26. Zane
ZANE
She comes to my office at nine, exactly when she said she would, and she sits down across from me without being asked, which she has never done before.
Every conversation we have had in this room, she has stood.
Tonight she sits, and I understand it for what it is.
She is not here to argue. She’s here to receive something, and she wants both hands free to hold it.
I close the laptop in front of me.
“All of it,” she says. “Like you promised.”
“All of it,” I agree.
I start with Gregor, though she already knows the shape of that part. I tell her exactly what he passed and to whom, the restaurant meetings, the financial transfer, and the two-day window between the council announcement and the leak reaching Sorrel.
I watch her face while I say it, and she doesn’t flinch, doesn’t interrupt, just listens with a stillness I haven’t seen from her since the morning she told me she was pregnant.
“The Marchetti faction has had your full background for over three weeks,” I say. “Your work history, the Queens address, Lena’s medical situation, and the debt that started this. And the pregnancy, two days after I told the council.”
“I know that part.”
“What you don’t know is what they’re doing with it.”
She waits.
“They’re not interested in hurting you,” I say.
“Not as an end in itself. A direct attack on you would bring the full weight of this organization down on them with no benefit attached. What they’re building instead is a position.
Leverage they can use against me specifically, through you, because you and the child are the two things in my life I will not negotiate on. ”
Something moves behind her eyes, quick, gone before I can fully name it.
“They want something from your operation,” she says. It isn’t a question.
“Almost certainly. I don’t know yet what specifically. Access to a route, a piece of territory, something that costs them less to ask for than war would cost them to wage. They’re patient. They’ll wait until they believe the threat is concrete enough that I’ll consider trading for it.”
“Would you?”
I look at her. “No.”
“Don’t answer that fast, Zane. Think about what you’re actually saying.”
“I have thought about it. I’m not going to hand the Marchetti faction a single piece of this organization in exchange for a promise from men who already proved, through Gregor, that promises mean nothing to them. Trading with them doesn’t make you safer. It makes you a precedent they’ll use again.”
She absorbs this. I watch her do it, watch the same methodical processing she brings to everything, the offshore documents, the council dinners, the architecture of a threat she didn’t ask to live inside.
“So what’s the plan?” she asks.
“Contain what we can. Roman’s team is working to identify every contact the faction has used so far, which gives us a map of how they communicate and through whom.
Lena’s security stays where it is. Yours increases, starting tonight, though I’m not restricting your movement, only adding coverage you won’t necessarily see.
” I pause. “If they make contact, and I believe they will, I’ll know within hours.
I have people positioned to ensure that. ”
“And when they make contact?”
“I deal with it directly. Not through intermediaries, not through anything that gives them room to negotiate around me.”
She’s quiet for a long moment. The office holds it, the lamp throwing long shadows across the desk between us, the city dark and indifferent through the window behind me.
I’ve given her everything I have. There’s nothing left in the folder, nothing I’m holding back this time, and the not knowing what she’ll do with all of it sits uncomfortably in my chest in a way that very little does anymore.
“Thank you,” she finally says.
It isn’t what I expected.
“For telling me,” she adds. “All of it. Even the part where I don’t get to do anything about it except wait.”
“You’re not powerless in this.”
“I know. I’m just tired of being the last to find out things that happen to me.” She looks at the desk for a moment, then back at me. “But you told me. Tonight, you actually told me.”
I don’t have a clean response to that. I’ve spent most of my life being the person who decides what other people need to know, when, and in what order, and being thanked for finally abandoning that instinct sits strangely, like praise for the bare minimum of what should have been true from the beginning.
“I should have told you about Lena before I moved her,” I say. “Not after. I know that now, in a way I think I only understood intellectually before tonight.”
“I know you know it.”
“That doesn’t fix it.”
“No,” she says. “It doesn’t. But it’s something.”
She stands. I think she’s going to leave, the way she’s left every other conversation in this office, decisive and final, and some part of me braces for the door closing the way it has closed a dozen times before.
She doesn’t walk to the door.
She comes around the desk instead.
I look up at her, and whatever is on my face must tell her I have no idea what’s about to happen, because something in her expression softens, not pity, nothing close to that, something gentler and more deliberate.
“I’m not doing this because of fear,” she says. “Or because I don’t know what to do with everything you just told me. I want to be clear about that, because I think you’ll try to talk yourself into believing it’s something simpler than it is.”
“What is it, then?”
“You gave me the truth tonight. All of it, even the parts that don’t make you look good.
Even the part where you admit you’d choose speed over including me again, if the same situation came up.
” She’s close enough now that I can see the exact shade of her eyes in low light.
“I’m choosing this with everything I know about you. Not despite it.”
I don’t move. I let her be the one who closes the last of the distance, because for the first time since the night in this kitchen, since the dinner in Connecticut, since every single time before, this is entirely hers to decide.
Her hand finds my jaw, the same way mine has found hers a dozen times, and something in that small reversal undoes me more than I expect it to. The simple touch undoes something in me. No one has ever touched me like this after knowing the worst parts of who I am.
“Celine.”
“Don’t talk me out of it,” she says. “Just this once, don’t.”
I don’t.
I look up at her, and for once I don’t have the right words. I stand from my chair, pull her against me, and kiss her.
The kiss starts slow, almost careful, like we’re both afraid of what this means. But then her fingers slide into my hair, and she makes a soft sound against my mouth, and everything shifts.
I kiss her deeper, tasting the quiet determination in her. She chose this. She heard everything I told her tonight and still chose me.
“Celine,” I murmur against her lips, my voice rough.
I lift her easily and set her on the edge of my desk. Papers shift beneath her, but neither of us cares. My hands move to the buttons of her blouse, undoing them one by one while I kiss her neck.
She breathes my name softly and reaches for my shirt, her fingers working the buttons open. When her blouse falls open, I push it off her shoulders, revealing smooth skin glowing warm in the desk lamp’s light. I kiss down her collarbone, then lower, tasting her.
She shrugs my shirt off my shoulders and runs her hands over my chest. Her touch is steady, but I can feel the slight tremble in her fingers.
I unfasten her skirt and slide it down her legs along with her underwear, leaving her in just her heels. I step back for a moment just to look at her sitting on my desk like this, blouse open, hair slightly messy, city lights faint behind her through the window.
“You’re so beautiful,” I say quietly. “I don’t deserve the way you look at me tonight.”
She pulls me back to her and kisses me again, deeper this time. I can feel how much she wants this. How much she’s choosing this. It does something dangerous to my chest.
I pick her up again, her legs wrapping around my waist, and carry her across the office to the large leather couch against the far wall.
I lay her down gently on it. The city lights coming through the window paint her body in soft silver and shadow. I kneel between her thighs and kiss my way down her stomach, slow and deliberate. When I reach the apex of her thighs, I look up at her.
“Let me taste you,” I say, voice low.
She nods, breathing already unsteady.
I spread her thighs wider and lean in. I lick her slowly, savoring the way she tastes, the way her hips twitch when I circle her clit with my tongue.
She moans softly, one hand sliding into my hair. I take my time, licking and sucking gently, sliding two fingers inside her and curling them slowly while my tongue works her clit. Her moans grow louder, sweeter, filling the quiet office.
“Zane…” she gasps, her thighs starting to tremble around my shoulders.
I groan against her, the sound vibrating through her body. I keep the rhythm steady and patient, completely focused on her pleasure. Her fingers tighten in my hair, and her back arches as she gets closer.
Her thighs start to shake around my shoulders, and her moans turn into soft, desperate sounds. I keep my mouth on her, licking and sucking with steady pressure while my fingers curl inside her.
When she comes, it’s beautiful. Her back arches off the couch, and she cries out my name, her fingers tightening almost painfully in my hair. I stay with her through every wave, licking her gently until her body finally relaxes.
I rise up and move over her. She looks up at me with flushed cheeks and heavy-lidded eyes. I push my pants and underwear down just enough and settle between her thighs. My cock is aching, hard and heavy. I brace one hand beside her head and look down at her.
“Are you sure?” I ask quietly, my voice rough.
Celine reaches up and touches my face again, the same gentle reversal that undid me earlier. “I’m sure,” she whispers. “I want you, Zane.”
I push into her slowly, inch by inch, savoring the tight, wet heat of her body. We both groan at the same time.
When I’m fully inside her, I stay there, forehead resting against hers, just breathing together. The feeling is overwhelming. Not just physical. Something much deeper.
“You feel perfect,” I murmur against her lips. “So fucking perfect.”
I start to move, slow and deep. Every thrust is deliberate.
I want her to feel all of me. She wraps her legs around my waist and meets my rhythm, her hands sliding over my back.
The office is quiet except for our breathing and the soft sounds of our bodies moving together.
The city lights glow faintly through the window, casting shifting patterns across her skin.
I kiss her deeply as I thrust into her, then pull back to look at her face. I need to see her. I need her to see me. “This is different,” I say between breaths, voice low. “You know that, right? This isn’t just… fuck.”
“I know,” she breathes, her fingers digging into my shoulders. “I know, Zane.”
Her words hit me somewhere deep. I thrust harder, still controlled but more urgent now.
She moans loudly, her head falling back against the couch.
I lean down and kiss her neck, her collarbone, anywhere I can reach while I move inside her.
The pleasure builds slowly, powerfully, wrapping around both of us.
When she comes again, she clenches tight around me, crying out softly as her body trembles beneath mine.
The feeling of her pulsing around my cock is too much. I groan deeply, burying my face in her neck as my own release hits me hard. I thrust deep one last time and come inside her, pulsing again and again as intense pleasure rolls through me.
We stay like that for a long time, still joined, breathing hard against each other.
I press soft kisses to her shoulder and the side of her neck.
Eventually, I shift us so I’m lying on the couch with her on top of me, her head resting against my chest. My hand strokes slowly up and down her bare back.
She feels small and warm against me. I listen to her breathing gradually slow down.
I don’t speak. There are no words that feel big enough for what just happened. For the fact that she heard every ugly truth I gave her tonight and still came to me. Still chose me.
I lie awake long after she falls asleep, one arm wrapped securely around her, the city lights flickering quietly beyond the window. For the first time in years, I have no plan, no calculation, no strategy for what comes next.
And for the first time in years, I’m not afraid of not knowing.