Chapter 22 - Viktor #2
Olivia’s whole body jerked. Her heel dug into his back, her hips rising to meet him, her hand fisting in the sheets while the other found his shoulder, and her nails bit down hard enough to sting.
She was loud—the sounds she made were specific and demanding and devoid of any attempt at modesty, direct in bed the way she was direct everywhere, unwilling to perform a restraint she didn’t feel.
“Faster,” she breathed, and he gave it to her, and her thighs clamped against his ears, and the bond between them blazed with the feedback loop of her pleasure registering in his body and his response feeding back through the connection into hers, an amplification that made his vision go white at the edges.
She came with a cry that punched out of her chest, his name cracking apart inside it. He worked her through it until her hand found his jaw and pushed him up, oversensitised, shaking.
Olivia pulled him up by the jaw, kissed him hard—tasting herself on his mouth and kissing him harder for it, her tongue against his, her teeth on his lower lip—and the groan that tore out of him broke against her mouth.
“Now,” she said. Not a request.
Viktor pushed into her, and the groan that left him was low and involuntary and stripped of every layer of control he’d been maintaining for months.
He felt her everywhere—the heat, the tight grip of her body adjusting around him, the way she exhaled against his jaw, and the sound she made was nothing either of them recognized, a sound that belonged to the place where the bond and the body merged, and the distinction between his pleasure and hers dissolved.
He moved, eight years of distance collapsing into deep, urgent, relentless rhythm. She rose to meet every stroke with her heels driving into the backs of his thighs, her nails raking down his spine hard enough that the sting turned bright. He swore against her throat and drove into her harder.
She wrapped her leg around his waist and pulled him deeper, and the angle changed, and her eyes flew open, and the sound that ripped out of her was raw and escalating.
“Right there, Viktor… Right there, don’t you… don’t you dare stop…” Her hand found the headboard behind her and gripped it, her body arching beneath his.
He braced both hands on the mattress and gave her everything he had—the full force and the full focus and the decade of silence behind it—and the bond carried the building wave between them, her orgasm approaching through the connection as a tightening in his own body, a heat at the base of his spine that matched hers, and when she shattered against him the force of it dragged him over the edge with her.
Her back bowed off the bed. Her mouth opened, and the sound she made was guttural and raw. Viktor followed a breath later, his body shuddering against hers, his forehead dropping to her shoulder, the bond between them blazing so bright he could feel it in his teeth.
After, they lay tangled in sheets that had been clean that morning.
Viktor’s arm was across her ribs. Her head was on his shoulder.
Their breathing slowed in unison, and the bond sizzled between them with a depth it hadn’t had an hour ago, as though the physical had unlocked a register that had always existed and had simply been waiting for permission to open.
Neither of them spoke. Viktor could feel her thinking—the bond carried the texture of it, the quick, restless quality of a mind that was already processing what had happened and building frameworks around it and deciding what it meant—and he let her think, because the alternative was speaking, and speaking would require him to describe what had just happened to his chest and his hands and his understanding of himself, and he did not have the vocabulary.
Her fingers traced the scratches she’d left on his chest—light, absent, the way she traced annotations in the margins of her investigation files. “Those are going to show,” she said.
“Yes.”
“Kahn will see them.”
“Kahn will pretend not to see them. “
Her mouth moved against his shoulder—the shape of a smile she was trying not to let him feel.
The room was dark. The compound was quiet beyond the walls, the patrol shift changing, the sounds of a pack that functioned because people like Viktor ensured it functioned, and people like Olivia ensured the functioning didn’t come at the cost of the people inside it.
He didn’t speak. The machinery of his silence, honed over twenty years, engaged without his permission, and the words stayed where they were—behind his teeth, beneath the discipline, in the sealed room where he kept the things he couldn’t afford.
Olivia’s breathing slowed. Her hand stilled on his chest. Her body softened against his, the hard edges of her consciousness giving way to the blur of exhaustion, and he felt the moment she fell asleep through the bond—a dimming, a release, the sharp mind going quiet.
He lay in the dark with her weight against his shoulder, the bond carrying her sleep into his awareness, and the scratches on his chest stinging in the cool air, and he knew he should stay.
She needed him to stay. He knew this. The bond told him this. His own body, still warm where hers pressed against it, told him this.
He left before dawn.