11. Chapter 11
Isla
Iam kissing Matthew Beckett in the back of a moving car and I am doing it like I mean it, because I do, and that is the most terrifying thing that has happened to me all week, including the stalker.
My fingers find his belt buckle, the metal cool against my skin. I work it open with deliberate slowness, watching his face as I do. His jaw tightens. His hands, still resting on my hips, grip harder for a moment — then release. Giving me control. Or testing himself. Maybe both.
His button next, then the zipper, the sound impossibly loud in the confined space. The partition is up, the driver nothing but a silhouette behind the wheel, but the knowledge of his presence adds a sharp edge to everything — a danger that makes my pulse quicken.
I shift off his lap, settling onto the seat beside him, and he watches me move with those hazel eyes gone dark. His hand comes up to my jaw, thumb tracing the line of it, and I lean into the touch for just a second before ducking away. Not yet. This is mine.
I pull him free from the fabric — hard, thick, the skin hot against my palm.
He exhales sharply through his nose when I wrap my fingers around him, and that small break in his composure sends a thrill through me.
Eleven days of watching him hold everything together.
Eleven days of that controlled, measured voice and those careful, professional hands.
And now he's here, in my grip, his breath coming uneven.
I lean down. Brush my lips against the head, just a whisper of contact, and feel his thigh tense beneath my other hand.
The leather seat creaks as his fingers curl into it.
I take my time — licking a slow stripe up the underside, tasting salt and skin, feeling him pulse against my tongue.
His hand moves to the back of my head, not pushing, just resting there, fingers threading through my hair.
"Look at me," he says, voice rough.
I do. I tilt my chin up and meet his gaze as I take him into my mouth, and the sound he makes — low, gutted, barely contained — vibrates through the air between us.
His hips shift, fighting the instinct to thrust, and I press my palm flat against his stomach to hold him back.
The muscle beneath my hand is rigid, coiled tight.
I set a rhythm. Slow at first, deliberate, letting him feel every inch of the wet heat, the drag of my tongue along the underside.
The city slides past the tinted windows — yellow cabs, delivery trucks, clusters of people on sidewalks, all of them oblivious to what's happening in this leather-bound sanctuary.
The thought makes me hollow my cheeks and take him deeper.
His hand tightens in my hair. "Isla."
My name in his mouth sounds like a warning and a prayer.
I hum around him in response, and his hips jerk — just once, a crack in that iron control.
I pull back, tongue swirling over the head, then sink down again, faster this time.
My hand works what I can't reach, twisting in time with my mouth, and his breathing turns ragged.
Shallow. The kind of breathing that says he's close.
I don't slow down. If anything, I push harder, taking him until I feel him hit the back of my throat, swallowing against the stretch. His fingers tremble against my scalp. His head tips back against the seat, the tendons in his neck taut — fighting it, fighting me, fighting the surrender.
Good. I want him to lose.
"Isla —" His voice cracks. His hand slides from my hair to my shoulder, gripping hard enough to bruise, and I feel him thicken on my tongue. One more stroke, one more swirl, and he breaks.
He comes with a groan he can't swallow down, his hips lifting off the seat, his hand fisting in the fabric of my dress. I take it — all of it — swallowing around him, not pulling away until the last pulse fades and his body goes slack beneath me.
I lift my head. Wipe my mouth with the back of my hand.
My lips feel swollen, used, and when I glance up at him, his eyes are still closed, his chest rising and falling with deep breaths.
The car rolls to a stop at a red light, and in the glow of the streetlamp, I can see the sheen of sweat at his temple, the way his shirt clings to his shoulders.
Then his eyes open. And something in them makes my stomach clench — not desire, not this time. Something guarded. Something careful.
He tucks himself away with efficient movements. He fixes his pants, straightens his shirt, adjusts his collar, and when he looks at me again, that wall is back up. Brick by brick, I can almost hear it building.
By the time the driver pulls up to my building something has shifted.
I notice it in the stillness of his profile, the way his gaze has moved back to the street, the small reorganization of his posture that I have spent eleven days learning to read.
He is putting distance between us and the last thirty minutes without moving an inch, which is a thing I both understand and resent in equal measure because I do it too and I know exactly what it costs.
He walks me to my door. He does a sweep of the apartment — kitchen, office, bedroom, the window locks, the service entrance code — without meeting my eyes, which is not unusual except that tonight the not-meeting has a different quality to it, more deliberate, like eye contact is a thing he has temporarily withdrawn.
He checks things that do not need checking.
He is giving himself something to do with his hands and his attention, and I recognize this too, and I let him do it.
He tells me Drake will be on the building overnight. He stands in my kitchen doorway and looks at the middle distance.
"Beckett," I say.
He looks at me then, finally.
"I know," I say. Not pushing. Just — naming it. Letting him know I see what he is doing and I am not going to make him explain it tonight.
Something moves behind his expression. Not the small tell she'd come to recognize. Something fuller than that, something he catches before it arrives and tucks back away. "Get some sleep," he says.
"You too," I say, which we both know is not going to happen.
He leaves. I stand in my kitchen and listen to the elevator and then I open the cabinet where I keep the good crackers and I eat several of them standing at the counter, which is how I process most things.
Lina is on my couch.
She has her own key and she has used it before and she has left her shoes by the door which means she has been here long enough to get comfortable, and she is looking at me with the expression she saves for situations that have exceeded her preparedness, which is not many.
"The tabloid shots from the gala are everywhere," she says, instead of hello.
I put down the cracker box. "What shots."
She turns her phone around. The photograph is from early in the evening — Beckett's hand on the small of my back, the two of us looking at each other during the board member circuit, something in both our expressions that does not look like a staged engagement.
The caption underneath is something about heat and body language and the word finally in italics.
I look at it for a moment. "That's not the most interesting thing that happened tonight," I say.
She puts the phone down. "Tell me."
I tell her. All of it — Voss in the east corridor, the catering uniform that wasn't on the roster, the NYPD handoff, the two things he said before the lawyer arrived.
The two theories about Conrad that Beckett has been sitting with since midnight and that I have been sitting with since the couch and the guest list and Cole's text and the moment I decided not to say it out loud yet.
I tell her about the eleven months of gap and the personal account payment and the way Beckett said handled like it meant something I haven't fully named.
She listens the way Lina always listens — completely, without interrupting, without offering the reassurance before she has heard the whole thing.
It is one of the reasons she is my closest person and one of the reasons I called her when I was sixteen and my mother first went to the first spa that was not a spa and I needed someone who would not flinch.
She does not flinch now either. She finishes her tea and sets it down and looks at me with the expression she reserves for situations that require her to say something true rather than something easy.
"The kiss," she says, when I have finished. "Was it real?"
I look at the cracker box. "Yes."
She puts her tea down.
"I know," I say, before she can say whatever she is about to say.
"I wasn't going to say anything."
"You were absolutely going to say something."
"I was going to say —" She stops. Reconsiders. "Are you okay?"
"I don't know yet." I sit down next to her on the couch. "I think I need to know who's at the top of this before I figure out what to do about the rest of it."
She is quiet for a moment. Then she asks the question I have been turning over since Beckett said but he's not the top of it in the east corridor.
"Do you think it's someone who hired Voss to get to your father," she says, "or your father who hired Voss to manage you?"
I look at the wall.
"I hate that I don't know," I say.
"I know," she says.
We sit with that for a while. Outside, the city does its two a.m. thing, indifferent and continuous, and I eat more crackers, and Lina drinks her tea, and we do not talk about the kiss again because she knows me well enough to know I have already said everything I am going to say about it tonight.
My building's front desk calls at midnight.
A delivery arrived addressed to me. No sender listed. Dropped off by a courier they cannot identify on the lobby footage because, as the desk attendant explains with the apologetic tone of a man who knows this is not the right answer, the camera was briefly obstructed.
Briefly obstructed. I write that down in my head.
Lina is still here. We look at each other and she puts on her coat to go down with me, and I tell her she doesn't have to, and she puts on her coat anyway, and that is the end of that conversation.
The box is small and white and sealed with tape that has been applied neatly and precisely — not hurried, not casual, the tape of someone who was not worried about being caught.
The desk attendant wants to open it for me.
I tell him I'll handle it and I mean it in every sense of the word.
I take it upstairs, put on gloves from the kit Beckett left in my kitchen after the first sweep — which I noted at the time and am now grateful for — and open it at my kitchen table while Lina stands in the doorway with her arms crossed and the expression of a woman who is frightened and refusing to show it, which I recognize because I am doing the same thing.
Inside is a single photograph, printed on heavy paper.
The gala, tonight, taken from inside the room.
Beckett and me in the corridor near the coat check — not the east corridor where he took Voss, a different moment, earlier in the evening, when I reached for his arm and he turned toward me and the thing that has been building for eleven days was visible, apparently, to anyone with a lens and a reason to look.
I look at it for a moment and think about angles.
Whoever took this was inside the secured perimeter, credentialed or staffed or brought in as a guest, close enough to get a clean shot without a telephoto lens.
Close enough that if they had wanted to do something other than take a photograph, they could have.
They didn't. They took the photograph and left and sent it to my building while I was still upstairs, and the message is the same message it has always been: I can reach you. I choose what I do with that.
Across the bottom, in red ink, neat and deliberate in the same handwriting I know from an envelope at a benefit and a photograph of a small boy outside an elementary school:
Voss was replaceable. I am not.
I look at it for a long moment. My hands are steady. I note this the way Beckett would note it — not with relief, just as information.
"Isla," Lina says, quietly.
"I see it," I say.
I take out my phone. I call Beckett.
He picks up on the first ring.
"There's a photograph," I say. "Delivered to the building tonight while we were upstairs. It's from the gala. From inside the room." I read him the note, word for word, my voice level.
The silence on his end is more frightening than anything he could have said.