Chapter 34 #2
She’s wrapped in a towel, water still beading on her shoulders, and the sight of her is like a gut punch. Small and fierce and so fucking beautiful it makes every part of me ache.
“I left you new clothes,” I manage to say, gesturing to where I laid them out on the bed. Then I lock her back in the room, go to the kitchen and pour another drink and try to remember a time when my life made sense.
Night falls like a curtain, no twilight, the way it seems to when the clocks fall back and winter is on the way.
I bring her dinner. She eats without complaint this time, which feels like a victory even though it isn’t.
I ask more questions. She gives me more silence.
The pattern is thus established—I push, she resists, we orbit each other like binary stars caught in a gravity well neither of us can escape.
At eleven p.m., I leave her alone and retreat to my bedroom.
At midnight, I’m still staring at the ceiling.
At one a.m., I give up on sleep and find myself in the hallway again, hand on her door, that magnetic pull dragging me toward her like I’m caught in a current that’s threatening to drown me if I don’t do something about it soon.
Stay away.
I open the door anyway.
She’s awake. Sitting up in bed, blanket pooled around her waist, my T-shirt slipping off one shoulder. The city lights paint her in silver and shadow. She is a vision of light in all this darkness.
“Can’t sleep?” she asks quietly.
“No.”
“Neither can I.”
Turn around, walk away, lock yourself in your room until morning.
I cross to the bed and sit on the edge, not touching her but close enough to feel the warmth radiating off her body.
“Why did you protect me?” The question comes out before I can stop it. “When your fellow agents asked how you got out of the warehouse, you lied. You didn’t tell them about me.”
She’s quiet for a long moment, staring out the window at the stars
“I don’t know.”
“Bullshit.”
“I don’t know.” There’s frustration in her voice now. “I should have told them. Protocol says I should have reported everything. But when Kat asked…” She shakes her head. “I just couldn’t do it.”
“Why not?”
“Because.” She meets my eyes, and there’s something grave in her expression. “Because telling them would have put you at risk. And I couldn’t do that. Because even after everything, I couldn’t make myself betray you. I’d already betrayed you so much.”
The words hang between us.
She’s lying, the cold voice whispers. It’s another manipulation.
But I don’t think it is.
I think, for the first time since this nightmare started, she’s telling me the truth.
At least, that’s what I so desperately want to believe.
“That’s fucked up,” I say quietly.
“I know.”
“You were sent here to evaluate whether I needed to be eliminated. And you couldn’t even report that I saved your life?”
“It wasn’t like that. If I told them I thought you saved me in the warehouse then…”
“Then what?”
“Then my cover would be blown once more. It would mean that you knew the truth about who I really was, which mean you would have to be…dealt with. No witnesses, definitely not in America’s superhero.”
“That’s really, really fucked up.”
“I know.”
So she cared. So it wasn’t all fake. So at least some part of what we had was real.
But where’s the triumph in that? Where’s the vindication?
All I feel is tired. Angry. So goddamn lonely I can barely breathe.
Because even if she was honest, even if she had feelings for me, we can never go back to the way things were.
That door has closed, like a jail cell slamming shut.
“I dream about you,” I hear myself say. “Every night. I dream about Montana, about the barn, about you looking at me like I was worth something. And then I wake up and remember what you are, and I want to—” I stop.
My hands are shaking. “I don’t know if I want to kill you or keep you.
And I don’t know which one is worse. Both options are bullets loaded with pain. ”
Her hand touches my arm.
I flinch but don’t pull away.
“Nate.”
“Please.” My voice breaks. “Don’t say my name like that. Not when I don’t know who you really are. Not when everything between us was fake.”
“I told you. It wasn’t all fake.”
“I know you did. But how am I supposed to believe that now?”
She moves closer. Close enough that I can smell the soap from the shower, feel the heat of her body through the thin cotton of my shirt.
“You’re not,” she says quietly. “You’re not supposed to believe anything I say.
That’s the smart play. That’s what you should do.
That’s what you’ve been trained for.” Her hand slides up my arm, over my shoulder, coming to rest against my jaw.
“But since when have either of us been smart about this?”
I swallow hard. “This is a bad idea,” I manage to say, but I don’t move away from her touch. If anything, I lean into it.
“The worst.” Her words fall softly.
“You’re my prisoner.”
“I’m aware.”
“I should hate you.”
“So, do you?”
The question hangs in the air between us.
I don’t answer with words.
I kiss her like I’m trying to punish her for every lie.
My hands fist in her hair and I drag her mouth to mine with none of the tenderness I showed her before.
She gasps against my lips, and the sound goes straight to my cock.
“This doesn’t mean anything,” I growl against her mouth.
“I know.”
“And it doesn’t mean I forgive you.”
She pulls back just enough to meet my eyes, and what I see there makes my chest constrict. I don’t see any fear in them, and there’s no calculation either. Just heat and hunger and something raw and open and bare.
“I’m not asking you to forgive me,” she says. “I’m asking you to fuck me.”
Christ.
I shove her back onto the mattress, and then I’m on top of her, pinning her down. She looks so dainty and small beneath me but I know the truth now, she’s anything but.
“Is this what you want?” I drag the T-shirt up her thighs, my hands rough on her skin. “You want to fuck the man who’s holding you captive? The very man you betrayed so callously, the man who could kill you with his bare hands?”
“Yes.” No hesitation. No flinching. Just that steady gaze and the rapid rise and fall of her chest. “God help me, yes.”
I yank the shirt over her head and she’s completely naked. Her body is familiar and strange all at once—I know every curve, every freckle of her sun-kissed skin, but I’m seeing her differently now. Not as the woman I loved, but as the weapon she was trained to be.
Both versions make me hard.
“Turn over.”
She complies, and I press her into the mattress face-first, my hand on the back of her neck, holding her down. She could fight—I’ve seen her fight, seen what she’s capable of—but she doesn’t. She just lies there, breathing hard, waiting.
Maybe even trusting.
But this isn’t about trust. This is about power. About control. About taking back something she stole from me.
I strip off my own clothes with one hand, keeping the other on her neck, keeping her pinned. When I’m done, I run my other hand down her back, over her ass, between her cheeks, spreading them.
“You want this?” I position myself at her entrance, feeling how wet she is, how ready, no matter what her answer is. “Say it. You know I need to hear it.”
“I want this.”
“Say please, little killer.”
A pause. Then, she quietly says, “Please.”
I thrust into her in one hard stroke.
She cries out—pain or pleasure or both—and I don’t give her time to adjust. I fuck her hard and fast, punishing her with every stroke, my hand still on her neck, my weight pressing her into the mattress.
The heat of her is staggering, the grip of her body pulling me deeper, and even as I try to keep some part of myself separate, I can’t.
Every thrust drags a groan out of me that sounds like it’s being torn from somewhere else.
And she takes it. She takes all of it. Her hands fist in the sheets and her body arches beneath mine and she makes sounds that are going to haunt me for the rest of my life.
“This is what you wanted?” I lean down, my lips at her ear, my hips never slowing. “To get fucked by the asset? To have me inside you one more time before—”
“Shut up.” Her voice is ragged. “Just—shut up and—”
I grab her hair and yank her head back, changing the angle, and she screams.
“Don’t tell me what to do.” I’m close already—too close, wound too tight, days of tension building to this moment, all this emotion, all this anger. “You don’t get to give orders anymore. You don’t get to—”
She comes.
I feel it—the clench and pulse around my cock, the way her whole body shakes—and it drags me over the edge with her.
I bury myself to the hilt and spill inside her, my vision blurring with stars, my hand tightening on her neck until some distant part of my brain screams too hard, too hard and I force myself to let go.
We collapse together.
For a long moment, the only sound is our ragged breathing. My body is still thrumming, that post-orgasm haze making everything soft and distant. I’m not thinking clearly. I’m not thinking at all.
Which is why I don’t see it coming.
One second she’s beneath me, satiated and spent. The next, her elbow drives into my throat with surgical precision.
I choke, rearing back instinctively, and she’s already moving—twisting out from under me, bare feet hitting the floor, sprinting for the door. She’s a slippery little thing, she knew exactly which moment I’d be at my most vulnerable and she waited for it.
Fuck!
I lunge after her, naked, throat burning. She’s almost at the door, then her hand closes on the knob.
Before she can open it, I grab her around the waist and slam her into the wall.
She fights. Fucking hell, she fights. Elbow to my ribs, heel scraping down my shin, her whole body twisting and writhing as she tries to break my grip. But I’m stronger than any human on this planet and I’m furious.