Chapter 20
Nico
Release
* * *
She learned to shoot.
My Beretta in her hands. The gun that sits on the nightstand she sleeps beside, the gun I used in the warehouse while she watched from the doorway and didn't flinch. She held it like she holds everything. With precision and the absolute refusal to be afraid.
The recoil surprised her the first time.
Not the second. By the fifth round, she was adjusting her stance without being told.
By the tenth, she hit center mass. I stood behind her, close enough to feel the tension in her shoulders, and watched Siobhan O'Brien learn to kill with the focus she brings to boardrooms and crisis management and the systematic dismantling of every wall I've ever built.
I should not have found it arousing. But I did.
Now it's evening. Day four of the war. The maps on the bedroom desk have been redrawn twice.
Viktor has gone quiet since the safe house hit, which is worse than noise because silence means planning.
Lex checked in an hour ago: no movement, no intercepts, nothing.
The absence of information is its own kind of violence.
I'm at the desk. The Beretta is disassembled in front of me.
I've cleaned it three times today. The ritual of control when everything else is chaos: slide, barrel, spring, frame.
My hands know the sequence better than they know anything except her body, and the fact that those two things now occupy adjacent space in my mind should concern me more than it does.
Four days. Four days of holding the war together with my hands and my phone and the cold focus that made me the youngest boss in forty years.
Four days of being the weapon instead of the man.
Andreas is dead. Viktor is watching. My wife sleeps in my bed with a gun on the nightstand and I taught her to use it today because the world I built isn't safe enough for the woman I—
I stop the thought. I've been stopping that thought for days.
She appears in the doorway.
I know she's there before I see her. The shift in air pressure, the particular displacement of silence that happens when she enters a room. My body has been calibrated to her presence since the night she knocked, and the calibration gets more precise every day.
She crosses the room. I don't look up. I'm holding the slide, running the cloth along the rail, and if I look at her right now I will see the woman who hit center mass and I will stop functioning as the boss and start functioning as the man and the man is not what's needed right now.
Her hand finds my jaw. Turns my face to hers.
"Nico."
I look at her.
Whatever she sees. And she sees everything, this woman who reads rooms the way I read threat assessments. She doesn't step back. The rage. The fear. The four days of coiled tension that's been compressing behind my ribs like a spring wound past tolerance. She reads it all and her eyes don't waver.
She kisses me.
Hard. Not the morning kiss, not the goodnight kiss, not the soft press of lips I've been rationing myself because if I kiss her the way I want to kiss her right now I'll break apart and the boss can't afford to break.
This kiss is a match to a fuse. Her mouth opens against mine and her tongue finds mine and her hands grip my shirt and she pulls me out of the chair.
"Let go." Her voice against my mouth. "Just for tonight."
My control snaps.
I don't decide it. The decision is made for me by four days of pressure finding its first exit and the exit is her mouth, her body, the permission she just gave me to stop holding everything together.
I'm on my feet. My hands find her waist, her hips, and I'm moving her backward, walking her across the bedroom until her back hits the wall and the impact makes her gasp and the sound reaches a place with no name and no restraint.
I pin her. My body against hers, pressing her into the plaster, and I can feel her heartbeat through her shirt.
My shirt. She's wearing my shirt. The white oxford she stole from my closet, the one with the buttons done wrong, the daily declaration that she belongs here.
My mouth finds her neck. The hollow below her ear where her pulse is hammering and I bite down gently and her head falls back against the wall and the sound she makes.
Low. Wanting. A sound that goes straight to my cock.
Undoes the last thread of whatever I was holding.
My hands drag down her body. Find the hem of the shirt. My shirt. I push it up her thighs, my fingers trailing over skin that's hot under my touch, and I discover she's wearing nothing underneath.
Nothing.
The sound I make is guttural. Not a word. Not the controlled "Christ" from our first night. A sound from the basement of a man who's been civilized his entire life and is, in this moment, not.
"You want this?"
"Yes."
"Even when I'm like this?"
Her eyes find mine. Clear. Certain. The same certainty that sat in my chair and negotiated terms and walked thirty feet of hallway and knocked.
"I want all of you. The control. The chaos. All of it."
The words break a seal. She's not saying rough sex is acceptable.
She's telling a man who hides his darkness that she wants every version of him.
The one who washes her hair, the one who kills with precision, the one who is shaking right now with four days of terror he couldn't show because the boss doesn't shake.
My hand slides between her thighs. She's wet.
Already wet. Has been, maybe, since she walked in and read my face and decided.
My fingers find her and she gasps, her hips rocking forward against my hand, and the slickness on my fingers is evidence that she wants this as badly as I need it.
I work her with the focus I bring to everything.
The attention that reads rooms and builds strategies and learned her body three nights ago in this bed.
But there's no patience now. I find her clit and her whole body jerks against the wall.
"Nico —"
I circle. Press. Read the way her breath catches, the way her hips tilt, the way her hand grips my shoulder hard enough to bruise. She's close already. Wound tight herself, days of tension in her body too, the cage and the surveillance photos and the dead soldier. We've both been carrying this.
I push two fingers inside her while my thumb works her clit and she cries out, her back arching off the wall, and I curl my fingers and find the spot that made her shatter three nights ago and she's clenching around me, her whole body tightening, and I watch her face while she comes.
Her eyes squeeze shut. Her mouth opens on a sound that's half my name and half a prayer.
Her thighs shake against my hand. I hold her through it, my other arm braced against the wall beside her head, and the sight of her coming apart on my fingers is the most beautiful thing I have ever watched.
She hasn't finished shaking when I spin her.
She faces the wall. Her hands flatten against the plaster, bracing herself. I press against her from behind and she pushes back into me and the contact. My cock against her ass, the heat of her skin through the shirt I'm still wearing. Makes me groan into her neck.
I push the shirt higher. Bare her completely from the waist down. My hand traces her spine through the oxford, and I grip the fabric at her shoulder and hold her.
"Is this too much?"
"No." Her voice is wrecked. Raw. "More. Give me more."
I push inside her.
Skin to skin. Nothing between us. The heat and the tightness and the raw closeness of being inside her with nothing separating us.
I feel every inch of her, the way she stretches around me, the way her body grips me, and the sensation is so intense my vision whites out for a second.
She gasps. Her hands press harder against the wall. Her head drops forward.
I pull back. Push in again. Harder.
She moans. A sound that bounces off the walls of a bedroom that never held sounds like this before her.
I find a rhythm. Not slow. Not careful. The rhythm of a man who's been holding himself together for four days and has finally been given permission to stop.
Hard. Deep. Each thrust pushes her up the wall half an inch and she braces and takes it and meets me.
"You're mine." The words pour out. I don't choose them. They escape from the place the guttural sound came from. Involuntary. Primal., the vocabulary of a man stripped to instinct. "Viktor Reznikov thinks he can touch you? He'll die before he gets close."
"Yes —"
"Say it." My hand grips her hip. I pull her back onto me with every thrust and the sound of our bodies is obscene and perfect. "Say you're mine."
"I'm yours." Her voice breaks on my name. "Nico… I'm yours."
I reach around her body. My hand slides down her stomach, between her thighs, and I find her clit again.
Slick and swollen from the first orgasm.
I work her while I fuck her. The dual sensation.
My cock inside her, filling her, hitting deep, and my fingers on her clit, circling, pressing.
She can't form words anymore. The sounds coming from her throat are fragmented.
My name, "please," "God," syllables that dissolve before they become language.
I feel her building again. The tightening around my cock.
The way her breath goes ragged and her hands scrape against the wall.
I'm close too. Four days of pressure cresting, the wave building at the base of my spine, and I'm trying to hold on long enough to take her with me but my control is gone.
She shredded it with three words: I want all of you.
"Come for me." My mouth against her ear. My fingers pressing harder. My hips snapping against her. "Let me feel you."
She comes screaming. Not muffled against a shoulder, not bitten off.
A scream that echoes off the bedroom walls, her body clamping around me so tight I can't breathe, her back arching against my chest, and the force of it pulls me over.
I bury myself inside her as deep as I can get and the orgasm tears through me — not release but purge.
Four days of fear and rage and the weight of dead men pouring out of me in waves, and she takes it. She takes all of it.
I press my face into her neck. My body shudders. The shudder goes on and on, aftershocks, my arms wrapped around her waist holding her against me while the last of it drains. My knees are shaking. Hers too. We're both breathing in gasps that might be sobs but aren't.
We slide down the wall. End up on the floor, her in my lap, my back against the plaster, both of us trembling.
She turns in my arms and her hand cups my face and her eyes find mine and she looks at me like I'm something worth keeping.
After what I just did. The roughness. The possession.
The raw uncontrolled need. She looks at me like that.
I carry her to the bed because the floor is cold and because carrying her is the only tender thing my body knows how to do right now.
I lay her down. Pull the blanket over us.
She fits against my chest. The hollow below my collarbone.
The place that only she fits. My hand rests on her stomach, idle, warm, feeling her breathe.
"Thank you."
"For what?"
"For letting me be... this. With you."
She's quiet for a moment. Her fingers trace my jaw. The touch is so gentle after the violence of what just happened that my throat tightens.
"You don't have to be anything but what you are with me."
Silence. The city through the east-facing window.
Her breathing slowing. My hand on her stomach, feeling the rise and fall.
The rage is gone. The fear is banked to embers.
For the first time in four days, I can breathe without the weight and I breathe her in.
Sweat and shampoo and the particular warmth of her skin after sex.
I start to drift. She's warm. The bed is warm. The beast in my chest that's been clawing at the walls since Viktor's photograph has gone quiet.
At 3am, my phone rings.
The sound cuts through sleep like a blade. I'm awake instantly. Hand reaching for the phone, body rigid, the tactical brain back online before my eyes fully open. Beside me, she stirs.
I answer. Listen. The voice on the other end is Lex's, and Lex's voice never shakes, but it's shaking now.
"They hit one of our safe houses. Four men dead." A pause. "Including the man guarding your mother."
The phone is in my hand and the bedroom is dark and the woman beside me is warm and alive and the war just arrived at my mother's door.
"Is she —"
"Moved in time. Secondary team got her out. She's safe. Nico, she's safe."
I hang up. I sit on the edge of the bed. Siobhan's hand finds my back.
"What happened?"
"Viktor hit a safe house. Four of my men." My voice is a stranger's. "The one guarding my mother."
Her hand goes still on my back. Then presses harder. Holding me in place. Keeping me in my body when everything in me wants to leave it.
"Is she alive?"
"She's alive. They moved her."
"Then we deal with it. Together."
Together. The word she gave me in the kitchen. The word I'm only beginning to understand.
I get dressed in the dark. She watches from the bed, the sheet pulled to her waist, her eyes tracking me with the fierce attention she brings to everything.
"I'm coming with you."
"Siobhan —"
"Together. You said together."
I look at her. This woman. This impossible woman who let me pin her against a wall and pour four days of rage into her body and is now sitting in my bed telling me she's not staying behind.
"Together," I say.