22. Mikhail
MIKHAIL
The alert was DeLuca, and it was nothing, which is the most dangerous kind of something.
His men had put a probe against the perimeter of the decoy, three cars circling a church with no wedding inside it, and found exactly what I’d left there for them, which was a great deal of my patience and not one member of my family.
There had been no breach and no shots, only a message sent and a message answered, both of us saying the same thing in the same silence, and the thing we were saying was soon, but not tonight.
I stood in the hall with the phone going cold in my hand and Timo’s voice in my ear confirming what I already knew, and I gave the orders a wedding night still requires of a man in my position, and then I put the phone in a drawer and went back to the woman I’d married.
I’ve walked into that master suite ten thousand nights as the man who owns the house and everyone breathing in it.
I walked in tonight as something I had no word for, a man who’d just promised a room full of God and family a thing he had spent years making certain he’d never have to mean, and who had discovered, halfway through the promising, that he meant every word.
She was standing where I’d left her, by the window, still in the dress. She had taken the pins out of her hair while I was gone, so that it fell the way I’d spent months refusing to let myself imagine it falling. She heard me come in. She didn’t turn around.
“Handled?” she said, to the glass.
“For now.”
“Good.” A breath went out of her. “Then there’s nothing left tonight that either of us has to manage.”
It was as close to permission as we had ever come out loud, and it cut the last rope I’d kept around my own throat for half a year.
I have crossed a thousand rooms toward a thousand ends, and I always know, before I arrive, exactly what I’ll do when I get there.
I didn’t know this time. That’s the truth I’ll set down here and never say aloud, that I reached her with no plan at all, the first time that had ever been true of me, and it was terror, and it was the nearest thing to freedom I have ever touched.
For a man who has built everything on the next move, walking toward a person with no next move in mind is the same as stepping off a roof. I stepped anyway. I found, somewhere in the falling, that I’d been wanting to fall for far longer than I’d ever let myself count.
I turned her from the window and kissed her the way I’d wanted to in the garden and hadn’t let myself, and she made a sound against my mouth that no operative ever made on purpose, and it went through me like current down a wire.
Her hands were in my shirt, then under it.
Mine found the line of her spine and the hidden seam of the dress, and I took my time with it, every hook, because I’ve learned that the surest way to undo a careful person is to refuse, entirely, to hurry.
The kiss deepened past anything careful.
She opened for me and I took the invitation the way I take very little in this life, greedily, learning the taste of her and the small catch in her breath when I caught her lower lip in my teeth, feeling her press herself into me from mouth to knee, with all the wanting she’d kept locked behind that careful face finally let loose.
My hands worked the hooks of the dress blind, one after another, and between each one I brought my mouth back to hers, so that getting her out of it took twice as long as it should have, and I didn’t once wish it faster.
The dress fell away, and I set my mouth to the bare curve of her shoulder, and then to the place at her throat where a wire used to ride.
I felt her breath snag. “There’s nothing there now,” I said against her skin.
“Nothing but you.” She shivered, the whole of her at once, and I lifted her and carried her to the bed the family had made up for a marriage neither of us had planned to mean, and laid her down in the center of it, and looked at her for a long moment before I let myself have anything more.
She lay there in the low light with her hair spread dark across the linen and her eyes steady on me, and I forgot, for a moment, how to be careful.
I got out of my own clothes with none of the grace I’m supposed to have, because her watching me do it burned every practiced motion out of my hands.
And then there was nothing between us at all, no dress, no shirt, no wire, no six months of the two of us pretending, and I lowered myself over her slowly and felt her breath catch at the first full press of my skin to hers, felt her hands go searching over the scars she had only ever seen through a camera, and I let her, and I’ve let no one do that in twenty years.
I have taken what I wanted my whole life, quickly, before anyone could think to stop me, because in my world the man who lingers is the man who loses.
I didn’t want to be quick with her. I meant to be the one thing in her life that had never rushed to use her and move on.
So I slowed everything down, until she was the one reaching, until the careful woman who counts every exit in every room forgot there was a door in this one at all.
“Tell me if you want me to stop,” I said, because a man like me does not take a thing that has not been given, not this, not ever.
“If you stop,” she said, “I’ll shoot you with your own gun.”
“Noted.”
I did not stop.
I started at her mouth and didn’t leave it for a long while, kissing her until she went restless under me, until her hands quit being careful and started pulling.
Only then did I begin to move. My palm slid from her throat to her hip, learning the weight of her breast on the way and the sharp breath she took when my thumb found the peak of it, tracing down over her ribs and the dip of her waist, and everywhere my hand went my mouth came after it, unhurried and thorough, until she arched up off the bed to chase a touch I kept just barely ahead of her.
And then I went lower, the way a man does only once in his life.
I kissed a path down the length of her, past the pulse still hammering in her throat, over the rise of each breast until she said something that wasn’t a word, across the flat of her stomach where the muscle jumped under my mouth, and lower, until her hands went tight in my hair and her hips lifted to meet me and that clever, careful voice came apart into something with no strategy left in it at all.
I stayed there until she was shaking, until she was saying please in a register I’d have traded years to hear again, and only when she hung poised at the very edge of herself did I move back up over her and take her mouth, so she could taste exactly what she did to me.
I learned her the way I have never permitted myself to learn anything, without a strategy, without an exit mapped, with the whole of my attention bent to a single question, which was what made her breath break and her hands fist in the sheets and that guarded voice lose its edges.
I found the answers one at a time, and I spent every one of them.
I used my hands, my lips, the low words she pretended not to feel and plainly did, and I watched months of her composure come apart beneath me piece by careful piece, and I have never wanted anything the way I wanted to be the thing that undid her.
Every discovery cost me something, and I paid it gladly.
Her back arched when I found the base of her spine.
She told me to stop in a voice that meant the exact opposite, and we both knew it.
She quit watching the room and began watching only me, which from a woman who had spent six months mapping every exit she stood near was a surrender larger than anything her body gave up.
I gathered them one by one, and no haul in my life ever left me richer, or less in command of anything.
She wouldn’t lie still under it for long.
She was never built to be only taken, and I didn’t want her that way.
Her hands found me, sure and greedy and maddeningly unhurried, and when she wrapped a hand around me, watching what it did to my face, I understood that whatever power I’d imagined I held in this had always been a thing we shared.
She used it without mercy. She had learned me in a single evening, faster than I’d managed to learn her across six months of trying, and she played it back precisely, with a small and dangerous smile.
Somewhere in it she tried to take a piece of herself back. She looked up at me with the old cool eyes and started to say a dry thing, some line built to set a professional distance between us. “This is a very thorough consummation, Mr. Morozov,” she began, or began to begin.
She didn’t finish it, because I chose that exact moment to stop being patient, and the sentence broke in her mouth, and what came out of her instead was the laugh, the real one, the too-loud one she keeps behind her teeth on principle, shocked loose and into the dark.
I felt it move through her chest and against mine, and I made a decision there that will outlive me.
Undoing her composure, I understood, is the only work I will ever again care to do.
She reached for me after that, done pretending she didn’t mean to, and the sight of it, Nora Brennan with her guard gone and her hands open, nearly finished me before I had begun.
I have been wanted, in my time. I have been feared and needed and used and obeyed.
No one had ever reached toward me knowing exactly what I was and doing it anyway.