40. Pavel
PAVEL
No masks. No handles. No lies between us. I hadn't been that naked in my life.
I have taken my clothes off for other people.
That's a different thing entirely. A body is the cheapest cover a man owns and the easiest to drop.
What I'd never once done was stand in a room with another person and have nothing between us at all, no handle, no cover story, no colder version of myself built and kept polished for exactly the purpose of holding them at a safe distance.
Luna had spent the evening taking the last of that down out loud, with her brother watching, and now the house was asleep around us and we were the last two awake in it, and for the first time in thirty-eight years I didn't own a single thing to hide behind.
It frightened me. I told her so, because that's the kind of thing a man is allowed to say now.
"You're allowed to be scared," she said.
She was standing in the middle of my room in one of my shirts and, as far as I could find any evidence, nothing at all underneath it.
"You held a gun on a god last week without blinking.
If a woman in your laundry is the thing that undoes you, that's just good taste. "
"It is not the woman. It is that she can see all of me and has not left the room."
"Yeah." She crossed the floor to me, unhurried. "That's the point, Reznikov. That is the entire point of the exercise."
She kissed me, and for once there was nothing in it to win.
Every other time I'd put my mouth on hers there had been a war somewhere in the room, a wall one of us was busy climbing or an argument that needed settling first. This kiss had no agenda hiding under it.
It was just her, choosing me, slow and sure and in no rush whatsoever, and I felt the whole careful architecture of myself go quiet, because for the first time in my life there was nothing left in that room to guard.
So I let it deepen. I let her walk me back toward the bed a step at a time, her mouth never once leaving mine, her hands finding the buttons of my shirt and freeing them one by one with the patience of a woman who has decided the whole night belongs to her and intends to spend every minute of it.
She pushed the shirt off my shoulders and laid her palms flat to my bare chest, and she felt what it did to my pulse and made a low, pleased sound against my lips, because Luna has never yet found a weakness in a man that she didn't immediately want to press her thumb against.
"There it is," she murmured. "The great Shadow's heart, going like a kicked drum. For me."
"For you," I said, because there was no piece of the truth worth keeping back from her tonight. "Only ever for you."
I got her shirt off her then, and there was only Luna in the low light, and I had to stop and simply look, because a man who has spent his whole life memorizing the exits should be allowed one night to memorize a reason to stay.
She let me look. That was its own gift, that she didn't reach for a joke to cover herself, just stood there and let me see her watching me see her.
"You're staring," she said, soft.
"I am studying. I intend to be tested on it later."
"Nerd," she said, and coming from her it landed like the tenderest word she owns, because in her mouth it's exactly that. "The most frightening man in the city, and he wants the extra credit."
"With you, always. I have not once been the smartest person in a room since the night you walked into one of mine, and I have decided I would rather be second to you than first to anyone else alive."
Then I put my hands on her, and my mouth, and I took my time, the way you do with the only thing you've ever been certain you wanted to keep.
I laid her back and learned her by degrees, the places that stole her breath and the ones that made her arch up off the sheets to chase my hands.
The hollow of her throat. The soft inside of her wrist. The line of her hip, and the curve just under her ribs where her breathing hitched every single time I crossed it.
I mapped her by the sounds she made and rewrote the map each time she made a better one, my mouth following wherever my hands had already been, patient and merciless at once, until she'd quit teasing me altogether and had both fists knotted in the sheets and was saying my name instead, my real one, the name no handle I ever wore had carried.
"Pavel." It tore out of her, wrecked. "If you stay this careful with me I'm going to lose my whole mind."
"That is the plan," I said against the inside of her thigh, and I didn't stop, and I didn't hurry, and I felt her unravel a little further under every unrushed inch of it.
I went down onto my knees for her on the floor of a room that finally had my own name back inside it, and I drew her to the edge of the bed and set my mouth to her, and the sound she made loosened something in my chest I'd kept bolted down for a very long time.
I took none of it fast. I'd wanted it too badly for too long to rush it.
I read her the way I read anything I mean to master, chasing the catch of breath that means yes and the lift of her hips that means more, holding her open to the exact rhythm that unstrung her, and when she tried to rise off the bed I held her down and kept her there, because tonight she didn't get to hide from a single thing either.
I stayed until she came undone with both hands twisted in my hair and my name breaking loose over and over, like a tongue she'd only just learned and meant to speak fluently for the rest of her life.
I rose while she was still shaking, and she pulled me down after her, hungry now, done being the only one undone.
She got her hands on the whole map of me with no wall left standing between us, the scars, the ink, the entire ugly honest inventory of a life, and she read it like a woman who had decided to love every line of it.
Then her hand closed around me, deliberate and sure, and the sound that left me was one I have never once let another living person hear.
She smiled against my throat when she heard it. Of course she did.
"Now who's coming apart," she said, low and delighted with herself.
"You did that," I said. "You can answer for it."
She kept her hand on me and drew me down over her, and I braced above her on my forearms and let her set me exactly where she wanted, because tonight even this was hers to decide.
I felt the blunt heat of myself settle against her, right at the threshold, and I held there without moving, letting us both feel the promise of it before I gave her a single inch of the rest. Her breath went ragged under mine.
Then she tilted her hips up in a plain, greedy demand, and I pushed in slow, one inch and then the next, feeding it to her by careful degrees and feeling her open around me, the stretch tipping over into something almost too much to take and exactly enough, until I was seated to the hilt and we both went still, because it was nearly more than either of us could hold, being wanted with the lights on and not one thing hidden.
I've picked a hundred locks in the dark and never once wanted the light on.
I wanted it now. I wanted to watch her watch me come apart, and to let her.
"Look at me," she said, and handed me back my own oldest order.
I looked. And I began to move, and there was no fury in it and no apology underneath it, just us with nothing left in the way.
I moved in her the way a man moves when he has finally let himself believe he gets to stay, deep and slow and certain, drawing back almost to the edge and then sinking home again until she'd surrendered the last word at last and was only saying please in a voice I had never once heard her use.
She hooked her legs higher and took me deeper and told me she loved me, not Shadow, not the alpha, me, and I said it back into her mouth until even that ran out and only breath was left, and the long climb of it rising in both of us at the same moment.
I felt her begin to go, and I kept her eyes the way she'd ordered me to, and when she broke the second time she pulled me over the edge with her, and I spilled into her with her name in my mouth and the whole of my careful self in honest ruins.
I held her through every wave of it and pressed my face into her hair and let myself, one time, be someone who had made it out of the dark and been let all the way into somewhere warm.
Afterward she lay with her head on my chest and her hand spread flat over my heart, tracking it back down to a human speed, and neither of us said anything for a long while, and I was the least defended I've been since I was a child, before I learned what quiet usually costs.
"He's coming back," she said into my sternum eventually. It wasn't a question. "Not another dossier. Not a proxy or a hired gun. Him."
"Yes. We broke his myth in the one place that could gut him, in full view of the only audience he ever craved.
Someone who spends thirty years being a rumor cannot survive being beaten where everyone can see it.
He has to answer it in person, or he's finished whether we ever lay a hand on him again. "
"So we let him answer. On a stage we build." She pushed up onto an elbow, and even wrung out and heavy-eyed she had the light in her, the one I first fell for over a wire. "Give him something his ego physically cannot walk past."
"A duel." I'd been turning it for two days. "Live. One keyboard against one keyboard, him and me, in front of the whole underworld he tried to crown himself before. No HELIX. No teams. No hostages. Only the two of us and a clock, and everyone watching to see which of us is the better ghost."
"Why you?" she said. "I'm the one who out-coded him. Bait the trap with me."