Chapter 13 - Zara
The investigation is bleeding out in front of me and I cannot find the wound.
That is the only way to describe what has been happening over the past seventy-two hours. It’s that nauseating experience of watching something that was alive and moving go motionless.
There’s not even the carefully worded non-answer of someone who is nervous but still present. Just the total silence of a person who has ceased to be reachable, which could mean two things and both of them are bad.
The second contact, a woman I had cultivated over eight months through a financial network analyst she trusted and who I had spent considerable effort befriending, sent a single message four days ago that contained three words and a full stop.
Don’t contact me.
The third is simply gone—number disconnected, email returned undelivered, the professional presence she had maintained across three separate platforms for the two years I had been quietly following her work all erased, as cleanly and completely as if she had never existed.
I sit at the desk in the study Mikhail has made available to me, staring at the screen of my laptop where three separate dead ends in three separate browser tabs mock me.
Someone is dismantling my investigation systematically. They are not blocking the information itself, just cutting my access from the people who held it.
Smart, because information can be re-found but trust, once severed by fear, does not come by again.
My notebook is open beside the laptop, and the page I have been writing on for the past two hours looks like the scribbles of a mad and frustrated scientist.
I have drawn three separate connection maps and crossed out two of them. The third sits at the bottom of the page and it has one clear conclusion written in the center of it, underlined.
Dubai. The original records. Physical access only.
Whatever my contacts held, whatever they were directing me toward before someone reached them first, the source material still exists somewhere.
Digital records can be wiped, communications can be severed, people can be frightened into silence—but the physical network that operated for years does not simply disappear.
Somewhere in Dubai there is a location that holds what I am looking for. It cannot be erased by a phone call and a threat.
“You’ve been in here for four hours.”
His voice arrives from the doorway, startling me slightly before I relax.
Mikhail.
“I’m aware of the time,” I tell him, not looking up from the screen.
He enters the room instead of staying in the doorway, moving to the edge of the desk. He peers at the laptop screen, at the notebook, the map I drew at the bottom of the page with its underlined conclusion.
The silence stretches for a moment before he breaks it.
“Talk to me,” he says.
It is not a demand, which is what surprises me into looking up. It feels like a request which is crazy because Mikhail Korovin does not request things.
So I tell him about everything: the contacts going dark, the pattern that points in one direction. Records disappearing from databases I had been monitoring, the shell designation SABLE-7, the physical location I believe holds the original documentation.
Spreading it across the desk between us, I watch him expectantly.
“I need to go back to Dubai,” I conclude, peering into those unreadable eyes. I want to see the resistance arrive, want to be ready for the negotiation that is about to begin and the fourteen reasons it is not the right moment.
He looks at the map at the bottom of my notebook for a long moment.
“All right.”
“All right…?” I echo dubiously.
“One condition,” he adds. “I go with you.”
At least he is not blocking my path or redirecting it. He only wants to be in the loop, choosing to go where I am going.
He has been a wall, a force, a presence that acted upon my movement from outside. This is something different. This is him walking through the same door.
“Agreed,” I breathe.
He holds my gaze for a moment; he doesn’t move and neither do I. I close the laptop. The notebook goes with it, cover shut. I rise from the chair, the wheels squeaking against the floor. Two steps close the distance, and I don’t let myself think.
My hands pull at the front of his shirt. The fabric is worn soft, warm from his skin. Our mouths meet, teeth and tongue and the small desperate sound I make against his lips.
His hands find my hips. Long fingers press into the curve of me, and I arch into the contact, needing more, needing to be closer. The taste of him is coffee and something sharper, something metallic like adrenaline and danger.
He presses me backward, my spine hitting the edge of the desk and a stapler clatters to the floor. Neither of us breaks apart.
“Zara, you—” he breathes against my mouth.
“I want you.” My voice splinters.
A wall crumbles behind his eyes. He kisses me again, deeper, one hand sliding up my spine to cradle the back of my neck.
Those tattooed vines brush my knuckles when I reach for him.
I trace them with my fingertips, following the ink down to where it disappears beneath his collar, and his breath hitches—an unguarded sound that sends heat cascading through my belly.
I tug his shirt upward. He helps, pulling it over his head in one fluid motion. The lamplight spills across his torso. Lean muscle shifts beneath skin mapped with ink. A garden of shadows.
“You’re staring,” he murmurs.
“Memorizing.”
My blouse comes undone button by button.
His fingers are surprisingly deft for a man with hands that could break things.
He pushes the fabric off my shoulders, lets it whisper to the floor, and my bra follows.
The air is cool against my bare skin, tightening everything, but his gaze is warm and hungry.
He lifts me onto the desk. The wood is solid beneath me, something else falling with a plastic crack I can’t be bothered to identify.
I wrap my legs around his waist and pull him flush against me.
The friction of his jeans against the thin fabric of my leggings draws a gasp from somewhere deep in my chest.
Mikhail’s mouth traces my jaw, my throat, the hollow beneath my ear. Each kiss is worshipful. His stubble rasps against my collarbone and I shudder.
“You have no idea,” he says against my skin, “how much I’ve missed this.”
“Show me.”
He pulls back just enough to meet my eyes. His are dark, nearly black in the low light, but there’s something searching in them. Checking. I answer by reaching for his belt.
The leather slides free with a soft hiss. The button of his jeans gives way. He mirrors me, hands finding the waistband of my leggings, and I lift my hips so he can drag them down. The fabric catches on my ankles before I kick it free.
My hand closes around him. He’s hot silk over iron, and the groan he releases vibrates against my palm like a struck bell. I stroke once, twice, learning the weight of him, the shape. His forehead drops to my shoulder.
“Zara,” he groans.
I guide him forward. The head of him presses against my entrance—I’m already slick, have been since the first kiss—and he pauses there, right at the threshold; the pause is excruciating. My thighs tremble.
“Look at me,” I whisper.
His eyes hold mine as he pushes inside.
The stretch steals my breath as he fills me completely. Mikhail sinks deeper, inch by agonizing inch, and my head falls back. A moan tears from my throat, raw and unguarded. My nails dig into the hard muscle of his shoulders.
“Okay?” His voice is wrecked.
“Don’t stop.”
He withdraws, slowly, making me feel every ridge, every vein, then drives back in.
The desk creaks beneath us. My world has narrowed to this: the solid heat of him, the rhythm he builds with each deliberate thrust, the way he buries his face in the curve of my neck and breathes me in like I’m oxygen.
My legs lock around his hips. The angle shifts and suddenly he’s hitting something devastating inside me, a spot that sends sparks cascading down my thighs. I cry out loudly when he does it again.
“There?” he asks, and there’s something like wonder in his voice.
“Yes, Mikhail. Yes.”
His pace quickens. The desk slams against the wall in counterpoint to our breathing, to the wet sound of our joining, to the broken syllables falling from my lips.
“Mikhail, Mikhail, Mikhail!”
His thumb finds my clit, circling it with devastating precision. The sensation of him pumping inside me, and the pressure building where his thumb works its slow magic is too much and not nearly enough.
I grip the edge of the desk. The world tilts. His other hand slides up my back, fingers spreading between my shoulder blades, grounding me even as I start to fragment.
“Let go,” he breathes against my ear. “I have you.”
The orgasm hits like a brick to the head. I clench around him, pulsing, and the sound I make is completely wanton. He fucks me through it, each thrust prolonging the pleasure, drawing it out until I’m trembling and gasping and boneless against him.
His rhythm falters. His forehead presses to mine, sweat-damp skin against sweat-damp skin, and his breath comes in ragged pants. The control he wears like armor is gone, completely stripped away. What’s left is raw and unguarded and impossibly beautiful.
“Inside,” I manage. “Please.”
He buries himself to the hilt. A groan rips from his chest as he spills, hot and deep, his whole body shuddering against mine. I watch his face—the way his eyes squeeze shut, the way his mouth falls open, the cords of his neck straining against those dark vines—and commit every detail to memory.
For a long moment, neither of us moves. The only sounds are our labored breathing and the persistent drum of rain against glass. I can feel his heartbeat where our chests press together.
He lifts his head, his eyes finding mine. There’s something in them I don’t have words for—something tender and terrified and fierce all at once. We’re tangled together on the desk, still joined in the most intimate way possible.
My phone is face down on the desk where I left it. The threat sitting in its message history is still there and the contacts that have gone dark are still dark.
And somewhere in Dubai, what I want is still waiting for me.
“When do we leave?” I whisper, my voice quiet and certain in the dark.
He presses his answer to the base of my throat, where my pulse flutters.
“Tomorrow night.”
Dubai is waiting for us, and this time I am not going alone. This time I know what I am walking toward, and whatever is there beneath the glass towers and the buried records and the silenced voices of people who were frightened—it is not going to stay buried.
Not when I am this close.