27. Luna
LUNA
We agreed to be nothing but professionals. It lasted until the door closed.
The ops room emptied a body at a time as the night wore down.
Kirill left first, because Kirill treats sleep like a sport he intends to medal in.
Zoya went next, and on her way out she gave me a look that said she knew precisely what she was leaving in the room and had decided it was my problem now.
Baba Luda set a plate of something warm at my elbow, pressed her thumb to my cheek the way you test bread, and took the last of the kitchen noise with her.
Then there was only the hum of the racks, and Pavel three chairs away, and eleven dead hops of air between us.
"Walk me through the failure again," I said, because the work was the one language we still shared that didn't come with a blade in it.
He did. He always does. He gave it to me clean, no softening, the relay dying at the eleventh hop the second it smelled a question, and somewhere in the middle of it my brain forgot to keep hating him and reached for the puzzle instead.
That's the thing nobody warns you about the person who fits you.
You can be furious at him with your whole chest and still finish his sentence before he does.
We fell into it before either of us noticed.
He fed me the shape of the dying relay and I threw exploits at the gap and he caught the ones that missed before they hit the floor.
This was the duels all over again, his logic and mine braided so tight you couldn't find the seam.
I landed a clean feint and heard him breathe out through his nose, which is as close as Pavel Reznikov comes to applause, and I hated how badly I still wanted the sound.
"Stop feeding it a query," I said. "Feed it a corpse. Hand it a request that's already dead on arrival and read how it flinches."
"It will not flinch. It will drop the connection."
"Then the drop is the tell." I pulled his keyboard across the desk without asking, which is a thing I do, and he let me, which is a thing he does.
"How it dies is the whole confession. You taught me that, back when you were just a handle.
Your worst habit is forgetting your own lessons the second you get scared. "
"I am not scared."
"You're terrified." I didn't look up from the screen. "You've been counting the racks on that wall for an hour. There are still fourteen. They aren't going anywhere, and neither is the thing you're actually afraid of."
His chair scraped. I heard it more than saw it, that small controlled sound of a very large man deciding whether to close distance, and my traitor pulse answered before my pride could file an objection.
"Say what you mean," he said.
"I mean you had eight months." The words came out before I could triage them. "Eight months of me telling a stranger everything, and the stranger was you, and you wore my whole heart like a coat you borrowed and let me believe I was safe."
"You were talking to someone who would have burned the city down for you."
"You don't get to make that sound romantic.
" I turned, and it was a mistake, because he was already close, near enough that I caught cedar and cold air and the ozone tang of a man who lives inside machines.
"You made me trust a screen because you were too much of a coward to let me trust your face. "
"Yes." No excuse rode in behind it. That's the maddening thing about him. He doesn't defend himself. He hands you the true answer and lets it cut whoever it reaches. "And you are still angry, and you still have not stepped back."
"Neither have you."
"No."
The word dropped low, and the last professional thing in the room went out like a killed signal.
I don't know which of us moved. I've replayed it and the log is corrupted on purpose, because if I moved first then it's my fault, and I wasn't ready to file it there.
His mouth found mine like an argument he meant to win, and my hands were already fisted in his shirt, and the kiss wasn't soft and wasn't kind and didn't pretend to be either.
"This doesn't fix anything," I got out against his jaw.
"I know what it is." His hands closed at my waist and lifted me onto the desk like I weighed nothing, and cables scattered, and I let them. "Tell me to stop and I stop. Now, Luna, while I still can."
"Don't you dare stop."
That was all the permission he needed, and he took it like a man who had been starving with a full plate in front of him for months, which, I understood later, he had been.
He kissed me deeper and slower, one hand spread wide at the small of my back to pull me flush against him, the other buried in my hair, and I felt the exact moment his restraint stopped being restraint and turned into a countdown.
My knees came up around him. He stepped into the space I made like it had been built to his measurements.
The anger didn't leave. It just changed states, the way water doesn't vanish when it turns to steam.
I got his shirt open and pushed it off his shoulders, and there was the map of him I'd only ever half seen, the old scar low on his ribs, the ink down one arm, all that lethal machinery gone warm under my palms. He held still for it.
Then he decided looking was taking too long.
He drew my shirt over my head in one motion and set his mouth to my throat, then lower, unhurried, learning my collarbone and the curve beneath it with a patience that bordered on cruelty.
His stubble dragged. My head fell back on its own and knocked one of my monitors crooked, and I didn't care about the monitor, which, if you know me, tells you everything.
"Look at me," he said.
I did. His control was gone in a way I'd never seen, the careful man split straight down the seam, his eyes blown dark, his jaw tight with the work of holding slow. Knowing I was the fault line did something reckless to whatever restraint I had left.
"Say it," he said, low against my skin. "Say who has you."
"You already know."
"I want it in your voice, not a log."
That undid me worse than his hands did. "You," I said. "You, sir. God help me."
"Good girl." He breathed it into the hollow of my throat, and the praise lit something in me I'd have been embarrassed by on any other night.
His hand opened the button of my jeans and eased them down my legs with the same deliberate care he gives anything he means to take apart and keep.
When he finally touched me I was already gone for him, and the sound he made against my skin was low and dark and far too pleased with itself.
"Pavel." His name came out wrecked.
"I have you." He worked me slow, reading my body the way he reads a network, chasing the catch of breath that means yes, walking me up to the edge and then easing back, once and again, until I was cursing him in two languages. "I have waited eight months for this. I am not going to hurry it."
"I'll end you."
"Later." Then he knelt.
I want it on the record that Pavel Reznikov, a man other criminals lower their voices to discuss, went down onto a floor full of scattered cable and put his mouth on me like he had waited his whole disciplined life for the permission.
Whatever I meant to say left me in a rush of air.
My hand fisted in his hair. He held my hips still when they tried to lift off the desk, kept me open to the exact rhythm he wanted, and he didn't speed up and he didn't let go, and he rebuilt me from the inside on his own schedule until the first wave broke and took my spine with it and left his name in pieces on my tongue.
He rose before I stopped shaking, unhurried, and there it was, the boy under the alpha, the almost-smile he only ever aims at me. "One," he said, the way he counts exits.
"You're keeping score?"
"I keep track of everything that matters.
" He kissed the answer into my mouth, and I got my hands to his belt, because I had run all the way out of patience for being the only one taken apart.
He stood between my knees while I worked the buckle loose and freed him, and the low sound he made when my hand closed around him was the first crack in his voice all night, helpless and rough, and I put it somewhere safe to keep.
"Luna." Just my name, wrecked, a warning and a plea folded into two syllables.
"I know." I guided him to me and felt the blunt heat of him settle exactly where I was aching and already his, and everything in me drew tight around the wanting. "Now. No more waiting."
He caught my hips and pulled me to the very edge of the desk, and he pressed the head of him against me and held there, right at the threshold, letting me feel the promise of the stretch before he gave me any of it. His forehead came down to mine. His breath broke ragged across my lips.
"Look at me," he said, the same as before. "I want your eyes when you take me."
I looked. He pushed in, slow and relentless, an inch and then the next, feeding himself into me until the stretch tipped over into that deep bright ache that is almost too much and exactly enough, and I heard myself make a sound I had no dignity left to guard.
He didn't stop until he was seated to the hilt, and then we both went still, the way you go still when a lock you have fought for an hour simply turns.
For one long second the two men I had loved lined up and became one, the voice off the screen and the weight now buried in me, and it was so much that I shut my eyes, and he told me to open them, and I did.
Then he moved. He drew back nearly all the way and sank home again, and my body closed around him like it had been built starving for this one shape.
He kept it controlled at first, reading me, watching my face for the catch that means more, and then he lost the thread of that control as I dragged my nails down his back and hooked my legs higher and told him in plain words what I wanted.