Chapter 9 #2
The second stool goes up in front of his.
I take his right hand in both of mine and look at the damage properly in the warm kitchen light, two knuckles split, a third abraded, the skin broken in the clean way that impact leaves rather than anything with an edge.
Nothing broken beneath; I press carefully along the bones and he doesn't flinch, which is its own confirmation.
I start with the antiseptic, working slowly, the cotton pad moving in small deliberate circles. His breath hisses once through his teeth and then he's still.
His eyes are on my hands, and the quality of his attention is something I feel without looking up, the same weight he gives a room he's not sure is clear.
"You didn't look away," he says. His voice is low. The house is quiet around us.
"In the alley."
"No."
"Should I have?"
His thumb moves under my hands, slow, deliberate, staying exactly where it is.
"Most people would," he says.
"Most people haven't spent the last week or so being chased across two continents." I look up at him. The kitchen light is warm and low, his knees bracketing mine, his hand in my lap, the smell of the city still faint on his jacket.
"Fair point," he says, and his thumb moves again.
The set of his jaw shifts. Remy's composure is a fixed thing in most rooms, the operational distance he wears like a second jacket, but it comes down a fraction now, and what's underneath is a man exhausted in the bone-deep way that follows violence, and present in the way that means he came out the other side of it.
Looking at me like I'm the only still point in the room.
The antiseptic goes down.
His uninjured hand finds my waist and draws me in.
When his mouth meets mine, all of last night's careful not tonight, later is gone.
The thumb tracing my jaw, the promise in his voice, none of it survives contact.
This isn't the careful, deliberate man who took his time the first time in this house.
His hand tightens at my waist and he kisses me like something in him finally stopped calculating, like the alley and the plane and all the hours since have stripped whatever restraint he had left down to nothing.
I kiss him back the same way, because I'm done being careful about this too.
We make it as far as the kitchen table before he pulls back, puts me at arm's length, his forehead tipping toward mine.
"We should go upstairs," he says.
"We should," I agree, and stay exactly where I am.
A sound low in his chest. "Isabella."
"Remy."
He answers by sliding his hands to my waist and lifting me off the stool in one clean motion, my feet leaving the floor before I've fully registered the intent.
The kitchen light swings past, the counter, the window, the dark garden beyond it.
Then his shoulder is under my ribs and the stairs are moving beneath us, his grip certain in the way that leaves no room for negotiation. It suits me entirely.
In his room, with the door closed and New Orleans pressing soft and humid against the old windows, he sets me down and takes his time.
Where the kitchen kiss had been urgent and barely contained, this is deliberate.
He undoes the zip of the emerald dress the same way he did the first time, slowly, knuckles grazing my spine from nape to waist, and when the emerald silk pools to the floor, he takes a long, measured breath before his hands move again and his own clothes join mine.
A man who is skilled. A man who is paying attention. The difference turns out to be everything.
His mouth finds my throat first, then lower, unhurried in a way that makes me dig my fingers into his shoulders. Every place he puts his lips he follows with teeth, just enough, testing until he finds what makes my breath go uneven, then filing it away and moving on.
By the time he works down my sternum, my stomach, the inside of my hip, I've stopped trying to be quiet about any of it.
When his mouth finally settles between my thighs I stop thinking in language entirely.
He reads my body the way he reads a room, cataloguing, adjusting, two fingers curling inside me while his tongue works in slow, deliberate circles that he varies just enough to keep me from bracing against anything predictable.
The headboard is in my hands without any conscious decision to put it there.
My hips move against him and he lets me, one forearm pinning me just firmly enough to remind me he's in control of this and chooses to let me have it.
The orgasm builds long and thorough and when it breaks I can't keep quiet and he doesn't stop, not until the aftershocks have finished and I pull at his hair with both hands.
He comes up the length of my body, weight settling over me, and the satisfaction in his face is unhurried and private in a way that sends a second wave of heat through me before the first has fully receded.
"My turn," I say.
His eyes sharpen. "Is that so."
"Lie down."
A beat. The particular stillness that means he's weighing whether to let me have this.
Then he rolls onto his back and I take my time with him the way he took his time with me, learning the geography of the scars on his ribs, the tattoo along his side, the places that make his jaw clench and his hand tighten in my hair.
I work down his stomach, feel his muscles contract under my palms, and when I finally close my mouth around him the sound he makes is quiet and involuntary and nothing like the controlled man in the kitchen.
His grip in my hair tightens. I take my time.
When his thighs go rigid and he tugs once in warning I pull back, because I have my own intentions for this.
I move up over him and take him in my hand first, watch his stomach contract with the effort of holding still, and sink down onto him slowly, one inch at a time, until he's fully seated inside me and we're both breathing through it.
The stretch of him is extraordinary. His hands find my hips and grip hard enough that I'll have the marks of his fingers tomorrow, but he holds rather than directs, jaw set, letting me have the pace while a muscle ticks in his throat with the restraint of it.
I roll my hips and feel him everywhere.
"Isabella." His voice has nothing polished left in it.
"I know," I say, and move.
I set a slow rhythm at first, deliberate, watching his expression as I rise and fall, the way his control splinters a little more with every stroke.
His grip tightens. His hips push up to meet mine and I press down to meet him, finding the angle that drags a sound out of both of us.
His thumb finds the place where we're joined and works in tight circles and my rhythm breaks entirely, hips grinding rather than rolling, chasing it.
He watches my face the whole time with an intensity that makes me feel exposed in ways that have nothing to do with being undressed.
When I come again it's harder and faster than the first time and I drop forward onto my hands, spent and shaking, and he gives me exactly three seconds before he rolls me under him and takes over.
His rhythm is deep and unhurried and completely certain, and whatever was left of my composure goes with it.
The third time I come apart he's right behind me, his face pressed into my throat, his weight fully on me, both of us breathing hard in the close humid dark.
Afterward, the ceiling fan moves the humid air in slow circles above us.
His heartbeat steadies under my palm on his chest. Outside, New Orleans has settled into its late-night register, a distant trumpet somewhere on Magazine Street, the low complaint of a streetcar, a burst of laughter from the direction of the Quarter that fades as quickly as it came.
Neither of us needs to fill the silence, and for a long time neither of us does.
"When this is over," he says.
A direction. Something aimed at a point forward.
"When this is over," I agree.
His arm pulls me closer. The city presses soft against the old windows, and the house settles around us in the unhurried way of old houses that have weathered more than this.
I think about three weeks and Brenner's voice dropping to the register of a man showing off, describing my own delivery system back to me like I'd never heard of it, calling the modification elegant while I smiled and nodded and filed every word away.
Safe, for now. Three weeks until the first Rotterdam shipment reaches its buyer. Three weeks before my delivery system becomes a weapon in someone's hands.
Downstairs, the side door opens and closes. A single set of footsteps, unhurried. Then quiet.
Morning comes in through the old shutters in long, amber strips. Remy goes down first, I hear him on the stairs, the familiar rhythm of his tread, and by the time I follow the smell of coffee down to the kitchen, the pot is already made.
Luc is at the table with his tablet. Neither of them is speaking.
Luc looks up when I come in. His eyes take in whatever I'm wearing, then the ease with which I cross to the cabinet where the mugs live without looking for them.
A beat, and his gaze moves to his brother.
Remy has his back to both of us, pouring.
I pour my coffee and look around for Margot.
"She's already at Beaumont's," Luc says, without looking up. "She goes in before six on prep days. Says the kitchen belongs to whoever gets there first."
"Does it always?"
The corner of his mouth moves. "Always has."
"Rotterdam," Luc says.
Remy sets the coffee pot down. "Yeah."
"Sophie flagged something overnight." Luc turns his tablet toward the counter. "One of the buyer names from Lorelai's list. The Cayman foundation. It cleared customs yesterday in Rotterdam under a shell that traces back to Lazarev."
The coffee machine finishes its cycle. The silence after it has a different texture than the one before.
Remy picks up his cup, takes a slow drink, sets it back on the counter. When he turns, the expression on his face is the one I've only seen when the calculation has come out somewhere he doesn't like.
"Then he's not just hunting me," he says. "He's buying."
My mug warms both hands. The encrypted drive in my messenger bag upstairs, the one I loaded from Emil's files and have carried since that night in Geneva, holds the synthesis pathway and every buyer communication I downloaded that night.
The formula I also carry in my own memory.
I spent five minutes in conversation with the man who weaponized it, smiled while he explained Rotterdam to me like I was a buyer and not the scientist whose work he'd turned into a delivery system for mass casualties.
If Lazarev's shell company is clearing customs through Rotterdam, he's not just hunting Remy anymore. He's working with the Iron Choir. Two threats that were supposed to be separate have found each other.
Which means whoever put Remy in their crosshairs has also put me right there beside him.
Sophie put me in that room under cover. Only a handful of people knew who I really was. Someone in that handful made a call, and by the time we reached the hotel there was a spotter on the building opposite.
Remy sets his cup down. Luc looks up from his tablet. The kitchen goes quiet in the way that means everyone in it has just arrived at the same conclusion.
"We have a leak," I say.