Chapter Eight
Victor woke to his whole body on fire, and his arousal spiking so high, he knew it was going to be over fast.
“Fuck! Oh, shit!” And just that quickly, he came, and in true Tane fashion, he kept his mouth on him the entire time, taking every drop he had to give, and not stopping until Victor collapsed, sated and spent against the mattress.
He flung his arm across his eyes as he fought to drag in enough oxygen to stave off brain death.
He felt the mattress move and the slide of his lover’s hands against his skin as Tane moved up the mattress to lie beside him.
When he felt like his heart had calmed below detonation speed, he lowered his arm and looked across at the man who had just rocked his world.
He realized by the fact that there was a low light in the van, that dawn was breaking beyond their window coverings.
“Morning, ku’u aloha.” Victor’s eyes narrowed at the distinct male smug tone his lover used.
“You think you’re so clever.” Victor drawled as he rolled toward Tane, a plan beginning to form.
“Damn right I do!” Tane said with a grin, putting his hands behind his head and lying back like he was some kind of Polynesian royalty.
“I not only got you hard, and took you up so damn fast, you had no idea what was going on, but I took you over the edge the moment you woke up. My plan worked perfectly.”
Victor moved swiftly, throwing his left leg over Tane’s thighs to straddle him, and reached for the tube of lubricant they had left on the bedside table. “Speaking of plans...” Victor opened the tube and squeezed some of the cold gel into his hand. “I have one of my own.”
“You do?” Tane said, his hands moving to Victor’s hips. “And what might that—shit!”
The last word erupted as Victor took a firm grip of Tane’s impressively hard cock with his left hand and stroked him exactly as he knew Tane loved. Hard, from root to tip with a swirl at the end, and then straight down again. He didn’t stop his hand from moving as he spoke.
“I do.” Victor used his right hand to roll Tane’s balls in his palm, doubling the pleasure. “I’m going to take you for a little ride and see how long you’ll last when you are balls deep inside me.”
Tane groaned and arched his back off the bed. “I think I love your plan better.”
“Only think?” Victor knelt up and shuffled forward to get into position. “I am sure within the next ten minutes or so, I can turn that into a sure thing.”
He placed the head of Tane’s cock against his back entrance, using the liberal amount of lubricant he had placed there for just this moment, and pressed out and down against him.
The moment Tane slipped inside him, he circled his hips, using the moment, lubricant, and his own body weight to slowly take every inch Tane had to give him.
As soon as he had him, he stilled, getting used to the stretch and the burn that came with this most intimate of acts.
“Dang, ku’u aloha, you are so fucking tight,” Tane moaned, lifting his hips slightly, and Victor felt him swell within him. “This is going to go fast.”
“Oh, kāne, I beg to differ,” Victor drawled as he started a slow pump and grind on Tane’s cock, taking his time as he lifted up onto his knees, then dropping back to take him deep once more. “I think I can make this go very fucking slow indeed.”
Tane huffed a groaned laugh. “I never knew you were such a bastard.”
Victor laughed as he continued to drive them both a little crazy. But there was only so much a man could take, and soon Tane had his hips in hand, lifted him off him with a surprisingly hot show of strength, planted his feet against the mattress then began to fuck him in earnest.
Victor cried out as the angle hit him in the sweetest damn spot imaginable, and all he could do was reach down to grasp Tane’s wrists in each hand and hold on.
When Tane came inside him, Victor once again came a second time.
Not as strong or intense as the first time, but definitely with the same amount of joy and emotion.
Once again, as soon as he was able to, Tane took care of him, something that Victor would never take for granted, but appreciated more than he had the words to convey.
Then they were wrapped in each other’s arms as the cabin of the van lightened beyond dawn and deepened into day. And what a start to the day it was.
Not the residual heat of exertion or the sharp edge of adrenaline that usually followed a night like the last one—but something slower, heavier. A weight that didn’t press, didn’t restrain. It simply was.
Victor traced the line of tattoos across Tane’s shoulder with his fingertips, feeling the solid reassurance of muscle beneath skin. The moment didn’t demand anything of him except presence.
Later, much later, they dressed in silence that wasn’t strained. Coffee steamed on the counter and the world resumed its shape.
By mid-morning, the command center hummed with controlled activity. Screens glowed with replays from the night before—compressed timelines, heat maps, interference zones annotated with precision.
Victor stood beside Tane as Kael walked them through it, the low hum of the command center wrapping around them like a held breath.
Screens flickered with layered data—thermal replays, drone paths collapsing and reforming, timestamps scrolling in tight, unforgiving columns.
The room smelled faintly of coffee and ozone, the after scent of systems pushed hard and fast the night before.
Kael paced slowly as he spoke, one hand braced on the table, the other gesturing toward a freeze-frame of the ridge line. “We know that they were never planning to fire,” he said. “That this was just a bullshit test of what Black Tide can do and then a disciplined withdrawal.”
He tapped the screen, bringing up a split view—Black Tide’s movement vectors on one side, Directorate signatures ghosted in red on the other. “They wanted to see who broke first.”
Victor followed the data without effort, his mind slotting it into place. The pauses. The pressure. The way the net had tightened and then eased. “They were looking for fracture points,” he said.
Tane nodded once. “They didn’t find one.”
Kael’s expression hardened, satisfaction edged with something colder. “And they never fucking will, because that means next time won’t be subtle.”
Before anyone could expand on that, a secure channel chimed—sharp, intrusive, cutting cleanly through the room.
“Surge,” a familiar voice came through the line. “This is Dev. Bateman’s with me.”
Victor felt the shift before the sentence was finished, a subtle tightening behind his ribs as the room’s attention snapped outward. The screen flickered to live and the two men appeared, faces fierce.
“We shut down the gun trafficking node east of us like we talked about,” Bateman said. “Thanks to Victor’s intel, it was a fairly clean op. No blowback to speak of. But ... something turned up.”
A file pushed through the system, resolving slowly on the main screen as if the software itself hesitated.
Victor’s blood went cold.
The image sharpened—a man in his late forties, eyes open and unseeing, body positioned with deliberate care. No sign of struggle. No defensive wounds. Not dumped—placed. A message, not a kill.
Victor knew that face.
Knew the scar at the jawline, thin and pale. The habitual tilt of the mouth, as if caught between amusement and contempt. Time folded in on itself with brutal efficiency.
Dev’s voice came next, stripped of humor. “Name’s Marcus Kade. He was a former intelligence liaison with the military. We found him this morning on Bravo land. No prints left behind. No weapon. No reason for him to be there—except I think he’s a message for you, Victor.”
The room went very still.
Victor exhaled slowly, keeping his voice even. “He is. Kade was my handler when I first started with the Directorate.”
No one spoke.
Tane turned toward him, eyes sharp but steady, searching Victor’s face rather than the screen. “Had you spoken to him recently?”
Victor shook his head once. “Not at all. He was only my handler while I was on probation. Once I completed a few missions, and the powers that be trusted me to do what was needed, I hardly spoke to him.”
Understanding settled over the room like a weight.
“There’s more,” Bateman said, a thread of disgust to his tone. “His shirt was open, and there is a message for you.”
The screen changed, to an image that turned his stomach. There was indeed a reminder carved into the poor man’s flesh and delivered with precision, placed exactly where Victor would eventually see it.
You were never free.
Kael swore under his breath, anger tight and controlled. “They don’t do subtle, do they?”
“No, they don’t,” Victor agreed. “And they’ll be wanting to revoke my freedom as soon as possible.”
He felt Tane’s hand settle at his back—steady, familiar, unremarkable in the best possible way. Not grounding him. Standing with him.
Victor straightened, gaze fixed on the screen as it went dark.
Whatever the Directorate thought they were reclaiming, they’d miscalculated one thing. Victor wasn’t alone anymore.
****
A low, deliberate tone rolled through the compound, subtle enough that anyone without clearance wouldn’t have noticed it at all. Tane felt it in his bones before the display lit—years of living inside layered security taught him the difference between noise and intent.
He was already moving when the lights along the command center walls shifted from neutral to amber.
“Report,” Kael said, calm as ever, even as his gaze swept the room, taking in posture, hands, the way everyone had already shifted closer to stations without being told.
Luca’s voice came in from the tech pit, fingers flying across glass. “External breach attempt. Multi-vector. Clean code, good hardware. Whoever this is, they know what they’re doing.”
Tane felt his jaw set. The boards lighting up in staggered patterns told the same story—probing fingers, not fists.
“But?” he prompted.