Chapter 6 – Gregory #2
The rhythm was uncompromising. I wasn’t being gentle; I was being thorough.
The wall thudded rhythmically behind her with every heavy, upward surge I made, the vibration rattling through both of us.
I watched her face—the way her teeth sank into her lower lip to keep from screaming, the way her breath came in sharp, rhythmic huffs against my neck.
I pushed deeper, my hands locking under her thighs to hold her open, forcing her to take every inch of me until she was shaking, completely trapped between the wall and my weight. I wanted her to feel the exact moment I lost control.
“Gregory…please,” she whimpered, her fingers digging into my shoulders.
I increased the pace, the raw intimacy of the hallway—unprepared and urgent—stripping away my usual composure. When she peaked, she cried out my name, her body shuddering against mine. I followed her seconds later, my forehead resting against hers as we both struggled to catch our breath.
I carried her into the bedroom, laying her gently on the center of the bed. The initial rush had subsided into a heavy, pulsing ache. I wanted to worship her now, to show her that my “itch” wasn’t just a physical craving, even if I was too proud to admit it out loud.
I knelt between her legs, my hands sliding up the insides of her thighs. I took my time, exploring every inch of her with my mouth and fingers. I wanted to see her come without me inside her, to see the way her body reacted to pure, unadulterated pleasure.
“Gregory, I can’t…” she gasped, her fingers tangling in my hair, pulling me closer.
“Yes, you can,” I murmured against her skin. “Just feel it. All of it.”
I teased her until she was sobbing my name, her hips bucking off the mattress in a desperate search for friction. When I finally used my tongue to drive her over the edge, she screamed into the quiet of the room, her body arching like a bow before collapsing into the pillows.
I didn’t give her long to recover. I moved to hover over her, bracing myself on my elbows.
I moved into a classic missionary position, wanting to see every shift in her expression. I entered her slowly, watching her eyes widen as she adjusted to the fullness once more.
“Slow,” I whispered. “Just breathe with me.”
I began to move, a long, languid rhythm. I used my hands to lace through hers, pinning them gently to the pillow beside her head. It was an act of total exposure. Every time I surged forward, I watched the way her breath caught, the way her back arched slightly to meet me.
“Gregory…fuck…yes…” she started, but she cut herself off, the words lost in a gasp as I hit a particularly sensitive spot.
I didn’t ask her to finish the sentence. I couldn’t. Instead, I buried my face in the crook of her neck, my movements becoming more urgent as the pleasure built to an unbearable peak. When we crashed together this time, it felt less like a conquest and more like a surrender.
We lay there for a while, the silence of the room only broken by the sound of our synchronized heartbeats. But the fire wasn’t out; it was just smoldering. I rolled her onto her side, pulling her back against my chest.
I began to touch her again, my hand trailing over her hip and stomach. I wanted her one last time before the sun came up and forced me to be the man I was supposed to be.
This time was different—quieter, almost desperate.
I entered her from behind, my arm wrapped firmly around her waist, pulling her flush against me.
There was no eye contact, just the raw sensation of our bodies moving as one in the dark.
It was the most intimate of the three, a silent acknowledgment of the connection I was so desperate to deny.
“Don’t stop,” she whispered, her voice thick with sleep and desire.
I didn’t. I moved with her until the world narrowed down to the point where her skin met mine, until the only thing that mattered was the way she felt in my arms. When it was over, I held her until she fell into a deep, exhausted sleep.
She’d gone under quickly, her breathing evening out within minutes into the slow, steady rhythm of someone completely at rest. Her hair was across my shoulder, hand at my chest, fingers loose, the silver bracelet her mother had given her catching the faint glow from the window.
I stared at the ceiling.
This was the part I’d not planned for
I’d made peace with being here on the drive back, the two-minute negotiation that had found no reasons and proceeded anyway.
Not even the preceding hour, which had dismantled several things I’d believed about my own capacity for feeling and would require significant processing at a time when I was better equipped.
I looked at the ceiling and thought: Matvey didn’t send me because I lack emotions.
He sent me because he needed someone who could withstand the cost of having them.
The thought sat in my chest like a stone.
Sofia shifted slightly in her sleep—just a small movement, just resettling—and her hand pressed fractionally closer against my chest, and something in me responded to that with a ferocity I’d absolutely no framework for, a possessive, aching pull toward the warmth of her that had no place in any version of this mission and no place in any version of my life.
I wished the night wouldn’t end.
That was the honest thing. The thing I admitted only to the ceiling, only to the dark, only to the quiet space of a moment that would be over when the light came.
I wished she could stay exactly like this—tucked against me, asleep, trusting, unbothered by the things I knew and she didn’t.
I wished the folder didn’t exist. I wished her father’s name wasn’t in it.
I wished I were the kind of man who could walk into a girl’s life without an agenda built into every point of contact, without the corruption of having chosen her as a means before I understood that she was a person.
The sunrise found me still awake.
It came in gray and gradual through the gap in her curtains, threading across the ceiling in slow, pale increments, and I got dressed in the thin morning light.
I was pulling on my jacket when she woke. I heard her breathing change first—the shift from the deep, even cadence of sleep to the lighter awareness of someone surfacing. Then the sound of her moving. I didn’t turn around immediately, which was cowardice, and I knew it.
“Where are you going?”
Her voice was soft with sleep. Unguarded—just Sofia, just her voice, with nothing in front of it yet.
I turned.
She was sitting up in her bed with her hair loose around her shoulders, the sheets around her waist, and her eyes still carrying that morning openness, and she was looking at me with an expression that was not yet anything—not hurt, not demanding, just a question.
Simple and direct and trusting in a way that hit me somewhere I’d specifically, deliberately fortified.
I had one job in this moment.
One necessary, non-negotiable job.
“We scratched an itch,” I said. “Move on with your life.”
The words came out level. I watched the morning openness on her face close—not all at once, but in a sequence.
The slight intake of breath. The moment where her eyes went very still, which was worse than if she’d flinched, because the stillness meant she was processing, meant the thing had landed, and she was deciding how much of what it did to her I was going to be allowed to see.
She decided I wasn’t going to see any of it.
The composure came down. Chin lifting fractionally. Eyes clearing. The version of Sofia Alvarez that the world got—steady, unreadable, present without being available.
She said nothing.
That was the part that stayed with me.
She just looked at me with those dark eyes and let me go.
I walked to the door without looking back, because looking back was the one thing I absolutely could not afford right now—not with her sitting in that bed, or with the heavy knowledge of what I’d just done and why and what it was going to cost both of us.
The door closed behind me.
The lobby was quiet in the gray Chicago morning, just the doorman and the amber light and the city beyond the glass already moving, already indifferent, already requiring nothing from me that I wasn’t prepared to give.
I walked to my car and got in, telling myself this was the right thing.
I told myself that distance was the only protection I could offer her—that proximity to me was proximity to a mission she knew nothing about, and the kindest version of this ending was the one where she thought I was cold rather than the one where she learned the truth.
I told myself the mission required this.
That the Bratva required this. That Matvey’s voice in a dark SUV had required this before Sofia Alvarez had ever looked at me with those unguarded eyes.
And then I started the car and pulled away from the curb and back to an apartment with a folder on the kitchen table and half a bottle of whiskey on the counter, and I sat with the absolute, clear-eyed, unsparing knowledge of a man who had been honest with himself about difficult things for four decades.
I hadn’t scratched an itch.
I’d made a mistake of an entirely different kind.
And the worst part was that somewhere in the thin gray light of her apartment, while she slept against my chest and the city moved outside her window, I’d looked at the ceiling and wished the night wouldn’t end.
And I’d meant it.
Completely.
The way I meant very few things.