Decker
It’s dark when Marek sees me coming and pushes off the wall. I watch him work out which conversation this is going to be.
“She’s with me until morning.”
“She’s not supposed to—”
“I know what she’s not supposed to.” I keep walking. “You can log it, or you can not log it. Either way she’s with me.”
He looks at me a long moment. He’s a solid man, and solid men know which orders are about safety and which are about paper.
“Shift change is at six,” he says, and turns back to his stretch of wall, and that’s Marek done with it.
Her door opens before I knock.
She’s standing there in the low light with her hair loose, and I can see the day has weighed on her. She looks at my face and reads whatever’s on it, because she always does.
“Something happened,” she says.
“Yes.”
“Good or bad?”
“Get your boots.”
She doesn’t ask where. She sits on the bed, pulls her boots on, and puts her hand in mine. No questions, no hesitation. A month ago, she wouldn’t have walked ten feet with me without knowing every step of the plan. Now she just takes my hand and stands.
I take her out past Marek, who studies the far wall like it’s new, and then it’s the two of us moving through a building I don’t trust, at an hour when the corridors are down to night lighting.
I keep her on my left, against the wall, and take the long way—past the dead offices, away from the dining hall where there’s still noise and light spilling out the propped door.
At the side exit, voices.
Two of them, just outside, close. Smoke drifting in through the gap.
I stop her with a hand, and we stand in the dark against the cold block wall, her back to my chest, my arm across her collarbones, both of us breathing slow while two techs finish complaining about a duty roster ten feet away.
Her heart pounds hard under my arm. Not fear.
I can smell the difference now, and the difference isn’t helping me think.
The voices move off. We cross the open ground between the buildings in the dark, not running, because running draws the eye, and then my key is in the door at the end of the contractors’ block, and we’re inside, and it’s done.
My room is nobody’s home. A bed, a chair, my gear in the corner, a lamp. It’s never smelled like anything but gun oil and me. She changes that just by standing in it.
She looks around, taking it in. “This is it?”
“I don’t need much.”
“One bag.” She shakes her head slowly. “You own a mountain and one bag.”
“I own a mountain and one bag, and there’s an empty room on both sides of this one.” I lock the door. “Nobody sleeps in this half of the block.”
She turns and finds me watching her, and her chin comes up. “Why does that matter?”
“Because you’re not going to be quiet.”
Color rises up her throat. She holds my eyes anyway. “Bold of you, bear.”
“We’ll see.”
But I don’t reach for her yet, and she doesn’t reach for me. For a minute, we just stand in the lamplight. I run my eyes over her face, over features that feel like they’re etched into my brain.
“Speak to me,” I tell her.
Her shoulders drop, some of the tension leaving her. “How do you know?”
“It’s written all over you.” I reach out and stroke a fingertip down her cheek. “Tell me what happened today.”
“I told them everything,” she says. “About Serenity. Today, with Vanya. I told them everything I remembered, and she took notes. I’m pretty sure it was useful information, because she seemed…
satisfied.” She exhales a sharp, frustrated breath.
“Not that you can tell with that woman. She’s not an open book. ”
“But you’re not pleased about it.”
She shakes her head. “I gave them everything I have, and then she told me I don’t get to know anything about what they’re planning.
Not how close. Not what it meant. I hand it over, and the door shuts, and I’m supposed to just—” Her hands come up and stop.
“She said it’s so I don’t accidentally give anything away to the wrong person.
But it makes me feel so helpless. How do I do anything to help Serenity if they won’t tell me how I can help? ”
“You are helping,” I say. “That part’s real. Hold onto that.”
“That’s why I wanted to tell you first.” She looks up at me.
“You’re the only one in this building who’d understand me.
I didn’t want to say it to anyone else. I don’t want to keep anything from you at all.
That’s the strange part. My whole life I’ve been told to keep my mouth shut.
With you I just want it all out where you can see it. ”
I don’t say anything. How could I when anything I say would be colored by a lie?
She’s standing in my room handing me all of herself, and I’m not doing the same. I keep it off my face.
Tonight is for the other thing.
I reach out and take her face in my hands, and I kiss her the way there was never room to in a stairwell. Slow. Nothing to outrun. Her breath changes against my mouth, and her hands come up my chest. When she pulls back, her eyes have gone dark and a little unsure.
“You’re different tonight,” she says. “I can’t work out how.”
I know how. I’m not going to tell her that either, not tonight, but I know it now, and it steadies my hands instead of shaking them.
I take my time. I start with her shirt. The top button, then the next, working down, my knuckles brushing her stomach as I go. I push the shirt back off her shoulders. It slides down her arms, and she lets it fall, as I unhook her bra and toss it aside.
I stop there a moment, just to look at her.
In the den there was little time to look.
There was the rut, and the cold, and one eye always on the entrance.
Here there’s a locked door and nowhere either of us has to be, and I use it.
I take in the line of her collarbone, the rise and fall of her breathing, the flush already starting up her chest.
“You’re staring,” she says.
“I am.”
I go down on one knee for her boots. I unlace the left, work it off, then the right. She keeps her hand on my shoulder the whole time for balance and leaves it there after, warm through my shirt.
Her jeans next. I open the button, draw the zip down slow, and ease the denim over her hips, along with her panties. She braces a hand on my forearm and steps out of them, first one foot, then the other.
When I stand, she’s bare in the lamplight, and I make myself slow down again, because the animal in me wants to rush now and she deserves better than rushed.
I spend a minute just taking her in: the soft curves of her shoulders, the pert swell of her breasts, the line of her belly down to the curls over her pussy. I reach out and trace my fingertip over a tight pink nipple, and she sucks in a breath.
“You’re doing it again.” Her voice is taut.
“You’re so damned pretty,” I murmur, knowing that barely covers it.
She makes a sound of frustration and pushes me, both hands flat on my chest, walking me backward until my knees hit the bed.
“Sit, bear,” she says. “My turn to be in charge.”
I sit and kick off my boots. I pull my shirt over my head and let her push me back. Then she’s over me in the lamplight, knees either side of my hips, working my belt open with steady hands, and I lie there under my little wolf and let her have all of it.
This is new. Every time before this, I’ve been over her, around her, driving. The rut ran it that way, and I never asked if it should.
Now she’s undoing my jeans, working them down my legs and over my feet. She settles over my thighs, straddling me, hands roving over my chest and shoulders.
“You’re so damn pretty…for a Grizzly,” she teases.
My chuckle is cut off when she reaches between us, wraps a warm hand around my shaft and guides me where she wants me.
The bear has never been under anything in his life.
He ought to be fighting this. He isn’t. He goes still and hot and lets her, because she’s the one deciding, and nothing in him wants to stop her.
She’s already slick when she lines me up. I feel the first give of her wet flesh against the head, and then she sinks down and takes me in by inches, and neither of us is quiet about it.
“God, Decker!” Her sound fills the room. It rolls out of her, no hand over her mouth, no teeth holding it back, and it hits me harder than the heat of her does. She’s tight going down. She works me deeper on each small drop of her hips, her breath catching every time she takes more.
When she’s seated completely, she goes still, palms flat on my chest, head dropped forward.
“Oh, that’s… That’s different like this.” Her chest is heaving, skin flushed pink.
“Deeper,” I manage. Her weight has me to the root, further than I get any other way. I feel every shift she makes clear up my spine.
“Yeah.” She rolls her hips once, testing, and gasps at what it does. “Yeah, it is.”
Then she rides me, and I get to watch.
She sets her own pace, and it isn’t mine.
Slower. Deeper. Greedier, grinding down hard at the bottom of every stroke, chasing angles I couldn’t find for her.
The light slides over her skin, over the sheen coming up on her chest and throat.
Her breasts move with her rhythm. I bring my hands up to them, and she pushes into my palms without breaking stride.
Her sounds are raw and unrestrained; only I can hear them, and that makes them mine.
I keep my hands on her, but I don’t steer.
It costs me, but I still don’t steer. All those months she made herself small in these corridors, and here she is on top of me, taking exactly what she wants at exactly her speed. I could lie still under that all night.
“You’re watching me,” she breathes.
“Yes.”
“Good.” She plants her hands on my chest and moves harder, and the wet sound of it fills the space between us. “Watch.”
So I watch the climax climb into her by degrees.
The flush spreading down her chest. The shake starting in her thighs where they grip my sides.
Her rhythm going ragged, her mouth falling open.
She drops down over me, hands in the bedding by my head, hair falling around us both, and rides out the last of it chasing her own finish.
I feel her go tight around me a breath before it takes her.
She comes apart on me with a cry the empty rooms swallow whole.
“Decker!” she chokes out, clamping down in waves. That’s what ends me. I grip her hips and follow her over, spilling deep with a sound I don’t try to stop. It goes on and on, and when it finally lets us down, she sags onto my chest, boneless, both of us slick and breathing hard.
She lies on me for a long time, her ear over my heart, my hand moving slow up and down her spine. When she talks again, her voice is half asleep and unguarded, nothing managed in it anywhere.
“You realize this is the first bed we’ve ever been in.”
I think about it. Stone, slate, a cot built for one, a stairwell wall. “Huh.”
“Don’t you start with the ‘huh.’” She smiles against my chest; I feel it. “A bed, Decker. We’re practically respectable.”
“Never that.” I’m smiling. And then I continue, “Grace…”
“Yeah?”
“I think I could love you.” I know I could. Because I’m pretty sure I already do.
She goes still. There’s a long pause. Too long.
Then, “I think I could love you too, bear.”
I pull her closer. We stay like that for a while, warm and silent.
Eventually, she moves. “I’m so tired.” Her breathing is going long and slow between the words, slurring slightly. “Wake me before six, okay?” She yawns. “Marek’ll worry…”
She’s asleep before she finishes the sentence. Mid-word, in my bed, with an enemy somewhere out there. She sleeps like none of it can reach her in here.
It can’t. Not with me between her and the door. I’m the most dangerous thing in this room by a long way, and she’s out cold on my chest without a lock or a knife between us, because to her I’m the safe part.
I reach up and flick the light off. She doesn’t stir. Her hair has fallen across her face, and I move it back. The long line of her neck lies bare in the half-dark, her pulse going slow and even under the skin.
That’s when he comes for it.
No heat left to blame, no cry of hers to ride in on. Just her bare throat a hand’s width from my mouth and the whole weight of him rising to finish the thing we left open.
Now. Do it.
She’d never feel the first of it as pain.
Torbjorn’s voice comes with him: it climbs, it doesn’t level off, and you do not want to feel what it’s like at the end of it.
My jaw aches with how little it would take.
I don’t.
I put my palm over her pulse instead, light, covering the spot where the teeth want to go.
Soon, I tell him.
Once she’s free. Once she knows the rest and says yes anyway.
The bear doesn’t settle. He stays up against the back of my teeth, and I lie there wide awake with her asleep on my chest and the one thing I want most in reach.
I keep my mouth shut and don’t take it.