Chapter 11 #2
“To convince me this isn’t a mistake.” Her eyes held mine. “Starting now.”
I didn’t waste a single second.
I crossed to her in two strides and cupped her face in both hands — not grabbing, not urgent, just holding, the way I’d been wanting to since she’d walked through my elevator looking like someone who’d fought her way through an entire city to get here.
“It’s not a mistake,” I said against her mouth. “It was never a mistake.”
Then I kissed her.
Not the desperate collision of the car, not the slow deliberate burn of the balcony. Something that fell between them — deep and certain, the kiss of a man who had just handed someone his worst secret and watched her hold it carefully.
She made a sound against my mouth that undid the last of whatever had been holding me together all evening.
Her hands fisted in my shirt, pulling me closer, and I felt the moment she stopped calculating and just — chose.
The same way she’d chosen on the L, I understood. She’d come here already decided.
I pulled back just enough to look at her — flushed, eyes dark, the exhaustion still there but underneath it something bright and alive.
“I’ve wanted—” I stopped. Started again.
“Since the moment you walked into my office with your notebook and your impossible stubbornness and told me it was bullshit—” I pressed my lips to her jaw, her throat, feeling her pulse jump beneath them.
“I’ve been trying to hold myself together ever since. ”
“You could have fooled me,” she breathed.
“I’m very good at fooling people.” I found the soft skin below her ear, felt her grip tighten on my shirt. “You’re the first person in twenty years I didn’t want to fool.”
“Sebastian—”
“I know.” I lifted her against me, felt her legs wrap around my waist, felt the warm weight of her — and started moving. Not toward the elevator. Past it. Down the hallway toward the only room in this penthouse that wasn’t designed to impress anyone.
“Where are we going?” she said against my throat.
“Somewhere that’s actually mine.” I pushed the bedroom door open with my shoulder. “Not the office. Not the elevator. Somewhere real.”
I set her down at the edge of the bed, and the city light came through the floor-to-ceiling glass behind her, catching the dark waves of her hair, the flush along her cheekbones, the way she looked up at me with those hazel eyes that had been seeing through me since a service corridor at a charity gala that felt like another lifetime.
“Hi,” she said softly. Like we were starting something.
“Hi,” I said back. Like I understood that we were.
I reached for her jacket first, sliding it from her shoulders slowly, pressing my lips to the curve of her neck as the leather fell away.
She tilted her head back, giving me access, her hands finding the buttons of my shirt with the focused efficiency I’d come to recognize as specifically hers — thorough even now, even here.
“Still calculating?” I murmured against her skin.
“Constantly.” Her palms spread flat against my chest as the shirt fell open, warm against my skin. “My numbers keep changing.”
“I know what mine say,” I said.
She reached up and pulled me back down to her mouth instead of answering, and I understood that was its own kind of answer.
I laid her back against the bed and took my time — more time than the urgency clawing at my chest wanted, more time than the six hours of silence and the threatening photograph and the month of careful restraint had left me feeling patient for.
But I wanted to do this right. I wanted this to be different from every other time we’d reached for each other in confined spaces with the world pressing in from outside.
I unzipped her dress slowly, pressing my lips to every inch of skin it revealed — the curve of her spine, the small of her back, the soft warmth of her shoulder blades. She shivered beneath my mouth and made a low sound that went straight through me.
When I turned her over she was flushed and bright-eyed and looking up at me with an expression I’d only seen in fragments before — unguarded, unmanaged, entirely present.
I stayed there for a moment, just looking. She let me.
“What?” she said softly.
“Nothing.” I traced a fingertip from her collarbone to her sternum, watching her breath catch. “Everything.”
I reached behind her and unclasped her bra, let it fall, and instead of moving immediately I simply looked at her — the warm curve of her, the flush spreading down her chest — until she made a small impatient sound that broke into a laugh.
“Sebastian.”
“I told you. I’m taking my time.”
I kept my hands moving over the curves of her — her waist, her hips, the soft skin of her inner thighs as I worked her underwear down and away.
She was already wet when I found her, slick and warm against my fingers, and the sound she made when I stroked through her folds was the most honest thing I’d heard all night.
“I’ve been thinking about this,” I said against her stomach, moving lower, “since you walked through that elevator.”
“You’ve been — oh god—” The sentence dissolved as my mouth found her, and I felt her hips buck upward, her fingers threading into my hair.
I took my time here too. Learned her with the same focused attention she brought to everything she cared about, reading her responses, finding what made her gasp and returning to it with the precision of a man who had decided this mattered.
Her thighs trembled against my shoulders.
Her breathing came in ragged pulls. When she finally came apart it was with my name torn from her throat, her whole body shaking, her grip in my hair tight enough to hurt in a way I didn’t remotely mind.
I worked her through every wave until she was pulling weakly at my shoulders, oversensitive and undone.
“Come here,” she managed.
I moved up her body, and she reached for my belt with hands that weren’t entirely steady — I noticed, and the sight of her like this, undone and reaching for me anyway, did something to my chest I had no clean language for.
When she freed me and wrapped her hand around me I groaned against her neck, my hips pushing forward involuntarily.
“Now,” she said. Not a request.
“Look at me,” I said.
Her eyes came to mine. Dark and certain and entirely present, the way she always was when she’d made a decision she believed in.
I pressed into her slowly — unhurried, deliberate, feeling every inch of her adjust and accept, her hands gripping my back hard enough to anchor us both.
She exhaled my name against my shoulder — not a question, not a direction, just the specific sound of someone arriving somewhere they’d been trying to get to for a long time.
I moved with more care than I felt — slow, deep strokes that had her head falling back against the pillow, her nails dragging down my spine.
I could feel all of it — the warmth of her surrounding me, the way she moved to meet me, the specific give of her body learning mine like something it had been waiting to know.
“Emilia.” Her name came out rough, stripped of everything I’d been trying to hold back. She pulled my mouth back to hers before I could find the rest of it.
The pace built gradually, both of us chasing something deeper than urgency — something that had been building for a month of late nights and sharp arguments and careful restraint finally given room to be what it actually was.
I felt her clench around me, heard the broken sound she made against my mouth, felt her come apart the second time with my name on her lips and her whole body arching into mine.
I followed her over the edge with my face buried in her neck, her name said against her skin like the prayer it had been since a service corridor at a charity gala, when I’d looked at a woman with ink on her thumb and decided she was going to be a problem.
I’d been right.
She was the best problem I’d ever had.
We lay tangled together afterward in the city light, her head on my chest, my hand moving slowly through her hair. Neither of us spoke for a long time, and the silence was the comfortable kind — the kind that didn’t need filling.
“Your board is going to want answers in the morning,” she said eventually.
“I know.”
“And Hartley is still out there.”
“I know that too.”
“And the article publishes in—” she checked the time on her phone, “—nine hours.”
“I’m aware.” My hand stilled in her hair. “Are you going to keep listing problems, or are you going to let me have twenty minutes where none of that exists yet?”
She was quiet for a moment. Then: “Ten minutes.”
“Fifteen.”
“Twelve.”
“Done.”
She laughed — soft and genuine, pressed against my chest — and I felt it move through me like something I’d been waiting a long time to feel.
My phone buzzed on the nightstand. I ignored it.
It buzzed again.
Something in the pattern made me reach for it.
Daniel’s message contained a photo and three words that turned my blood to ice.
Threat confirmed. Old rival.
The photo showed Emilia leaving her apartment that morning — time-stamped, annotated, a red circle drawn around her face with the particular precision of someone making a point rather than a mistake.
The message below was four words:
She’s next. Move fast.
I looked at Emilia, still warm against my chest, her breathing evening out toward something close to sleep for the first time in what I suspected was days.
I looked at the photograph on my phone.
I looked at the city beyond the glass — the empire I’d built from nothing, the skyline I’d been chasing since I was seventeen years old and helpless in a kitchen that smelled like alcohol and broken things.
I hadn’t been strong enough then.
I put the phone face-down on the nightstand, pulled her closer, and started making calls in my head.
Whatever game had been running in the shadows of this investigation had just declared itself openly.
That was a mistake.
I was very good at dealing with mistakes.