Yakob #2
Her hands are already at my waistband, shoving my boxers down. I kick them off and settle between her legs again, the head of my cock sliding through her folds. She’s so warm. So ready. I notch myself at her entrance and pause.
“Look at me,” I say.
Her eyes open, green even in the near-dark, shining with the same certainty that undid me the first time.
I push inside her in one long, steady stroke.
The sound she makes is pure relief and pleasure.
I swallow it with another kiss and start to move in deep, measured thrusts that drag against every sensitive place inside her.
She meets me stroke for stroke, nails digging into my shoulders, legs locked around my waist. The world outside the shutters might still be hunting us, but in here, there is only this. Only her.
I lose myself in the rhythm. In the way her breath catches every time I bottom out.
In the slick heat of her body gripping me tighter with every thrust. My name falls from her lips like a prayer and a plea at once, and I chase the sound, chasing the edge that’s already building at the base of my spine.
“Come with me,” I growl against her throat. “Iris. Let me feel you milk me.”
She dips her hips, changing the angle to what she needs.
Her body seizes around me, pulsing, pulling me deeper, and I follow her over with a low groan, burying myself to the hilt as the release crashes through me.
I spill inside her in heavy pulses, hips stuttering, arms shaking with the effort of holding myself above her.
Fractured sounds of surprise escaping my throat.
I don’t move from her, even after m cock stops throbbing and twitching.
We stay locked together, breathing hard, hearts hammering against each other.
I brush damp strands of hair from her face and kiss her softly, until the urgency bleeds into something quieter.
Something that feels dangerously like permanence.
I roll to the side, my cock still hard, and pull her against me so she’s tucked against my chest. My hand strokes down her belly in slow passes. The wound in my side aches faintly, but it’s nothing compared to the ache in my chest.
“Two days,” I murmur into her hair.
“Two days,” she echoes, covering my hand with hers. “And then we figure out what comes after.”
I don’t answer. I just hold her tighter and listen to the night settle around the little stone house.
For the first time in twenty years, the dark doesn’t feel empty. It feels full of her.
And whatever comes after Sicily; her brothers, my contracts, the world that wants to pull us apart…I already know I won’t let it.
She is mine now.
And I’m hers.
After she falls asleep, I sit in the chair by the window with the pistol on my knee and the night arranges itself into the oldest job I know. A door. A principal. A man between them.
Except it’s different now, and I spend the dark hours studying how.
I’ve guarded people I was paid to guard and I felt nothing.
I sat outside a minister's bedroom for nine nights once and couldn’t have told you the color of his eyes.
I know the color of hers in four different lights.
I know the sound she makes when she surfaces from sleep, half a syllable, like a question.
I know that she is too calm, that she has been too calm since the compound, that a week of terror is packed away inside her the way I packed twenty years into a vault, and that vaults don’t hold.
Mine didn't. Hers won't. And when hers fails, when the storm she is holding off finally makes landfall, I intend to be standing in it with her, and that intention isn’t professional.
This can't happen. I run the assessment anyway, out of discipline, the way you check a weapon you already know is loaded. She is an Orlov. The only sister, the center of a family that could quite possibly have me erased with a phone call. A woman whose world is a warm kitchen with singing in it. I’m the thing families like hers hire and then wash their hands of.
I have a body count instead of a biography.
But she touched every scar I have and asked for the story instead of the exit.
She says my name like it’s worth something, like it’s a place she has decided to live.
Yakob, stay with me, on a vineyard in Sicily with my blood on her hands.
Yakob, in the dark of this room, a thread of sound with her whole life behind it. Nobody has ever said my name like that.
The moon works its way across the shutter slat. The stripe of light climbs the wall, touches the cot, lays itself across her open hand at the edge of the mattress.
I could still do it. Deliver her, take the balance of the fee, and be a rumor by nightfall. It’s the correct move. It’s the move I’ve made after every job for twenty years, and it kept me alive, if that’s the word for what I was doing.
I look at her hand in the moonlight and I know I am not going to make it.
Falling is the wrong word for this. Falling is fast and has a bottom. This is more like the tide coming in over a man who sat down on the sand and told himself he would move in a minute. It’s slow and consuming.
Another day. Then a boat, a plane, five brothers, and a world where her life resumes.
I watch the track. I watch the door. I watch the rise and fall of her back, six seconds in, seven out.
The gravity of her, I thought, like I was describing a hazard.
It isn't a hazard. It's the first true north I've had in twenty years, and I've already set my course by it.