Chapter 12 #2
She fists my jacket and drags me into a cross street, around a corner, through a passage between buildings that spills us onto the Kettenbrückengasse where the extraction vehicle idles with its lights off.
She opens the rear door and shoves me inside, and I land across the back seat while she follows, closing the door behind her.
The driver, a local asset arranged through my European contacts, doesn't wait for instructions. The car moves before the latch engages.
Vix pushes me onto my back and strips my jacket off my shoulder with the briskness of a field medic rather than a woman who was pressed against me in a closet minutes ago.
She finds the wound with her fingers and I watch her face change, the shift registering not as a flinch or a gasp but as a visible recalibration behind her eyes, the processor catching on a piece of data it was not prepared for. Her hands are shaking.
"Graze," I tell her. "It went through the muscle, not into it."
"I can see what it did." Her voice is level but her fingers are not.
She searches beneath the seat with practiced hands, finds a med kit, and opens it across my chest. She presses the gauze hard against the wound, and the pressure sends a flare across my vision.
She holds it there with one hand while the other tears open an antiseptic packet with her teeth.
"Hold still."
"I'm holding still."
"You're not. Your shoulder keeps tensing."
"That's because you're pressing on a bullet wound, Vix."
She doesn't smile, but the skin at the corner of her eye tightens in a way that I have spent years learning to read. Her fingers trace the edge of the wound while she applies the antiseptic, and the touch is careful and more intimate than anything she has permitted between us since London.
"You're going to need stitches," she says.
"I've had worse."
"That is not the reassurance you think it is.
" She secures the bandage with medical tape and sits back, her hands still trembling.
She notices me watching and tucks them into her lap.
The gesture is defensive, hiding evidence of vulnerability the way she would hide classified documents, and I want to take her hands and hold them still and tell her that the tremor is not a weakness.
It is the most honest thing she has shown me since I came back from the dead.
Instead I sit up, test the shoulder, and determine that the range of motion is limited but functional.
The safe house we are using as a temporary base is a clean, furnished, anonymous flat in the Neubau district, sourced through my network of European contacts who ask no questions and accept cash.
The courtyard below the windows is quiet when we arrive, the only sound a tram passing on a distant street, and the stillness of the flat after the velocity of the last hour lands over us like a change in pressure.
Vix locks the door behind us and clears each room before she lets herself breathe, and I sit in the kitchen and let the adrenaline metabolize while she finishes her sweep.
She comes back for the shoulder. The med kit goes onto the kitchen table, and she pulls a chair around sits me down and peels the bandage away from the wound with steady hands.
The steadiness is a choice, a discipline she has imposed on her own nervous system, and I can see the effort in the set of her jaw.
"It should hold with a few stitches," she says. "The edges are clean and it’s not too deep."
She works in silence, her fingers moving across my skin with the impersonal hands of a medic.
I watch her from close range and take in the details that the darkness and the urgency didn't allow: the tension gathered in her wrists, her lower lip caught between her teeth when she positions a closure strip, the scar on her collarbone that I first saw on the train, the one that tells a story I still don't have the right to ask about.
She smells like cold air and antiseptic and the fading trace of whatever soap she used at the Vienna hotel this morning.
"Vix." My voice comes out lower than I intend.
She looks up, and the distance between us narrows to the width of a breath.
Her fingers are still on my shoulder, the closure strip half-applied, and her eyes hold a quality I can only describe as a decision waiting to commit.
I can see the argument happening behind her gaze, the cost-benefit analysis running at the speed of someone who evaluates risk for a living.
"If this happens," she says, and her voice is steady and certain and stripped of every pretense she's been maintaining since London, "it doesn't change anything. It doesn't fix what you did. It doesn't mean I forgive you."
"I know."
Her eyes hold mine, and the fingers on my shoulder press harder, and the pressure is no longer medical.
"This changes nothing," she says again.
Her mouth hits mine with the force of controlled impulse finally overrunning her defenses.
The kiss is not gentle and not tentative.
This is two people who mapped each other's bodies in Moscow hotel rooms and spent years starving for the landscape they memorized, and the kiss carries the full accumulated weight of every night I spent in borrowed beds wanting exactly this.
I haul her off the chair and onto me. She comes without hesitation, her knees bracketing my hips, her hands framing my face with a hold that turns her knuckles white.
The split in her knuckles from hitting me in London has healed to pink scars, and I can feel the ridges of them against hands as she places her hands against my jaw.
She kisses me with her whole body involved, hips grinding down against the hard length of me through layers of fabric that are becoming a structural problem, fingers raking through my hair, and the sound she makes against my mouth is raw and involuntary and goes through my nervous system like a detonation charge.
"Bedroom," she says against my mouth, and the word is an instruction, not a request.
I stand with her legs locked around my waist, and the shoulder screams, and I sort the pain under acceptable losses because this woman has her thighs clamped around me and her tongue in my mouth and the combined effect outranks a bullet graze by several orders of magnitude.
I carry her the few steps to the bedroom, through the doorway, and put her down on the edge of the bed, and she doesn't pull me down.
She plants a hand on my chest and holds me at arm's length, eyes running over me with an assessment that has nothing to do with affection.
She pushes my shirt off my good shoulder and gets it tangled on the bandaged one, and I pull it over my head and let the wound announce itself in the cold air.
Her gaze drops to the bandage, then lower, tracking the scars and the muscle I've accumulated since Moscow with the clinical attention of an operative evaluating a changed asset.
Whatever she's concluding, she keeps it to herself.
She peels off her jacket, then her shirt, and my hands go still at my sides.
The body underneath is Vix and not Vix. I see the same shoulders, the same narrow waist, the breasts I mapped in Moscow with my hands and mouth until I could have drawn them from memory in a dark room.
But the years wrote themselves across her skin.
A raised line runs along her ribs that I don't recognize.
Her arms carry lean muscle definition that speaks to training MI6 never gave her.
A small scar sits beneath her left breast that I want to trace with my tongue and ask about later.
She is harder, leaner, marked by time I wasn't there for, and the observation lands in my chest like a round hitting a plate carrier, all blunt force and no penetration and nothing but impact.
She watches me look at her. The vulnerability of it lasts an instant before she converts it to aggression.
Her hands find my belt, and her fingers are efficient and unforgiving, working the buckle and the button and the zip with the same brisk competence she applied to the junction box panel.
When her hand wraps around me through the fabric of my shorts, her hold is firm and just shy of rough, and I exhale hard through my teeth and clench the edge of the mattress because the alternative is seizing her wrist and showing her exactly how I want her to move.
"You're real," she says, and the words are low and fierce and directed at my sternum as if she is addressing my heartbeat rather than my face. "You're actually real."
"I'm real." I cover her hand with mine and press her palm harder against me. "I'm here."
She shoves me onto my back. She strips off her trousers and the dark underwear beneath them in one motion, efficient as clearing a weapon, and I lift my hips and do the same.
When she drops onto me again, the contact is skin on skin, the slick heat of her pressed along the full length of my cock, and the groan that comes out of me is low and rough and tastes like the end of restraint.
She rolls her hips once, dragging herself along me, coating me in the wet evidence of what the closet and the adrenaline and every suppressed impulse since London have done to her, and the sensation peels back a layer of control I can't afford to lose this early.
She leans down and puts her mouth against the bandage on my shoulder, her lips tracing the edge of the gauze where my skin begins.
The tenderness of it is a blade I don't see coming, and it cuts deeper than the bullet did.
Then her teeth find my earlobe and bite hard enough to sting, and the tenderness is over.