31. Theon
THEON
She’s sitting on the edge of our bed when I walk in, still wearing tactical trousers and the black base layer from Seattle. Her vest and boots lie where she dropped them.
Raphael cleared us both at staging. Nikolai kept the return debrief short because Marcus was coordinating Ezra’s abort and Dominic’s recovery team was already moving.
Isla stares at a point beyond the wall.
I know the look. I’ve worn it in front of mirrors, wondering which version of me the files described.
“Did you eat?”
She shakes her head.
“Do you want to talk?”
Another shake.
“Do you want me to leave?”
Her eyes snap to mine. “No.”
I crouch in front of her and rest my hands on her knees. “Tell me what you need.”
“I need to belong to someone who chose me.” Her voice is steady because she is forcing it to be. “Not someone who acquired me.”
I wait.
“I want you to own me tonight,” she says. “Because I’m giving myself to you. No file. No transfer order. Me.”
The words hit every dark place in me built to answer them.
I do not move yet.
“Look at me.”
She does.
“Are you asking because you want this, or because you need to punish the girl in that photograph?”
Pain crosses her face. It does not make her look away.
“I want it. I want the word to mean something I chose.”
“Tonight only unless you choose it again.”
“Yes.”
“Same colors as before. Red stops everything. Yellow pauses. Two taps if words disappear.”
“Yes.”
“No restraints. No gag.”
“No restraints,” she agrees. “I want your hands. I want your voice. I want you rough enough that I can feel the difference.”
“The difference between what?”
“Being taken and giving.”
I rise and frame her face between my hands.
“Color?”
“Green.”
Then I kiss her.
I remove the remainder of her gear slowly. Buckles, belt, base layer. Not stripping an operative down to a woman underneath—she is both, and both are mine tonight because she has placed them in my hands.
“Mine,” I say against her throat. “Because you chose me.”
Her breath catches.
I kiss the hard pulse beneath her jaw, her collarbone, the scar near her ribs. My hands close around her breasts. She arches into them.
“They documented your body,” I say. “They never had this.”
“What?”
“Your yes.”
My hand slides between her thighs. She’s already wet.
“Mine to touch?”
“Yes.”
I make her say it again before my fingers enter her.
She grips my shoulders, trembling, but she remains with me. Her eyes stay open. When I ask her color, she says green without hesitation.
I walk her back to the bed and lay her down.
“Tell me what you want. Exact words, baby girl.”
Her cheeks flush. She fights through it.
“I want you inside me. I want you to fuck me like I’m yours. I need to hear you say I belong to you because I gave myself to you.”
I strip and kneel between her thighs.
“You belong to me tonight.” I press into her slowly. “Not because someone wrote your code on a file. Because you opened your legs and told me yes.”
I sink deeper.
Her mouth falls open.
“Mine,” I say.
“Yours.”
I hold her gaze while I move. Slow at first, then harder when she lifts her hips to meet me. Every time the bed strikes the wall, her breath catches. Pleasure begins to pull her apart.
“Throat?” I ask.
“Hold. Don’t squeeze.”
My hand closes around her neck with no pressure on her airway. Presence, not restriction.
Her eyes darken.
“Not yet,” I tell her when her body tightens. I slow until frustration twists through her face. “Your pleasure is mine because you gave it to me. Ask.”
“Please, Daddy.”
The word goes through me like heat.
“Again.”
“Daddy, please let me come.”
I release her throat and put my fingers against her clit.
“Come for me.”
She breaks around me, crying out my name. I keep moving until the tremors begin to ease, then stop long enough to check her face.
“Color?”
“Green.” She catches my wrist and brings my fingers back between her legs. “Again.”
The second comes faster. The third takes longer.
I turn her onto her stomach only after she nods. When my palm settles against one cheek, I ask, “Do you want my hand?”
“Yes.”
The strike is sharp enough to sound, not hard enough to injure. Her body pushes back into mine.
“Mine?” I ask.
“Yours.”
I take her from behind, one hand working her clit while the other grips her hip. She comes with a sob that pulls the last of my control with it. I follow, her name breaking against her shoulder.
Then the shaking changes.
I pull away and turn her carefully.
Tears move silently over her face.
“Isla. Look at me.”
Her eyes find mine.
“Color?”
“Green. Finished, but green.” She reaches for me. “Hold me.”
I gather her against my chest.
“They had eighteen years,” she whispers. “They called it ownership, but I was inventory. Tonight I chose the word.”
“And you can take it back whenever you want.”
Her grip tightens.
“You’re not equipment,” I tell her. “I want your chemistry and your impossible spreadsheets because they are parts of you. I want the woman who names centrifuges and argues with recipes. I want all of it. But none of it is mine unless you give it.”
“I did.”
“I know.”
We run a bath and lower ourselves into the warm water. Isla settles between my legs with her back against my chest. I give her water first, then the protein bar she refused before the operation. She eats half without argument.
“The file said engineered vehicle incident,” she says. “Then it moved straight into my response to isolation. Exceptional. Within parameters.”
“The appendix was missing.”
“I know.”
“We verify before we let their version become yours.”
She leans her head back against my shoulder.
“Was that okay?” she asks. “What I asked for.”
“You were present. You told me what you wanted. You used your words when I checked you. You asked me to stop when you were finished.” I kiss her wet hair. “That makes it ours. It doesn’t mean tomorrow can’t feel complicated. If it does, we talk about it.”
“You’ll still do it again?”
Dark want tightens low in my body despite exhaustion.
“If you ask me when this isn’t the first night after finding your acquisition file.”
She turns enough to look at me. “That’s annoyingly responsible.”
“Don’t spread it around.”
Her mouth almost smiles.
“I want to find Vale,” she says. “Not so I can kill her.”
“What do you want?”
“I want the missing appendix. I want to know whether my parents really died. And I want her to see that I became a person after everything she authorized.”
“When we find her, I will be beside you.”
“That sounds like a promise.”
“It is.”
My secure phone vibrates on the floor beside the bath.
I reach for it without moving Isla from between my legs.
The message is from Nikolai.
Abort transmitted. No acknowledgment. Both trackers moving toward the return corridor. Dominic twenty-one minutes out.
Isla reads it over my arm.
“Twenty-one minutes is too long.”
“Yes.”
I do not tell her Ezra is brilliant, as though brilliance makes a person immune to machinery designed for him.
“Dominic is already going after him,” I say. “Marcus has both signals. If either changes, Nikolai wakes us.”
“You think we’re going to sleep?”
“No.”
We stay in the bath until the water cools, Isla held against me, the phone balanced on the dry tile within reach.
Twenty-one minutes becomes nineteen.
Then seventeen.