Laura
When I wake, I find the bag just inside the bedroom door, handles creased, paper still crisp where my name isn’t written but must have been spoken.
Inside: a pair of jeans that fit the dip of my waist without gaping, a soft sweater the color of storm clouds, a toothbrush still sealed in plastic, a comb, my favorite toiletries.
Someone, somewhere, paid attention to details they had no business knowing.
My sizes. My preferences. I dress slowly, unnerved by the accuracy of it all, and follow the smell of coffee. I find Maxim in the kitchen.
He didn’t cook. He ordered. The room service cart is loaded with enough food for a small luncheon—eggs four different ways, a pyramid of pastries, jeweled cups of fruit, toast fanned across a silver rack, shakshuka bubbling in a cast-iron dish, blini stacked beside caviar, something dark and rich that smells of cinnamon and fig.
Enough for eight people, arranged across the marble counter.
It’s too much. It’s overwhelming. I stand in the doorway and stare at it.
He doesn’t look up from the newspaper he’s reading—actually reading, broad sheets of actual paper that dwarf his hands—seated at the counter in a clean black shirt with his sleeves rolled to the elbows and his coffee cradled in one palm.
The morning light kisses his cheek through the penthouse glass.
“Eat something,” he says. Not a suggestion.
“You ordered one of everything.”
“I didn’t know what you liked.”
The simplicity of that—I didn’t know what you liked—cracks me open.
I sit down and reach for the eggs benedict, then the fruit, and dig into a scrumptious blueberry muffin.
Nobody has ever ordered one of everything for me before.
This violent, impossible man with seventy-two-hour background checks and a bar full of expensive whisky apparently operates on the principle that if you don’t know, you cover all available ground.
He pours me coffee without asking and sets it at my elbow. I look at it. Cream, exactly right. The shade I prefer. Not close—exact. “Lucky guess?” I say, wondering how he's doing this.
He turns a page of the newspaper. “Something like that.”
“Tell me about your students,” he says.
I look up. He folds the paper. Like the question is casual. Like he asks this kind of thing over breakfast with strangers all the time. “My students?”
“The six-year-olds.”
I study him for a moment. The line of his jaw, the bruised fatigue beneath his eyes that softens when he thinks I’m not looking. “Why?”
He pinches each fold into sharp creases, but I see the pause in his fingers. “Because you lit up when you mentioned them last night. Even in the middle of the argument.”
I didn’t know I’d done that. The idea that he clocked it—that he was watching me closely enough to register light while we were arguing about assassins and background checks—does something to my stomach.
“There’s this one kid,” I say. “Marcus. He couldn’t read a single word in September.
Wouldn’t even look at the page, he was so embarrassed he’d fold himself smaller and smaller until he was practically under the desk.
” I pick up my coffee, warming my hands around the cup.
“I sat with him every day during snack time. No pressure. Just... presence. Last week he read a full sentence out loud. The cat is big.” I laugh, still thrilled by his accomplishment.
“He looked up at me after, and his whole face—”
I stop.
Maxim has put the newspaper down. He’s looking at me with an expression I haven’t seen on him before.
Not the cold assessment. Not the predatory patience.
Something unguarded, just for a second—a flicker of want so profound it mirrors grief.
He shuts it down so quickly I almost miss it, but the residue remains, hovering in his eyes.
“He looked up,” I finish quietly, “and I thought, that’s it. That’s the job, right there.”
“That’s why,” he says.
“What?”
“Why you teach.” He picks up his coffee, but his gaze stays on mine, unwavering. “Not because it’s practical. Because of that. Because you have something that you’re intrinsically good at that brings joy to you and gives that same joy to others.” He hesitates, then adds, “That’s not nothing.”
I swallow. “Do you? Ever do something because of that?”
He looks at me across the counter, steam rising from his cup, morning light gray and endless behind him. He says nothing for so long that silence becomes its own answer. “Eat your eggs,” he says finally.
I eat my eggs. And I smile into my coffee, where he can’t quite see it.
***
That afternoon he shows me a scar. It’s not intentional.
He’s coming back from the gym attached to the guest room, sweat darkening the neck of his shirt, his chest bare beneath an unzipped hoodie.
His torso is a tapestry of ink—saints watched over by script I can’t read, daggers and wolves and stars that ripple as he moves.
The scar is tucked around a bloody dagger tattoo near his shoulder, bigger than the rest, a crater of puckered skin at the back where something went all the way through.
I ask about it before I can stop myself.
I expect him to shut it down the same way he shut down my questions at breakfast.
Instead, he says, quietly, “A man who thought he could take what was mine.”
“What happened to him?”
The look he gives me is answer enough. A graveyard in a single glance.
“And you?” I ask. “What happened to you?”
“Hospital. Three weeks.” Flat. Clinical.
“Were you alone?”
A pause. The air-conditioning hums. “Yes.”
I reach out and touch it—fingertips, light, barely a contact—and his whole body freezes the way it did in the hallway that first night. Absolute, animal stillness.
“I’m sorry,” I say, and I mean it.
“Don’t be.” His voice is rougher than it was. “It made me harder to kill.”
“That’s a terrible thing to be grateful for.”
“Yes.” A beat. A muscle tics in his jaw. “It is.”
I expect him to pull away. To armor up. Instead, his hand lifts, slow and deliberate, and he wraps his fingers around my wrist. Not to push me off. To anchor himself. His thumb strokes the divot of my pulse. Then his grip tightens.
“Come here,” he growls, and the dominance crashes back in like a tide.
He pulls me flush against him, his damp skin bleeding through my sweater, his mouth descending on mine with a hunger that bruises.
He tastes like salt and coffee and something darker.
His hand fists in my hair, angling my head exactly where he wants it, kissing me with a command that leaves no room for hesitation.
I melt into it, into him, this monster who lets me touch his wounds and then reminds me exactly how dangerous he is.
When he breaks away, we’re both breathing hard. “You don’t get to feel sorry for me,” he says against my lips.
“I don’t.”
“Good.” He tilts his head to the side and his eyes ignite a blaze between my thighs. "How are you feeling?"
He stares at my mouth as if fixated by my lips. Lips I bite nervously in return. "I'm fine." A brow lifts wickedly, and I'm already wet. "I'm okay."
"Just okay? Let's see if we can fix that.
" His mouth slams onto mine. It's better than I remember.
So much better. Richer. Darker. Because it's laced with the anticipation of what comes next.
Each swipe tugs at a tendril from last night.
The trace of his fingers on my spine, the brush of his hair between my thighs, the way his mouth consumed my breast. Each ribbon of memory is braided into his kiss. Making it everything.
He lifts my shirt over my head. His bag-of-everything didn't contain a bra.
An omission that seems purposeful as he licks his way down to my chest. I've always had a love hate relationship with my breasts.
They blossomed too big, too soon. The cringe of being dragged from store to store searching for the perfect fit for my young frame, only to have to do it again a few months later.
But now as he cups them, worships them, I arch into his mouth feeding him.
He takes my hands and shapes them into a table to serve him properly.
Guiding me to squeeze them together so he can feast on both at once.
Damn, it feels good. I moan. My thighs clench to hold back an orgasm. I can't come like this, can I?
He alternate between nipples, switching between blowing, tugging, pinching. And yes. Shit. Yes, I can come like this. Right here in the middle of his hallway, with him pulling back to watch an embarrassing climax I can't hide and no clench can hold back.
His eyes are wild as he kneels before me.
Stripping my pants off to capture my orgasm with his tongue, and using his fingers to coax more of my tremors.He works me one handed while he frantically strips his clothes off and I do my best to hold on to my sanity and help.
Then he's inside, breaking through a gate he opened last night.
Wrapping my ankle around his waist to anchor me as he pummels me against the wall.
Something crashes. We don't stop. Can't stop.
The train has flown wildly from the tracks and all we can do is hold on as we plummet.
I'm still trying to remember breathing when he carries me to the bathroom and sets me on the counter. Runs a bath I didn’t ask for.
His hands are rough but his touch careful, and when the tub is full, he guides me in.
The water is perfect. He kneels beside the porcelain, and washes my hair.
His eyes brand mine. No blinking. Just him drinking my reactions.
It is the most intimate thing he’s done yet.
His fingers scrub slow circles against my scalp, gentler than I thought those hands capable of.
He rinses with a cupped palm, water sliding down my neck in streams. He doesn’t speak.
He watches the suds run through my curls.
He pulls them straight then watches fascinated as they spring back into their natural coils.