Chapter 9 #3
I pin her wrists above her head with one hand.
She tests the grip, once, and finding it immovable, makes a sound in her throat that's half frustration and half relief, and something in that sound strips the last rational layer off whatever I'm doing.
I push into her and she cries out, loud, her head falling back against the wall with a crack she doesn't seem to feel.
I don't give her time to adjust. I don't give myself time.
I fuck her hard, each thrust driving her shoulders into the metal, and the sounds between us are obscene, wet and rhythmic and underscored by her breathing, which comes in sharp, punched-out gasps that I can feel against my collarbone.
"You're going to take all of it." My voice doesn't sound like mine. Lower. Wrecked. The voice of something that's come unmoored. "Every fucking thing I'm carrying tonight, you're going to take it."
"Give it to me." She says it through gritted teeth, her eyes glassy, her wrists straining against my hand. "Stop holding back and give it to me."
I shift my grip. My free hand finds her throat, fingers settling over the pulse that hammers against my palm like a living thing trying to escape.
I don't squeeze. Not yet. I let her feel the weight of my hand there, the potential of it, and her whole body goes taut against me, a wire pulled to its limit, vibrating.
"Breathe in," I tell her.
She does.
I close my hand.
Her air stops and her eyes go wide and her body clamps around me so hard I nearly lose the rhythm.
The sensation is staggering. She's squeezing me like she's trying to pull me deeper, and I can feel her pulse under my fingers, fast and frantic and completely at my mercy.
I hold the pressure for three seconds. Five.
Seven. Her face flushes, her lips part, no sound escaping because I've taken the sound from her along with the air. Then I release.
She drags in a breath that sounds like a sob.
I fuck her through it, through the rush of oxygen that hits her system like a drug, and her legs are shaking, both of them wrapped around me now, her full weight suspended between my body and the wall.
My marks are blazing. I can see them in my peripheral vision, bright enough to cast shadows, the bioluminescent lines along my arms and chest throwing blue-white light across her skin.
They've never done this before, never burned this hot, and the light makes her look like something sacred, something profane, something I'm desecrating in real time.
I close my hand again. Lighter this time, enough to restrict but not cut off, and I set a pace that matches the squeeze: thrust when I tighten, breathe when I release.
She catches the rhythm before her conscious mind does, her body learning the pattern, and soon she's moving with it, riding the edge of air and deprivation and pleasure with an instinct that would humble me if I were capable of humility right now.
"That's it." I press my forehead to hers. Our breath mingles, hers rationed, mine ragged. "That's it, take it, let me hear you."
She comes with my hand on her throat. The orgasm rips through her in a long, shuddering wave that starts where we're joined and rolls up through her body until she's arching off the wall, her mouth open on a sound that's been building since I walked through her door.
It's raw. Wrecked. It sounds like grief and rage and release all tangled together, and it doesn't stop.
I keep moving, keep the pressure on her throat calibrated to the razor edge of too much, and she comes again, or she never stopped, her body convulsing around me in pulses that destroy what's left of my control.
I bury myself in her and let go. The release is violent, savage, pulled out of some depth I didn't know I had, and my vision whites out for a second, two seconds, long enough that when I come back she's the first thing I see and the first thing I feel and the only thing in the room that's real.
We stay like that. Pinned to the wall, tangled together, both of us wrecked.
Her breath comes back in stages, each inhale deeper than the last, and I release her throat, letting my hand slide down to rest at the base of her neck where the pulse still runs wild.
My marks dim slowly, the light fading from incandescent to a low, steady glow, and in the shifting luminance I can see what I've done to her.
The red print of my fingers on her throat.
The bruises forming on her wrists. The place on her shoulder where I bit down hard enough to leave the impression of my teeth.
She should look damaged.
She looks like she's entirely and completely mine.
I carry her to the bed because her legs won't hold her.
She doesn't protest, doesn't joke, just lets me set her down and then pull the thin blanket over both of us when I lie down beside her.
She fits against me in a way that defies geometry, curling into my chest with her face tucked under my jaw, and I wrap myself around her and hold on.
Neither of us speaks. The silence fills the room like water, slow and total, and it's the most intimate thing I've ever experienced.
More intimate than the sex. More intimate than my hand on her throat.
This, the quiet after, the two of us breathing in the dark while the station hums its endless mechanical lullaby around us.
She doesn't ask what happened. I don't offer.
She traces patterns on my chest with one finger, slow, idle, and I let her, and the touch is so gentle after everything that came before it that my throat closes around something I refuse to name.
I stay. I don't get up. I don't leave. I don't retreat to my quarters to process in solitude the way every instinct I have is screaming at me to do. I stay in her bed with her body pressed against mine and her heartbeat slowing under my palm, and I let the silence hold what words would ruin.
That's new. I know it's new. She knows it too, because at some point her hand stills on my chest and she exhales, long and slow, with a quality of settling into something that feels like the opposite of temporary.
Minutes pass. Maybe longer. The artificial night cycle dims the corridor lights beyond her door, and the only illumination left is the faint residual glow of my marks and the standby light on her datapad across the room.
Her voice, when it comes, is quiet. Almost conversational, except nothing about it is casual.
"Your father's message. He said don't trust anyone who tells you to follow him."
I don't move. "Yes."
"Ethan was the one who suggested looking in the sealed section."
The silence that follows is not the same silence we've been lying in. That silence was warm, inhabited, alive with the things we chose not to say. This silence is cold. Structural. The silence of a room that has just changed shape around you while you weren't looking.
I stare at the ceiling. I think about Ethan in the intelligence hub, his careful pauses, his curated revelations.
The way he offered the sealed section like a gift, wrapped in plausible deniability and tied with the bow of helpful concern.
Your father never told me why. Though I suspect it's related to his personal research.
The perfect amount of knowledge. Just enough to send me looking. Just enough to open that door.
"Yes," I say. "He was."
Talia doesn't say anything else. She doesn't need to. The conclusion sits between us in the dark, growing colder by the second, and my arm around her tightens without conscious thought, as if the danger is already in the room with us and the only thing I can do is hold onto what's mine.
The enemy might be closer than either of us knew. And I invited him in.