Yakob
"I'm sure," she says, and every operational principle I have lived by for twenty years flies out of the room.
I’ve been sure of things before. Sure of ranges, of timings, of the way a man's shoulders drop a half second before he draws.
This is something else. She is kneeling between my knees, and she says it the way she says everything, with her whole weight behind it, and I understand that I am about to do the one thing I have never done on a job.
I take her face in my hands and she comes up to meet me.
Her fingers spread over my chest, over the scar at my collarbone, over skin and history, and she doesn't flinch from any of it. I pull her up out of her kneel and into my lap because eight inches was too far and now, even touching doesn’t close enough.
She makes a small sound against my mouth.
Her hands have moved to my shoulders and her hair has come loose from its braid and the smell of her is everywhere, soap and salt and something earthy, and for the first time in my adult life the perimeter of my awareness collapses to the space inside my own arms.
Which is why it takes me a full second and a half to hear the engine.
I go still. She feels it instantly, pulls back an inch, and whatever is on my face makes her go still too.
That fast. No questions. One heartbeat she is a woman being kissed and the next she is the person who got me off a compound and onto a boat.
I have never wanted her more than in the half second she gives me absolute silence.
The sound again, under the wind. Low gear. Coming up the coast road, slow.
The track goes nowhere. That is why we’re in the house at the end of it.
"Down," I breathe, and she is already moving. I kill the lamp with two fingers. The dark comes in like water. I put her against the interior wall, and lift the cot to stand in front of her, so if anyone looks in, they see a disused room and nothing else.
I take the pistol from the window sill where it has lived since the first night whenever it’s not been on my person, and move into the open space of the kitchen.
Everything has been put away and cleaned down. There are no signs that anyone has been living here for the last three days, and only one person knows.
Stefano.
I put a wedge beneath the locked door and find the gap in the slats of the shutters that cover the kitchen window facing the track.
Headlights swing along the terraces below, the olive trees jumping out of the dark and back into it.
A small four by four, the kind the island farmers drive, except it’s nine-thirty at night and no farmer alive checks his terraces by headlight in the dark.
It stops at the ruined barn at the bottom of our track.
Doors. Two men. A torch beam climbs the terrace walls, patient, methodical, left to right and back.
Grid search.
The urge to return to Iris is almost overwhelming, but I stay put, I do my job.
The beam crosses the shutters. Slides over. Comes back.
I count. Options, not seconds. Two targets, dispersed, one still at the vehicle.
Four seconds of work if it comes to it, five if the second man is competent.
But bodies are information. Two missing searchers would tell the remaining Ramunnos exactly which island, maybe even which farm, and there would be boats in the north cove before ours.
So I stand in the small dark house and I do the hardest thing my trade ever asks.
Nothing.
Boots on the track. Closer. A voice, low Sicilian, bored more than careful, and the second voice answering.
One of them tries the door. The bar takes the weight without a sound, because I check that bar the way other men check their phones.
A shoulder against the wood, once, testing.
The house holds its breath. The last fire we had outside was long enough to be cold now, Iris scattered the ashes and covered the area with leaves to disguise the burn mark.
The shutters are winter-shut, despite the time of year.
A house closed up like every other abandoned property on this island as the farmers have moved on to better properties.
The torch beam bleeds through the slat and lays a stripe of light across the floor, a hand's width from my boot.
The bored voice says something with a shrug built into it.
It’s late.
There’s no blood.
They’re not here.
I thought I saw a light.
One last sweep of their flashlight over the building, looking for any signs of use.
Then boots on the gravel. Doors opening and closing, the sound an assault on the quiet night.
The engine drops down towards the coast road the way it came, headlights sweeping the trees one last time, and the dark closes behind it.
Neither of us moves for four full minutes.
"Yakob." A thread of sound.
"They're gone."
She exhales. It shakes at the end, the adrenaline beginning to dissipate.
I put the pistol down and move the cot back into position beneath the window.
When I turn back to her, she comes into my chest like she was fired from something.
I fold my arms around her in the dark. Her heart is going hard enough I can feel it against my ribs.
"Farmers?" she asks, into my shirt, already knowing.
"No."
"They're searching the island?"
"Yes. But not thoroughly. With Salvatore Ramunno dead they are probably just going through the motions while the family recalibrates."
She's quiet for a moment. Then, muffled, "I have notes on their timing."
The laugh comes out of me before I know it exists, one low breath of it, unpracticed, and I feel her smile against my skin, and this is what she does.
Ten minutes after torchlight on the floor she is dragging me back up into the world of the living, because she refuses to leave anyone behind in the dark, even me.
"The boat is coming," I say into her hair. "We hold. Moving now puts us on open roads with search teams on them. This house has held for two days. It holds for two more."
She pulls back enough to look up at me. There is just enough moonlight through the slat to find her eyes with. "Before we were interrupted," she says, "I told you, I was sure. I want it noted that the interruption changes nothing."
"So noted." I tuck the loose hair back behind her ear.
The kiss is tentative at first, experimental, she is testing the waters after a storm.
My body reacts immediately, remembering last night.
Every inch of me tightens with the memory of her above me, around me, the way she took what she wanted and gave everything back without hesitation.
The interruption should have killed the heat.
It hasn’t. If anything, the threat outside has sharpened it, turned it into something edged and necessary.
I cup the back of her neck, angling her mouth to mine, and take control.
Slow at first, matching her caution, letting her feel that I’m steady.
Then deeper. Hungrier. My tongue slides against hers and she makes that small broken sound again, the one that undoes every wall I’ve spent two decades reinforcing.
Her hands fist in my shirt, pulling me closer even though there’s no space left between us.
“Iris,” I rasp against her lips.
She doesn’t answer with words. She answers by pressing her body flush to mine, hips rolling once in a slow grind against my cock that drags a groan out of my throat.
My hands slide down her back, under the hem of the oversized T-shirt she’s wearing, and find bare skin.
Warm. Soft. Alive. The contrast with the cool night air seeping through the shutters makes her shiver, and I pull her tighter to me, chasing the tremor with my palms.
The bedroll is only steps away. I guide her backward without breaking the kiss, one careful step, then another, until the backs of her heels hit the edge.
She sits, then lies back, tugging me down with her.
I brace my weight on my forearms, careful of the fresh scar pulling at my side, but she doesn’t let me hover.
Her legs part and wrap around my hips, heels digging into the backs of my thighs, anchoring me exactly where I want to be.
“You’re still healing,” she whispers, even as her hands slip under my shirt and trace the ridges of muscle along my abdomen.
“I’m healed enough.” The words come out rough. Truth and need tangled together. I kiss the corner of her mouth, her jaw, the sensitive spot beneath her ear that makes her arch. “I need to feel you again. All of you.”
She nods, and helps me strip the shirt over her head.
Moonlight through the shutter slat paints silver across her breasts, the curve of her waist, the flare of her hips.
I’ve seen her in every state now; terrified, fierce, exhausted, laughing.
But this is the version that brands itself into me. Wanting. Trusting.
I mouth my way down her body the way I did before, slower this time because the danger outside has reminded me how fragile every second is.
I linger at her breasts until her breathing turns ragged, then lower, until I’m settled between her thighs, pulling off the boxers she took from the packet this morning.
The taste of her floods my senses. She’s already wet, slick from earlier and from the fresh wave of arousal the kiss stirred.
I lick into her slowly, learning every hitch of her breath, every roll of her hips.
When I slide two fingers inside her she clenches around them with a soft moan, her hands fisting in my hair.
“Yakob—please—”
I give her what she asks for. I curl my fingers, find the spot that makes her thighs tremble, and work her with my tongue until she comes apart under me.
Sharp, sudden, her whole body bowing off the bed roll.
I stay with her through it, gentling her down, then crawl back up her body and kiss her so she can taste herself on my tongue.