Chapter 16 #2
"I was there when I could be. Every time the Committee got within arm's reach and I could track it, I was somewhere close with a line of sight and a decision I was prepared to make.
" I hold her gaze across the display. "That's what I left behind, Vix.
The ability to protect you openly. I gave that up when I chose to disappear, and every day since has been the price of doing it from the shadows instead. "
The briefing room is silent. The display glows between us with Prague street maps and Committee dossiers and the framework of an operation neither of us is thinking about.
Vix stands. She closes the distance before I've processed the movement, and her hands grip the front of my shirt with a force that has nothing to do with affection.
Her mouth finds mine because walking out of this room with ten years still rotting between us would be worse than whatever this becomes.
I don't hesitate. My hands find her waist, her hips, the curve of her lower back, and I pull her against me hard enough that the display behind me rattles against the wall.
She bites my lower lip and the copper taste of blood registers a full second before the sting does, and the combination sends heat straight through my chest and lower, pooling heavy at the base of my spine.
My hand slides to the back of her neck and holds her there with a grip that makes no pretense of gentleness. Vix would see through the lie if I tried.
She pushes me against the wall and I let her, let her have the control for exactly as long as it takes me to register what happens when my thigh presses between hers.
The sound catches in the back of her throat, and her hips grind forward against my leg with a pressure that is deliberate and unapologetic.
The warmth of her registers through the fabric, and ten years of disciplined absence collapses into the single, undeniable fact that my body knows hers and has never stopped wanting it.
I reverse us. Her back hits the wall, her wrists pinned above her head in one hand, and the look she gives me is furious and wanting and completely unconcerned with pretending otherwise.
I hold her there, wrists locked, my grip tight enough that she'll feel the pressure for hours, and she tests it once, a sharp twist that is assessment, not escape.
Satisfied that I'll hold, she stops fighting and starts watching me with the focused intensity of a woman deciding exactly how much of herself she's willing to give.
"This doesn't fix anything," she says, breathless, and her body presses against me in direct contradiction.
"Didn't say it would."
I release her wrists and she doesn't move them, keeps her arms raised while I drag my mouth down the line of her throat.
I find the pulse point beneath her jaw and press my tongue flat against it, tasting salt and the faint trace of whatever she uses on her skin, clean and sharp, the scent I used to find on hotel pillows in cities I can't think about without wanting her.
Her breath hitches. I close my teeth over the tendon at the side of her neck and the vibration of her groan resonates against my lips.
My hands drop to her waist. I pull her shirt from her trousers and slide my palms up bare skin, feeling the contraction of muscle beneath my fingers, the ridge of a scar along her ribs that wasn't there before.
She sucks in a breath when my thumb traces it, and I file that reaction alongside every other piece of intelligence I'm collecting about what the years have changed and what they haven't.
Her fingers drop to my belt and work the buckle with the same precision she brings to fieldwork, and I feel the leather pull free. She unbuttons me, pushes the fabric down my hips, and when her hand wraps around the length of me I lose the thread of whatever advantage I thought I had.
Her grip is firm, sure, and she strokes once from base to tip with a slow, deliberate pressure that buckles something behind my ribs.
I press my forehead against the wall beside her head and breathe through the sensation, because the alternative is finishing this before it's started, and I refuse to give her that victory.
"Look at me," she says.
I do. Her eyes are dark, the color almost swallowed by pupil, and she knows exactly what she's doing to me. She's deciding whether mercy is something I've earned.
It isn't. She strokes again, tighter this time, and I catch her wrist.
We don't make it to the floor by choice.
Vix hooks her leg behind my knee and shifts her weight, and the result is both of us on the ground with papers scattering and neither of us caring.
Her back hits the floor and I'm over her, pulling at her trousers while she shoves at mine, and the graceless urgency of it is more honest than anything either of us has said in this room.
I get her trousers down her thighs and she kicks them the rest of the way off one leg, leaving them tangled around the other ankle because neither of us is willing to waste the seconds it would take to finish the job.
She shoves me backwards and straddles me, one hand braced on my chest, and sinks down before I'm ready.
The wet heat of her is a shock that travels the full length of my spine, and the groan that tears out of me is low and rough and sounds nothing like control.
Vix rolls her hips in a slow grind that takes me deep and holds me there, and the way her lips part and her breath catches tells me she feels it the same way I do.
She sets a pace that is punishing, deliberate, her thighs flexing against my hips, her nails digging crescents into my chest through the cotton of my shirt.
I grip her hips and watch her move above me, her hair falling forward around her face, her shirt open and the skin beneath flushed and damp, and the sight of her is something I will carry long after this floor has cooled.
She rides me until I can't let her, until restraint becomes something my body simply refuses. I grip her jaw, sit up into her, and the angle change drags a sharp exhale from her that resonates off the walls.
I roll us and pin her beneath me with my weight and my hands and a thrust that buries me deep enough to feel the resistance of her body yielding.
Her response is all challenge. Her nails rake down my back hard enough to score through the fabric of my shirt and her teeth find the muscle at the cap of my shoulder and the pain mixes with the slick, tight heat of her until every sensation collapses into a single frequency I haven't felt since Vienna.
I drive into her with a rhythm built from absence and carrying every year of it, slow on the withdrawal and hard on the return, and Vix wraps her legs around my hips and takes every stroke with a ferocity that matches mine.
Her shoulders will carry the marks of this floor the same way my back will carry the marks of her nails, and neither of us slows down.
"Harder." The word leaves her mouth on a breath that breaks in the middle, and I comply because there is no version of this where I deny her anything she asks for with that voice.
I brace one hand beside her head and drive deeper, and her back arches off the floor and her hand grips the front of my shirt so hard the fabric strains at the seams. The angle shifts with her arch and I feel her tighten around me, a rhythmic clench that tells me she's close.
My hand slides between us. My thumb finds her clit and presses with a firm, circling pressure that makes her gasp and clamp down around me hard enough that my vision blurs at the edges.
I keep the pressure steady, keep the pace relentless, and watch her face as the tension builds across her body.
Her jaw tightens. Her breathing fractures into short, ragged pulls, and her hips cant up to meet every thrust with a desperation that strips away every layer of control she maintains in every other room of this compound.
Vix comes with her teeth buried in my shoulder and her body locking around mine with a force that drags me to the edge and holds me there. The orgasm rolls through her in waves I feel from the inside, and the rhythmic pulse of her around me shatters whatever remained of my restraint.
I bury myself as deep as her body allows, and the release whites out the briefing room, the display, the maps. Nothing survives it except the heat of her and the grip of her hand on my jaw and the raw, gutted sound I press against her throat.
We lie on the briefing room floor with our breathing ragged and scattered papers around us.
The display still glows with Prague maps.
The coffee on the table has gone cold. I can feel her pulse where my mouth rests against her neck, fast and hard, and the skin there is damp with sweat and faintly bruised where my teeth must have landed.
"Still changes nothing," Vix says. Her voice is steady. Her fingers are still wrapped around my jaw.
I press my mouth against the curve where her neck meets her shoulder and taste the salt on her skin. "Liar."
She doesn't argue, and she doesn't agree.
She releases me and pushes herself up, pulls her trousers from where they're tangled around one ankle and dresses with an efficiency she brings to harder things than this.
She buttons her shirt from bottom to top without looking at me, runs her fingers through her hair once, and walks toward the door without looking back.
I stay on the floor longer than necessary.
The LED lights hum overhead with the flat tone they always carry inside this mountain.
I can still feel her on my skin, the weight and heat and friction of her body against mine, and the absence of it is a loss I register in terms that have nothing to do with sentimentality.
My body spent years forgetting what it felt like to be hers, and now it remembers, and the remembering is worse than the forgetting ever was.
I stand and straighten my own clothes, then begin collecting the papers that scattered when we stopped pretending the briefing was about Prague.
I sort mission timelines and approach routes and Committee personnel files and Baumann's intelligence summary into the precise stack Vix maintains, the organizational habit that makes her intelligence work look effortless to people who don't understand what it costs.
The last page stops me.
The Prague operational timeline fills the final page, annotated in her handwriting, approach windows marked in blue ink and contingency protocols noted in the margins.
The detail is meticulous, every variable accounted for, every risk assessed with the thoroughness I've come to expect from the woman who ran the most effective independent intelligence network in Europe.
At the bottom of the page, beneath the final contingency notation and written in the same precise blue ink, is a single line:
Don't die in Prague. I'm not done being angry at you.
I fold the note and put it in my pocket. It sits against my chest like a second heartbeat, and it is the closest thing to a love letter I've received in ten years.