14. Chapter 14 #3
She shudders beneath me, whimpering softly and I feel her start to tighten again, her body winding toward the edge.
"That's it." I murmur, nipping her neck. "Come on my cock. Show me how much you want this."
I pinch her clit and she screams into the pillow, body convulsing, pussy milking me in waves so intense I can barely move. Her arms give out beneath her, and I move my hand off her, so I can take my weight down to my elbows.
"I'm going to come inside you," I say through gritted teeth. "You're going to take it."
She nods frantically, still shaking, still clenching around me.
I thrust deep one final time and let go — spilling into her in hot pulses, groaning her name against her shoulder blade, my hips jerking involuntarily as I ride out the aftershocks.
The pleasure crests and breaks, rolling through me until I'm spent, empty, collapsed half on top of her with my face pressed into her hair.
I roll beside her, both of us breathing hard, chests heaving. The storm still rages outside, rattling the windows, but in here there's only the sound of our ragged breaths and the thunder of my heartbeat in my ears, slowly returning to normal.
She turns her head to look at me. Her hair is a mess — chestnut waves tangled and damp with sweat, sticking to her forehead and cheeks. Her face is flushed, lips swollen and bitten, and a red mark blooms on her neck where my mouth was, vivid against her olive skin.
"Okay?" I ask softly, fingers brushing the mark on her neck.
She laughs, breathless and genuine. "Very okay."
I reach over and brush a strand of hair from her face, tucking it behind her ear. She catches my hand, presses a kiss to my palm — soft, tender, a gesture that feels more intimate than anything we just did — and then lets it go.
We lie there in the dark, not speaking, not moving.
The warmth of her body seeps into mine, her shoulder pressed against my chest, and for a moment the weight of everything — the stalker, the job, the lines I've crossed — fades into the white noise of the storm.
Just this. Just her. Just the steady rhythm of her breathing slowing toward sleep.
The storm is still running outside, lower now, a sustained pressure against the windows rather than the violence of two hours ago.
She's asleep. I can tell by the change in her breathing — the quality of it, the way it settles into something longer and less deliberate.
Her shoulder is warm against my chest. I do not move.
I have been in this work long enough to know the difference between a situation that can be filed and one that cannot.
This is the second kind. What happened tonight does not go on the board.
It does not go in the notebook. It sits here, in the dark, between the sound of her breathing and the weight of the phone on the nightstand, and it is the most alive I have felt inside my own life in years, and I do not know what to do with that except to lie still and let the storm run itself out.
She breathes. I watch the ceiling. I think about Elias down the hall and Drake on the perimeter and the forty-eight hours I promised and whether that window is still intact.
My phone lights up.
At three in the morning my phone lights up on the nightstand.
Isla is asleep against my shoulder, her breathing even, the nor'easter down to a low percussion against the windows. I pick up the phone without moving and I read the screen.
An email. Martin Frey's personal account, sent directly to mine. It's short:
You cannot protect them both. Choose.
I read it twice. I set the phone face-down on the nightstand. I look at the ceiling of my bedroom in the dark.
He knows where I sleep. He has my personal email address.
He has been in this operation long enough and at a level high enough to know that the one thing that can break my concentration is not a threat to Isla — she is who I'm protecting and I'm good at protecting — but a threat to the person I cannot have in my line of sight while I am doing it.
He is telling me he knows this. He is telling me he intends to use it.
I look at the ceiling for a long time. Isla breathes beside me, steady and even, and I listen to it, and I think about what it means to have been handed a choice by a man who believes the choice is real.
I do not believe the choice is real. I believe the choice is a construction — a pressure point designed to make me reactive, to push me into a decision that benefits him by being made quickly rather than well.
Frey has been patient for eleven years. He didn't send this email to be patient.
He sent it because something changed, and the thing that changed is that we have Voss and the communication thread and Drake has been pulling his financials for thirty-six hours.
The window he has been operating in is closing.
He's trying to make me act before I'm ready to act. That's the choice he is actually offering.
I don't believe the choice is real. But I believe he thinks it is, which is its own kind of information.
I pick up the phone. I start making calls.