Chapter 13 #2
"Fortnightly," I say. "Staggered by three days each cycle so the interval is never predictable. Two pickup windows per rotation, minimum six hours apart." My voice only shakes a little. "Separate cipher for each—"
The vibration ticks up without warning and the sentence dissolves. I make a sound I didn't decide on.
"Separate cipher for each," he says. Evenly. Waiting.
"Separate cipher for each window, keyed to the date. The key changes on the new moon." I get it out. Barely.
"Good girl."
The approval lands like a hook in my chest. My cunt clenches around him and he knows it—I feel him feel it—and the vibration ticks up one notch. I am going to think about this later and feel very professionally ashamed. Right now I don't have the space.
"The contact point for window two," he says. Still moving. Entirely steady. "Where is it."
"You already know where it is."
"I do. Tell me anyway."
He strokes into me slow and deep and I tell him.
I tell him with my face turned toward his shoulder and my hips rolling to meet his rhythm.
The contact point for window two—a chalked mark at the base of the second lamp post on the east corridor approach, changed to the garden gate if the primary is compromised.
The fallback if the window is missed. The abort signal if the fallback fails: a particular piece of red ribbon in the lower left windowsill of the safe house.
I cannot stop my hips from moving. I cannot stop my voice from breaking on the larger words. I tell him anyway.
He makes me come mid-sentence.
The alternate routing system collapses into just his name and a sound that has never belonged in an intelligence debrief. He keeps his rhythm through every wave. I shudder through it and he keeps moving.
"Still thinking?" he says.
"No," I manage.
"Good."
He moves the vibration up.
I cry out. Whatever frequency that is, it is past the one that handles language.
I am mewling against his throat and cannot stop it and cannot make myself care, which is its own kind of information—a spy in the field and completely beyond managing any of it, everything professional gone, just his name and please and the sounds that keep arriving without my permission.
I want his mouth on me. I think it clearly, between one sound and the next—the vivid specific memory of his mouth between my thighs, the cold of his tongue and the patience of him and the sound he made against me—and the wanting of it is sharp enough that my hips roll toward it even though that's not where he is.
I visited that memory six times yesterday.
I will visit it again tomorrow. The drawer has no more structural integrity and I've stopped pretending otherwise.
"The lower cock," he says. Against my hair.
"Yes." Before he moves. Before he does anything at all, my cunt clenches from the wanting of it. "Yes, please—"
He shifts. The angle changes and the lower cock—thick, straight, blunt—presses against my arse.
Cold. Patient. I grip his back and breathe and he works in slowly, and the wall between the two cocks inside me is impossibly thin, the stretch of both together enormous and real, and I make a sound that is not a word.
Full. Both of them. Both places.
"Tell me who runs the eastern cell," he says, still not moving.
"I can't—it's too much—"
"Name." Not unkind. Just certain.
"Sable." From whatever part of me is still a professional. "Handler name. I don't have the real name. No one does."
"There you are."
He moves.
The upper cock drives deep and curved, dragging against the front of my walls on every withdrawal.
The lower cock fills my arse, straight and different, different rhythm, and they press against each other through the wall between them so each thrust of one shifts the other.
The dual vibration starts—the upper running high and bright, the lower deep and slow—and together they are not two sensations.
They are one thing I have no name for, something past sensation entirely, and I look at him.
His jaw is tight. His grip on my hips has gone past measured—I can feel it, harder than he intends—and his chest heaves with each thrust, and there is a line between his brows and his mouth is a hard flat line. The look of a man running through six centuries of patience at speed and aware of it.
He is not as controlled as he looks.
I put this somewhere next to my name and his.
Every last thing I know about the eastern cell is gone. I am saying please. His name and please and yes and sounds that are not words. There is nothing professional left in any of it. I am past the last of it entirely, and I come apart.
Hard and sudden. He doesn't stop. He rides through it steady, and the orgasm keeps going, prolonged by the vibration and the fullness and the weight of him, until I'm sobbing and gripping the headboard and begging him with syllables that stopped being words several minutes ago.
"The knot," I manage. Barely sound. "Please. Vaelis, please—"
Both knots come at once.
The expansion is soft and full—filling every space, locking us together in two places simultaneously, nothing to do but breathe through it.
His release comes in two waves: the cool silver of his court magic first, flooding through from both sides, and then the warmth of the seed after.
I feel both. I have all of myself to feel both with, which is the difference from the heat—I'm here, entirely, taking the full account.
The bond runs wide open. What comes through it is his wanting—cold and specific and aimed at me. His. But mine to receive.
I say yours into his throat. I mean it completely. I am aware of every way this is professionally catastrophic and I mean it anyway, and he makes a sound above me that is quiet and genuine and his hands move into my hair.
After. The knot holding. The bond quiet. The marks warm at my throat.
I ran a negotiation forty minutes ago and won archive access and told him I knew the shape of everything he was doing and came down the corridor anyway.
Both of those things are true at once. I know what I am.
I know what I did while he was between my legs—yours four times and please and good girl hitting me like approval from a handler, which it was, which I know it was, and my body responded like it was the highest praise I'd ever received and I could not stop it.
I know what I said while both his cocks were inside me.
I know the sound I made that has never belonged in a professional debrief.
I know about the drawer and the six times I visited the memory of his mouth and the structural state of the drawer.
I am going to think about all of it later. I am not going to think about it tonight.
"The secondary logs," I say, into his throat. "Tomorrow morning."
"Tomorrow morning," he says.
His hands are in my hair. I close my eyes and let the knot hold me and I stay exactly where I am.