Sam
Her driver is waiting for her right after the hit.
But even in her imagination, she knows this is impossible.
The minutes and miles go by, and she tries to cast everything out of her memory, wants to erase Dominique’s slumped figure and the vacant look in her eyes.
But the sand in her blood makes sure that her memory remains startlingly clear, and instead, her mind plays and replays a tapestry of snapshots from the night, as sharp as if she’d taken photos of every moment.
She reaches her floor and heads toward her suite. But when she passes Will’s door, she stops in front of it, hesitating.
And suddenly, she thinks of Ari. Feels him tracing the symbol for gold on her palm. Sees him silhouetted on a moonlit beach. Hears his voice.
Because I missed you.
There is an urge in her to cry and she can’t understand it.
Can’t understand why she thinks of him now, of a time before all of this.
Can’t understand what they have done. Can’t understand how to bear it.
All she wants in this moment is to be back at that beach, flowers braided into her hair, listening to him make her a promise that he can’t keep.
But Ari isn’t here. She’s just standing in a hall, staring at Will’s door.
Maybe he’s not even back from Oxford yet.
She has no idea what business he’d attended to while she was on assignment, or how long his work might take tonight.
Even if he is here already, he’ll be annoyed with her if she disturbs him now.
Will had specifically told her to meet him here the next morning.
But Sam stands in the hall and imagines herself going to her empty hotel room, washing her hands again and again until her skin cracks and bleeds.
Suddenly, she’s terrified of being alone.
If she wanted to, she could transmute his door open, could turn the lock into water and let it drip to the carpet, leaving a gaping hole. If she wants to, she has the power to do anything.
Instead, she reaches into her purse and takes out another sand pill. She swallows it. Then she decides to knock.
The door opens a second later to reveal Will.
The collar of his shirt is undone, his tie is loose, and a glass of wine is in his hand.
He looks at her and says nothing. He doesn’t have to.
He can tell from her expression that she was successful at her assignment, that by morning, Lumines will know about it.
“Yes?” he says.
His tone is flat and hostile, but tonight Sam is too exhausted to fear it. Without a word, she walks past him and into his room.
The lights are dim. Beyond the entry hall, she can see the entire city of Londinium glittering outside his windows.
She stops and turns back to him. In the dimness, he is a collection of dark and light lines, eyes black and glittering, figure silent and powerful.
His gaze wanders down her body, then back up to her face.
She’s reminded of the first time she ever saw him behind the Odyssey, when she was still a girl, and how his eyes had somehow found her in the night, piercing all the way into her soul. How she had desired him, even then.
“What is it, Sam?” he says quietly.
She looks up at him, grits her teeth, and takes a step closer. There’s a cry inside her, and when she speaks, her words come out hoarse.
“I want to forget,” she says.
He studies her thoughtfully, and for a moment, she thinks he’s going to send her back out into the hall, tell her to go to her own room, that she’ll feel better in the morning.
“Will, please,” she whispers, and for a moment, she’s not even sure what she’s asking for.
He takes a step toward her too. The second dose of sand is flooding her body now, heightening everything. His hand comes up to hold her chin, tilts it up to him. She’s suspended there, quivering in his grasp.
Then he leans down and, at long last, kisses her.
She sighs in gratitude and longing. Her lips part and she kisses him back, harder, harsher.
He responds in kind. As he does, he holds out his wineglass and lets it drop, and the glass shatters against the hallway floor.
Wine spills across the wood. Freed, his other hand presses against her bare back and pulls her to him.
Make me forget, Will, she thinks feverishly.
His lips are moving along her jaw, her ear, her neck, her clavicle, and her skin prickles with pleasure in his hands.
Her mind feels broken, and tonight, all she wants is to fill her brain with this.
To push everything else out. How many years has she fantasized about him touching her?
She concentrates on that, her long yearning.
The grief that shards her heart numbs, tranquilized, and she thinks maybe this is the same as solving it.
She doesn’t dwell anymore on the slide of a knife through a human, how easily the body gives way. She’s only whispering his name now.
Will. Will, please.
She can’t remember him sliding her dress off her body, or him lifting her up—maybe she gets up on her own and lets him lead her across the room to the bed.
It’s strange, because doesn’t her mind record everything?
Isn’t the sand surging through her veins, eating away at the surface of her heart?
She doesn’t know and doesn’t care. She wants to be dizzy.
At some point, her back hits the bedsheets and then Will is hovering over her.
She sees him pulling loose the tie from around his neck and looping it in one hand.
Her heart jumps in panicked anticipation. Of course Will isn’t a gentle lover.
“Turn around,” he tells her in a low voice, and she obeys the order on instinct.
She feels him press up behind her, hard and ready, and then the world goes black as he wraps the tie around her eyes, pulling her throat back before knotting the fabric behind her head.
She trembles all over, blind and naked, and her mind sparks frantically, recalling her first test at the Observatory, when he’d first done this to her.
In the new darkness, she feels him turn her back around so that she’s facing him.
His hand slides down her stomach and her hips and along her inner thigh.
She presses against the bed and falls back onto it, and as she parts her legs for him, she feels his hair brush her thighs, then his tongue sliding against where she has turned hot and wet.
Her mind relents gratefully, and she lets her lust carry everything away.
Her body, arched back with pleasure. His fingers, stroking deep and relentless inside her.
His tongue, circling the bundle of nerves buried in her folds.
The sand enhances everything, filling every corner of her mind with the sound of her wetness and the slide of the bedsheets against her back and the sun-hot touch of his hands.
He works on her until she feels the heat building and building inside her abdomen, and then the wave in her is cresting over, and she lets out a broken gasp, shuddering against him as she comes.
“Bend over.” His whisper is against her ear now.
She does as he says, turning to face the bed and leaning against the frame with her arms. He comes up behind her.
He’s naked now, too—she can feel all of him there.
He pulls her head back by her hair, and she feels his breath against the nape of her neck.
His muscled arm curls around her, his hand sliding along her throat. She shivers at the power of him.
“How long,” he murmurs, “have you wanted this?”
She shudders, doesn’t dare admit the answer, is suddenly ashamed of herself.
“I don’t know,” she ends up whispering back.
His lips press against her shoulder. He says nothing.
And then he pushes fully into her.
Her body has to stretch to accommodate him, but she’s so wet that he’s in with a single try. She winces and loves it, a hoarse cry breaking from her as she braces herself against the bed.
When he fucks her, it’s hard and merciless and there is no hesitation at all; he’s done this plenty of times before.
He goes until she’s trembling again, her orgasm taking her breath away as she claws at the bedsheets.
Then he’s telling her to lie flat on the bed, and when she does, he yanks the necktie off her eyes.
Suddenly, she can see everything—the dark hotel room, Will’s naked, muscular form towering over her, his gaze dark and possessive and ensnaring her.
He pushes into her, and she cries out again, her arms locking around his neck.
The bed shudders, she’s crushed beneath his weight, she can barely catch her breath.
When she slides her hands down his body, he gives her an impatient look and grabs her wrists, then forces her arms over her head, where he transmutes a strip of the headboard to strap her hands firmly in place.
Helpless, trapped, she squirms as he drapes her legs over his shoulders, and then he’s fucking her hard, the bed thudding against the wall with the force of him.
She can feel the violence in him pulled taut, as if on a leash that might snap.
There is the hint of a snarl on his lips.
She pushes back, defiant with lust, baring her own teeth at him, and she can tell he likes this.
When he kisses her harshly, she bites his lip, drawing blood.
She hardly knows what she’s saying to him.
Yes, please. Yes, again. Yes, more.
Her brain records everything. She’s all too eager to replace the events of the evening with him, erase her mind with the feeling of him.
He makes it easy for her. She’s so wet that the slick of her drips steadily onto the bed.
Her world has become nothing but feeling.
He’s rough with her, but he gives her enough room to fight.
They fuck like they’re angry with each other but don’t know why.
She’s sweaty, slippery against him, whimpering as another wave rises in her.
His hand grips her face, holding her steady.
“Look at me,” he orders.
She obeys, eyes on him as her body blooms once again, the ache rolling on and on and on, each crest overlapping with the last, and god, it should be impossible to feel this good. She loses track of everything except him, his jaw clenched, his brows furrowed, his eyes furious and hazy with desire.
And then he’s cracking, gifting her this moment, this absolute want in his gaze, this weakness, this clenching of teeth, when his eyes shut and he rasps out her name, Sam, fuck, and he spends everything he has inside her.
This moment. Oh, it is everything, the attention she has hungered for all her life, the need to be seen, the power to make someone want her.
Tonight, to him, she is not invisible. And maybe, for this, she was always willing to sell her soul.
She can’t tell if she’s in love with him, or whether she is starving after so many years of longing and desire, or whether she truly just wants to forget, to make the scream inside her go silent.
Maybe it’s all of it. Maybe it doesn’t matter.
Maybe happiness only exists in fragments. Maybe it is only the absence of grief.
When she turns her head to the side, she can see the skyscrapers in the night, the cityscape filling up the wall of windows. Everything looks infinite, like it’s all possible, like she can become anything. All is one, and one is all.
And isn’t this worth it? Isn’t she worth it?