10. Wells
TEN
Wells
The Tell: A disguise can hide a face completely and still give the wearer away through a laugh, a cadence, a sound the costume was never built to cover. The mask held. The sound she made did not.
I know every reason this cannot happen. The smart move is to turn and walk back to my desk, thank her for staying late on her Friday night, and jack off to release whatever this is.
Cera is my employee. She reports directly to me. Not to mention, she could rake me over the coals more efficiently than any ex ever could.
But none of that is strong enough in this moment to stop me.
Her face is turned up toward mine, her breath audible in the quiet. I stare at the perfectly placed beauty mark above her upper lip.
Our website is complete, the project I needed for Monday is done, but both of us are still here.
Peoria has been in my head all week, more than usual. The wanting she leaves behind scrapes at my concentration and burns through the hours I need for sleep, a wanting only a woman in the flesh can satisfy.
Cera is right here, close enough to touch. With Ronnie's death stirring up everything with my father that I thought was buried, I'm already wound too tight before Cera becomes the immediate problem in front of me.
My forearm is rigid beside her hand. My breath stalls and my heartbeat punches in my throat. The old warning about money and exposure flashes sharp enough to taste metal.
I know the danger in the room. I know what happens when control slips.
Cera doesn't move back, and neither do I. She stands up to face me.
Her eyes drop to my mouth, then lift, locking onto mine. Those deep brown eyes grab me.
Fuck it.
I close the distance, her mouth meeting mine before the thought finishes. The kiss is not soft. It is not tender. It is heat and pressure and the snap of something that has been pulling tight for weeks, finally breaking.
Cera's hands go to my chest, fingers curling into my shirt.
The kiss breaks for air, and Cera presses her center into me. The chair rolls back and hits the credenza with a dull crack. Her hands drop to my belt, and every question I didn't ask is answered before I can form the words.
The relief hits harder than the lust. I was not reaching alone.
Cera's hands work the buckle, and the urgency roughens my breathing.
I turn her to the desk, and she braces her own hands flat on the wood without instruction. The sight of her bent forward, ready, sends heat crashing through my chest hard enough to blur the edges of the room.
I push her skirt up over her hips and drag her underwear down, tossing them on the floor at her feet.
Pulling my wallet from my back pocket, I know I should stop. I have a clean break. The functional part of my brain stays online even while the rest of me is gone. I rip the foil, roll the condom on, the delay almost unbearable.
Cera shifts her weight forward and spreads her stance.
Neither of us says a word. I grip her hip, fisting her skin as I line myself up and push into her in one stroke.
She gasps, and I push again, this time harder.
"Keep going," she pants, her voice rising with the thrust.
Her body takes me, the tight heat erasing any thought. My breath turns ragged. She rocks back into me and meets every thrust, setting the pace as much as I do.
"Fuck, yes."
I don't know which one of us says it.
The desk edge bites into my awareness, the last ordinary thing in the room. My hand slides up her spine, fisting the fabric of her blouse, holding her in place while I lose every shred of control I thought I still had.
"Don't stop. Don't fucking stop."
I don't stop. I can't stop. The rhythm turns brutal, and every bit of what I have been holding back drives into it.
Cera doesn't just take what I give her. She matches it, then she commands it, and that undoes me more than the act itself.
She arches under my hands, and the movement sends me deeper. A sound tears out of her throat, broken at the edges, and the cadence of it eggs me on, feeding on the frenzy of it all.
I almost freeze. The momentum carries the next drive before the rest of me catches up, but something stutters hard enough to register.
The sound she makes as she approaches her climax is familiar, a vague déjà vu.
It's not the words or the tone but the rhythm, how her breath catches before the sound breaks loose, the exact shape of her pleasure when it cracks her open. I can't put my finger on exactly what.
The thought knifes through the haze and lands wrong. My pulse spikes in a direction that has nothing to do with arousal and everything to do with something I cannot afford to process right now.
Cera makes the sound again, higher this time, and my body answers before I can stop it. I ride into her harder, and the recognition twists with the pleasure until I cannot separate them.
I squeeze my eyes shut. Peoria is there, sprawled across her bed. The mask, the red lips, the blue beneath the rhinestones, all of it flares white hot behind my own eyes.
I bury the thought before it can overtake what is happening here, in the flesh. The only reason my brain is making connections is because I am so fucked up over one woman that I am hearing her ghost in another.
I don't slow down. The wrongness of it grinds against the pull of her body, and the friction torches what restraint I have left.
Cera's breathing comes apart. Her hands slide forward on the desk, and her nails scrape the wood. She tips her head back, the line of her throat bared, and I refuse to think about anything except that she is here, that she is real, that she wants this as much as I do.
"Fuck, Wells."
My name in her mouth detonates the last of my control. My right hand comes to the base of her neck as I bend into her, burying myself as deep as I can go. The tempo breaks open and goes rough, and the push and pull of it wipes out the room, the rules, every reason I had for not doing this.
She comes first.
The sound is unmistakable. Her whole body locks and then releases in a wave that tightens around me and drags me over the edge with her.
The climax hits hard enough to white out everything. My vision blurs, my chest seizes, and the release rolls through me. The only problem is, it doesn't quiet the wanting. It makes it louder.
I pull out and step back, and the air between us goes electric. My hands shake when I strip the condom off and tie it. The motion is automatic. My breath is still uneven.
It's like we both realized in that exact moment that we crossed a line we shouldn't have, but neither of us knows how to handle it.
Cera straightens slowly. She doesn't turn around. Her hands stay braced on the desk, and her shoulders rise and fall with the effort to steady herself.
The silence fills the room, and there is nothing comfortable in it. It's the quiet that settles after a wreck, when no one knows where to put their hands.
Without a word, I walk into the private bathroom and shut the door behind me. The trash can sits under the sink. I drop the tied condom and run the water too hot and scrub my hands longer than necessary.
The soap smells antiseptic. The mirror reflects nothing useful. My face is locked down, the same as always, when I won't let anyone in.
When I walk back into the office, Cera has already straightened her skirt. Her hands smooth the fabric over her hips once, then drop. Her underwear is gone from the floor, back where I don't see the evidence of what we did. It's almost like we can pretend it never happened.
Cera tucks her blouse in and tests the buttons. Her hair is still neat. She does not look wrecked or upset.
But nothing feels right. Apologies seem insulting, and reassurance is just presumptive. More than anything, acknowledgment of any kind feels dangerous.
Cera breaks it first.
"Well. That was efficient."
The line lands dry and unbothered, with just enough humor to keep it from cutting. She glances at the desk, then back at me, and her mouth quirks in something that is not quite a smile.
"Good to know the project wasn't the only thing we could finish under deadline."
I stare at her.
She doesn't flinch or reach or angle for anything. How the fuck did I just let that happen?
I expected something else. Not tears, Cera doesn't strike me as the type, but a question at least, or a demand, some signal that this meant something to her, or that she wants it to, like all women after an unexpected fuck.
The deflection is so smooth that it takes a second to register. She is handing both of us an exit and refusing to make a thing of it.
She picks up her tablet from the desk and checks the screen. Her posture is relaxed. She could be wrapping up any work session.
"I'll test all of the links and buttons this weekend and make sure we didn't miss anything. I'll let you know before Sunday night if anything needs adjusting."
Her voice is level, a late meeting that ran long. I keep my face flat and nod.
"Good."
Cera turns and walks out without looking back. The heavy glass door swings shut behind her.
I stand there, watching her walk away through the glass to the elevator, and let the silence settle.
My heart is still going too fast, but my hands hold steady now, even if I have to force them. The edges of control lock back into place, familiar as old armor I know how to wear.
I walk back to my desk and sit. The chair is exactly where I left it. The room looks the same. Nothing is out of place except me.
I notice an unread notification. I pick it up and click the bubble, needing anything to pull me out of this moment. It's a text from Ridge.
Need you to look at the quarterly logistics audit. Flagged discrepancies in the Miami terminal.
I open the file and scan the data. Everything is as it should be. His request is an easy one to trace.
It's no use. My focus is completely shot.
It's Saturday morning. I sit down at the desk with coffee and three monitors and the intention to look at the discrepancies in the Miami terminal for Ridge until my head clears.
I never open the Miami file. I click back to the search I started yesterday into Ronnie Louvre's death.
It's probably nothing, but it keeps nagging at me, so I want to know more about what he's been doing for the last sixteen months, where he was getting his supply from, and if this really was an accidental overdose.
Cera's face surfaces, and behind it, Peoria's. I shove them both down.
Last night I bent an employee over that desk, a woman who knows my name and what it is worth, and handed her the exact leverage I've been carefully building to never give anyone. And somewhere out there, I am still paying another woman for the exclusivity I didn't reciprocate last night.
The case is the one thing that can pull me out of my own head, so I go back to the screens. The alerts are still running. The same ones I set up after my father died and never took down. Most days, they sit quietly, background noise I stopped hearing years ago.
I click through the most recent data it pulled, looking specifically for Ronnie's name or any reference to him or his partner at the docks that night.
When I mentioned it to Ridge yesterday morning, he told me to let the case go. The Duvalls were blamed, they are gone, and the investigation is closed. His biggest thing since the Feds finally let everything go was to leave well enough alone so we could keep the business moving forward.
I've never been good at leaving well enough alone.
Getting in is never the problem. I have had a quiet way into the parish coroner's system since the year my father died, one of a dozen doors I keep open and never mention.
The only question is what I am willing to pull, and this morning I am willing to pull a dead stranger's file with no case and no permission behind me.
Overdose, needle in the arm is the textbook overdose scene. My father's "mugging" was also textbook, and it was nothing of the sort.
The ruling is the easy part, the line they wrote on the certificate. The full tox panel lives in the lab's system, where the family never sees it, and the press never asks for it. I take it from there.
It comes back clean. Fucking clean. How does a man overdose with nothing in his system?
I sit back and let it sink in.
I dig further. There are no priors, no history of use, no scripts in the prescription database, nothing that says Ronnie ever had a habit to die from.
The workup is thin too, with an external exam and a tox screen.
It's the short version a presumed overdose gets, which means no one ever looked for what actually killed him.
A clean panel under a needle in the arm is a contradiction that stops a careful office cold.
But the scene read like a hundred others that month, so the coroner signed it off as an overdose pending tox and moved on.
The body went in the ground, and when the lab came back clean, there was no family asking and no detective waiting. No one went back to square the two.
The gap between the ruling and the lab is the loudest thing in the room.
Someone carefully staged it, and a system too buried to look twice signed off, and between them they put a man in the ground without ever meeting.
Staging a death that an overworked coroner will wave through takes someone who knows precisely how these cases die quietly.
It was not a junkie's bad night. It was a professional closing a loop.
I pull the old file on the two guards and run both names. I know Ronnie is dead. Dane Carter still has a thin but current footprint, recent enough to indicate he is alive.
I don't know who is cleaning up. I only know I have to reach Dane before whoever this is does.
A dead witness sits on one screen and a live one on the other, the closest I have come to my father's killer in over a year, and the back of my mind has already wandered off it, to Monday, to her, to the next time I can get her alone.