruises she'd find tomorrow morning and press with her fingertips the way she pressed everything. Testing. Measuring. Trying to understand.
"Tu me fais peur," she whispered. You're scaring me.
I slowed. One second. The sentence hitting me in the chest. Then I sped up again.
Faster. The fear in her voice making me harder.
The fear making everything sharper. The edges of the room.
The sound of the bed. The slap of my hips against hers.
The wet sound of her cunt taking me in, releasing, taking me in again. A rhythm. A clock. A countdown.
"Encore," she gasped. More. "Plus fort." Harder.
I gave her harder. Gave her everything. Fucked her like the world ended in twenty-nine days and the only thing left was this.
Her body. My body. The collision of the two, producing a friction that felt like fire, like ruin, like the thing that happens when a man who has controlled everything encounters the one thing he's about to lose.
She came. Screaming. Her whole body locking around me.
Her cunt clenching in waves that pulled the orgasm out of me like a confession.
I came inside her with a groan that sounded like something breaking.
Because something was. The architecture of my control.
The forty-five years of coldness and calculation.
The man who wanted nothing he couldn't buy, kill, or negotiate for.
All of it breaking against the body of a woman who would disappear in twenty-nine days if I couldn't convince five old men she was worth the blood on my lobby floor.
I collapsed on top of her. Heavy. Breathing hard.
My face in her neck. Her hair in my mouth.
Her heartbeat against my chest, fast, confused, the heartbeat of a woman who had just been fucked with an intensity that scared her and aroused her in equal measure and she couldn't separate the two and didn't know if she should try.
"Something happened tonight," she said. Into the dark. Into the ceiling. Into the space where all the things I wouldn't tell her lived, crowding the air like ghosts.
"Yes."
"You're not going to tell me what."
"No."
"Is it bad?"
Twenty-nine days. A woman disappearing quietly. A king falling with her. The round table and the five chairs and the old man with shaking hands who had just given me a month to justify the only addiction I'd ever fed.
"Go to sleep, Maeve."
She turned on her side. Drew her knees up.
Put her hand on her stomach. The protective gesture.
The muscle memory. I pulled her against me.
Chest to back. My arm around her waist. My hand over hers, on her stomach, on the place she guarded.
Holding her the way I held everything. Too tight. Without apology.
She fell asleep in four minutes.
I stayed awake.
Counting.
Twenty-nine days.
Twenty-eight by morning.
The clock was ticking and the woman in my arms was the bomb and the detonator and the only thing worth saving from the blast.
I held her tighter.
She murmured something in her sleep. Gaeilge. A word. Maybe a name. Maybe a prayer. I couldn't understand it. I would never understand it. The room inside her I couldn't enter, speaking through the walls in a language I couldn't learn fast enough.
Twenty-eight days.
I closed my eyes.
I didn't sleep.