8. Raven #2
"I asked you in a cabin, when you had reasons not to answer. I am asking you now."
I turn around.
"Because harming a child voids the operation. It was my op, my order, my team, and one of them fired that bullet. That weight is mine to carry." I shrug.
He just watches me.
"And because,” I continue. “He was so deep in that panic attack that he wasn't breathing. Those two things weren't in competition. I'd like to tell you the first one was the reason but it was the second one."
"You could be lying," he says. "About all of it. The file, the photographs, why you stayed."
"Sure."
"Some of it is checkable and some of it is not." He pushes off the desk. "Show me one thing that is not."
And he takes a knife out of his sleeve and puts it against my throat.
It's a good knife, sharp, lethal and he's fast, my back is to the window instantly and there's about three inches of daylight between his body and mine. The flat of the blade is cold under my jaw.
"You have six weeks in the file at Quantico," he says softly. "Show me."
Oh, you absolute idiot, I think, and it's not entirely clear which of us I mean.
Because he's got the knife in the wrong hand for a man who wants to keep it.
I go under and outside, strip the wrist, and it's textbook and it's over in about a second and a half — I've got his own knife in my hand and his arm turned up behind him and I put him into the desk hard enough to move it four inches on the rug.
"That," I say into his ear, "was insulting."
He laughs.
He laughs — low, genuinely delighted — and then he throws me.
Not cleanly. He gets a foot behind mine and drops his weight and we go down together off the desk and hit the rug, and it turns into something ugly and real: elbows, a knee, my forearm across his throat and his hand around my wrist, both of us fighting for the knife which has gone somewhere under a chair.
He is enormously strong and about eighty pounds heavier than me and he does not fight like a boxer, he fights like a man who has been in rooms.
I win despite it.
I win because he telegraphs left when he's tired and because I've been waiting for it for forty seconds, and I roll him and get a knee in and come up sitting across his chest with both his wrists pinned under my hands and my hair hanging in his face.
His breath is warm against my cheek, uneven from the effort.
And I stop.
Because he's stopped. He's not fighting.
He's lying on his own office floor with a federal agent on his chest and he is looking up at me with an expression I have never had aimed at me in my life.
Every part of my body has just now noticed.
His wrists are hot beneath my palms, his chest hard pressed under the weight of my own body.
"Get up," I protest.
"You have my hands."
"That's not the—"
"Raven."
That get’s my attention. Thats the first time he's used my name, and it goes through me like an electrical current.
"Let go of my hands," he says quietly, "or don't. But decide, because I am not going to move under you and then be told afterward that I misread the situation."
And there it is. Right there in the middle of everything, this man on his back with my knees on either side of his ribs, asking permission.
He's asking.
I have known a great many men and been touched by more of them than I'd like and I cannot at this moment think of one single time somebody asked.
"Say it plainly," I hear myself say. "Whatever you're asking. Say it in words."
"I want to kiss you." No hesitation at all.
"And I want to do a great deal more than that, and I am going to do exactly none of it unless you tell me to.
If you get up and walk out of this room right now, nothing about your position in this house changes tomorrow.
Nothing. You have my word and my word is the only currency I actually have. "
"And if I don't get up?"
"Then I’ll take that as permission."
"Don't stop," I say.
I let go of his wrists and he moves, and he is fast — one hand into my hair at the nape and the other flat between my shoulder blades and he rolls us both, and my back hits the rug and his mouth is on mine.
It is not gentle and I don't want it to be. It's a decade of nothing coming apart at once. He kisses like he does everything else, which is thoroughly and without any apparent doubt, and I get a fistful of his shirt and pull and hear something give at the shoulder seam and neither of us cares.
"Up," he says against my mouth, and lifts me — actually lifts, one arm under me, like I weigh nothing — and sets me on the edge of the desk and steps between my knees.
Everything on the desk goes onto the floor. A lamp survives. Nothing else does.
His mouth on my throat, over the marks Andrei left, careful there and not careful anywhere else.
My hands under his shirt and up the flat of his back, the ridge of an old scar under my palm, the heat coming off him.
He gets my shirt open and does not rush it and his mouth follows his hands down and I make a sound I have not made in years.
"Tell me if you want me to stop."
"I don't."
"Tell me anyway. Any time. That's the arrangement."
"Ilya."
"Say it."
"I'll tell you," I get out. "I swear to God I'll tell you. Now will you—"
His hand goes to the button of my jeans and stops.
"Yes," I say. "Yes."
He takes his time. That's the thing I'm not prepared for — that a man built like a wrecking ball turns out to be patient, and generous.
Two fingers, slow, working me open like he has all night to do it, every time my hips come up off the desk chasing it he slows down instead of speeding up and giving me what I want.
“Bozhe moy,” he says against my jaw. “You’re soaked. Just for me.”
“Ilya–”
He watches my face the entire time and adjusts to what he finds there. When I get loud he puts his other hand flat over my mouth and murmurs something in Russian into my hair that I don't understand and yet understand perfectly.
“You’re wet enough that I can hear it,” he growls, “and I haven’t even gotten your pants all the way off yet.”
Mercilessly he continues, faster, then not. Then a curl of his fingers makes my heel come off the back of his thigh reflexively.
“There,” he murmurs, satisfied. “That spot right there.”
“Don’t stop—” My words are lost in a whimper as I burrow my head against his shoulder again, taking the fabric of his shirt between my teeth as if biting it might help me.
“I’m not going to stop.” He drops his voice low again, and keeps his promise.
I come apart on his hand on the edge of his own desk with my heels locked behind his thighs, and he holds me through the whole of it, and afterward he doesn't let go.
For about four seconds I let myself have it.
Then I open my eyes.
And over his shoulder, on the corner of the desk that didn't get cleared, there's a folder — plain, closed, tab out — and on the tab in small block capitals is my own name.
WEST, R. A.
The top sheet has slid half out of it. A photocopy of something. An address in Bethesda, Maryland, that I have not spoken aloud in this house or any other for eleven years.
My mother's street. Ilya follows my eyes. And he closes the folder — unhurried, without a flicker, the way you'd straighten a picture frame — and puts it in the drawer, and turns back to me.
"Where were we?”