18. Kat
eighteen
Kat
"You don't get to do this."
"I am doing it."
"You're removing me." My voice cracks on the second word and I let it. "From my own work. From the thing I built out of nothing while people like you were still deciding whether I was a security risk."
He stands where he has stood for the last ten minutes, three feet from the door, hands open at his sides. That is new. The fists are gone. I do not know what it means and I do not have room for it.
"You are not being removed. You are being covered."
"Say that again and listen to yourself."
"Kat."
"No." I point at the wall, at the red thread and the manifests and the fourteen months of my life pinned to brick. "That isn't a hobby. That's the only thing I have ever finished. And you walked in here and told me it's classified like the word is a lid you get to screw down."
"Because a man I trained has your address."
"I know he has my address. I've had my address since the night somebody photographed my door.
" My hands are shaking. Not the fear kind.
The other kind, the kind that wants to throw something and settles for a fist against my own thigh.
"You think I don't understand what he is?
I have his face on my laptop. I put it there. "
"Then you understand why you stop."
"I understand why you want me to."
Something moves through his jaw. He steps forward once, and my whole body registers it wrong, a hot pull low in my stomach that has no business being in this room, in this argument, in this hour.
Fury and want braided so tight I cannot get a finger between them.
I hate it. I want to shove him. I want him closer. Both, at once, at full volume.
This is why he sleeps at the door. Because if he came all the way in, I'd let him.
And that is the sentence I have refused to finish for two weeks, so here is all of it: I would let him.
In the middle of the single worst thing he has ever done to me, stripping my whole life down to a satchel and a screwed-down lid and calling it care; my body has taken that one step forward and read it as an opening, it is not confused.
It wants the man who just tried to erase me, and it wants him for the same reasons that should have me throwing him out.
There is something wrong with a woman who can be this furious and this wet in the same breath, over the same man, over the exact same act.
I have stopped pretending I am not her. She has been in here the entire time.
She was only ever waiting for someone big enough that letting her out felt worth the cost.
"I am not one of your casualties." I snarl. "You don't get to file me next to them."
"I cannot protect you if you keep running into fire."
"Then don't." I lift my chin. "Nobody asked you to be a wall. I asked you to move with me. You said yes. You said it, in this room, and then a face came up on a screen and you turned back into a locked door."
His breathing changes, a tell he cannot stop, I have learned to read.
"You're not trying to keep me alive," I say. "You're trying to keep me from being one more name you have to carry."
He does not move.
"That's not protection, Naveed. That's your grief with a weapon."
The heater ticks. Outside, a siren travels west, fades, leaving the room emptier than it found it. He is looking at me like a man who has just heard his own file read out loud.
"Who was he?" I ask. "The one you couldn't cover."
He does not answer. The silence stretches until it has its own shape and sit between us like a living thing. I have interviewed enough men to know that pushing right here would give him a wall to hide behind.
So I change the question.
"Fine. Keep him." My voice comes out steadier than my hands. "But hear this one thing and then do whatever you were going to do anyway."
His head tilts, barely. Listening.
"Stop standing in front of me." I take a step. The floorboard between us creaks and neither of us looks down. "Stand beside me."
Nothing in his face moves. Nothing at all, and that is how I know it landed, because everything in this man is small and everything small is loud. His shoulders drop half an inch. His hands stay open.
I am not asking him to guard me less. God, that is not it.
I am asking to stop being an item on a list. A variable.
A door to check, a window to film, a woman to move from room to room while the men decide what she can survive.
I have been the thing people manage since I was nineteen years old and somebody handed me a casserole and a folded flag and told me not to ask questions.
I do not want less of him. I want a different kind of him. Beside. Shoulder to shoulder, both of us facing out.
"You want me to stay alive," I say. "Then let me be useful. I'm better at this than anybody you could hire. You know that. You've watched me work a source who was one wrong word from bolting and you didn't breathe until I had him."
His throat works. Still nothing out of his mouth.
"Move with me," I say. "You said it once. Say it again and mean it this time."
The room goes quiet in a way that has nothing to do with sound.
He crosses the last of the floor between us and stops close enough that the heat comes off him, close enough that I have to lift my chin to keep his eyes, and my body abandons the argument entirely.
Warmth pools low and heavy between my hips.
My breath goes thin and useless. Every nerve below my waist wakes up at once, all of it wrong, all of it now, and I do not step back.
"Say something," I whisper.
"You are not a liability." Gravel and smoke, that voice, lower than I have ever heard it. "You were never a liability."
"Then what am I?"
His hand comes up. Slow. He gives me the whole way to move and I do not take it. Two fingers under my jaw, rough skin, careful pressure, tipping my face up like he needs the angle to be exact.
"A problem I do not want solved."
A laugh scrapes out of me and dies halfway because his thumb has moved to the corner of my mouth and my knees stage a brief protest.
"That's the most romantic thing you've ever said."
"I know." His forehead comes down against mine. "Okay?"
"No," I breathe. "Better than okay. Move."
He moves.
Not at me. With me. His mouth lands on mine and I take a fistful of his shirt and pull, and he lets me pull, and that is the whole difference. He does not steer. He follows where I take him, and my back finds the bedroom doorframe with a thud that knocks the breath out of both of us.
"Off," I say against his jaw.
The shirt goes. His hands go under mine and it goes too, and then his palms are on my ribs, wide and rough, and I am the one who reaches for his belt.
He watches me do it. That is what wrecks me.
He stands there letting a woman he could carry across a room undo his buckle, and his breathing has gone to pieces.
"Bed," I tell him.
"Say it again."
"Bed."
We get there badly. Jeans caught at my ankles, his knee on the mattress, my hands everywhere they have wanted to be for weeks.
His mouth finds my throat and stays. When I roll and put him under me he goes, no resistance, hands falling open on the sheets, and heat cracks through me so hard my thighs shake.
I look down at him. Scars, shoulders, and those honey eyes wide open on mine like he refuses to miss a second.
"Okay?" I ask.
Something breaks in his face. "Yes."
I take him inside me slowly and the stretch pulls a sound out of both of us at once.
His hands come to my hips and do not push.
They just hold, five points of heat, letting me set every inch of it.
I move. He lets me move. Nobody in my life has ever handed me the reins of anything and here he is, a man built entirely out of control, giving it away with his teeth clenched and his heart slamming under my palm.
This is the thing no one who is afraid of him would ever believe: that the most dangerous man I have ever put my hands on is under me with his palms open on the sheets, letting a woman he could break without effort set the entire pace of her own undoing.
He is not a man who gives up control, yet he’s surrendering to me on purpose, one clenched-jaw an inch at a time, and my whole body understands that this is not softness.
A gentle man giving me control would mean nothing at all.
This means everything, exactly because I can feel what it strips out of a man who has not once let go of the wheel and I am drunk on it, on being the one exception carved into a life built entirely out of never making them.
"Look at me," I breathe.
He already is.
I ride him until the burn winds tight beneath my navel and my rhythm falls apart, and only then does he sit up, gathering me against his chest, hips driving up while his mouth works the curve of my shoulder. Not taking over. Meeting me. Beside, even here, especially here.
"Kat." My name escapes his lips, raw, rough, a half prayer.
"Don't stop. Don't you dare."
The climax breaks over me in waves that whiten the edges of the room, and he goes with me, one hand splayed across my back, the other buried in my hair, a word in Dari falling into my neck that I do not understand and will never forget.
After, the ceiling comes back. The heater ticks. His arm is heavy across my waist and he has not moved toward the door, and I feel that absence like warmth.
I turn my head on the pillow.
"Now tell me," I say.
His eyes stay open on the ceiling.
"Who was Amir to you? And why did you take this job when you could have handed me to anybody?"
His hand stops on my hip.
"Naveed. The truth."
He does not answer right away. His chest rises under my hand, holds, lets go.
"I trained him."
"I know that part."
"You know the file." His eyes stay on the ceiling. "You do not know the man."
I wait. Sources talk when you stop filling the space, and I hate that I am doing it to him, and I do it anyway.