Chapter 15 #2
He crossed to the desk. She rounded to the other side.
Paper lay in ordered stacks, evidence logs and manifests and names like little landmines waiting for feet.
He dragged a folder free and flipped through pages, reading lines he already knew by heart.
She stood close enough that when she leaned in he smelled her skin, the clean note under his jacket where his scent clung to her.
It messed with his focus more than he liked.
“Here,” she said, tapping a line. “Vendor sign-ins. Final sweep at 7:45. The device was timed for fifteen minutes after the start of the conference. This delivery is stamped after the sweep. Too late to be part of it. But no one flagged it.”
“Because the manifest matched the contracted florist’s spec.” His mouth went hard. “Clipboards lie. Men help them.”
“Which men?”
He didn’t answer. He was thinking of faces. Henry on nights. Rolf on days. Two new hires from Magnus’s list. A float guard whose name he hated the sound of for no good reason. It was as though all the oxygen had been pulled out of the room.
She watched him think, read the shift in his shoulders, the way his eyes dropped half a centimeter when he was counting backward through time.
“If you decide Rocco did this because it’s tidy, you’ll miss the hand inside your own house,” she said.
“And that hand will use me again. Use you. Because it worked.”
The words hit him where nothing else could.
He snapped the folder shut and stepped into her space, into the gravity that always yanked him closer than sanity, closer than good sense.
“You think I don’t know what it means to be used?
” he said softly. “I was raised to be a sharp edge. I’ve been used like a knife my entire life. ”
“And I was raised to be currency,” she answered in the same soft tone. “I know what it’s like to be traded and smiled at and told to say thank you.” She swallowed, throat working. “I’m not a bargaining chip. Not for Stellan. Not for you. And not for your Brand.”
“Our Brand,” he corrected. “You think the Brand is a cage.”
“I think you want to use it like one when you’re scared.”
“Scared?” Amusement filled him. He let the word curl in the air, then cut it off sharp. “I don’t scare. Not ever.”
Her smile was almost kind and that made it worse. “Then admit it shakes you when it’s me.”
He had nothing to say to that, because it was true and he didn’t know how to hold truth gently. He only knew how to crush it until it fit his hand.
“Tell me what you want,” he said.
“I want to go to my apartment and get my things.” She said it simply, like an itinerary.
“I want my papers, my passport, the ring I kept from my mother that I swore I’d never let Stellan sell.
I want more shoes and clothes that don’t smell like you.
” She paused, then added, quieter, “I want to decide to come back to this room. Not be trapped in it.”
Something hard and mean slid under his skin. “You want out.”
“I want the choice,” she said. “If I walk back in, it’ll be because I chose you. Not because you locked a door.”
He thought about keys. He thought about all the ways he knew to keep something precious safe. Put it where no one could reach it and post a man with a gun. He thought about how much he hated the picture of her walking away and not turning around.
“Go after breakfast,” he said at last.
“I already ate.”
He gave in. “Tomas will take you.”
Her chin tipped. “I can take a cab.”
“You can take my car.” The words came out flat.
Command. He didn’t back away from them. “You’ll be shadowed.
He’ll keep ten paces when you want space and one pace when I say so.
He’ll stand in the hall while you pack and he’ll check the locks when you leave.
If anyone we don’t know breathes on your door, he’ll put them to sleep and I’ll decide if they wake. ”
She stared at him a long moment, trying to decide if she should fight him on this and risk losing the sliver of ground he’d just given. Finally she nodded. “Fine.”
He should’ve let her walk out then. He should’ve stayed at the window and watched the river and called Alaric to pull vendor rosters until the pages bled. Instead he heard himself say, “One more thing,” and he crossed the space and caught her mouth with his.
It wasn’t a kiss meant to change her mind.
It was a collision. He tasted coffee gone cold on his own tongue and the clean heat of her.
She made a sound that wasn’t consent and wasn’t protest. It was something in between, the place where their fights always lived, that narrow strip where everything burned hotter.
He cupped the back of her neck and dragged her closer. His jacket slid off her shoulders and hit the floor. His thumb found the pulse at her throat and pressed, picking up on the rabbit-quick thrum that matched his own. She opened to him. He didn’t ask. He took.
Papers skidded when he pushed her backward into the desk.
A pen rolled and dropped with a small sound that was indecent in the quiet.
He lifted her onto the edge and stepped between her knees.
Her hands went to his shirt and fumbled with buttons and then gave up and ripped. He heard stitches give and didn’t care.
“Leif,” she said against his mouth, and his name in her voice made something in him uncoil.
“Don’t run,” he said into hers. “Not from this.”
“I’m not running.” She bit his lower lip hard enough to sting. “I’m arguing.”
“Do it later.” He kissed her again, deeper, until the argument went to breath and then to need.
He dragged her dress up. She lifted her hips to help and cursed him for knowing how she’d move.
His hands mapped skin he’d already memorized and still felt new.
The long line of her thigh. The cut glass of her hip.
The small tremor when his mouth found the soft place below her ear.
“We’re not solving anything,” she said, breath breaking.
“We’re solving this,” he said. “The part where I need you like oxygen.”
He took his time. Not gentle, not cruel.
Demanding, tough, all dominance and control.
He tasted her neck, her collarbone, lower, where her breath hitched and her hand tightened in his hair.
He braced one palm on the desk beside her hip and used the other to tilt her closer to the edge.
The room smelled like paper and leather and the smoke of his cologne and something sweeter under it that undid him.
He didn’t look down at his hand when he slid it under the hem of her dress.
He watched her face instead, the flicker in her eyes when he found heat, the way her mouth parted on a sound she didn’t want to give him and did anyway.
“Look at me,” he said, voice edged like command.
“I am.” Her eyes didn’t flinch.
“Don’t look away.” His grip on her hip tightened to make sure.
“I won’t,” she whispered. “Not unless you do.”
He didn’t. He couldn’t have if he’d tried.
When he touched her, slow then firmer, her head tipped back and then came forward again like she remembered his order and wanted to obey it just to defy him.
She went tight and then slicker, her breath choppy, her hands sliding from his shoulders to the back of his neck and lower, like she couldn’t decide whether to pull him closer or push him away and discovered there was no difference anymore.
He wanted to be inside her. He wanted to drag this out until the sun moved across the whole sky and came back around.
The kind of impossibility he’d built his life on.
He unbuckled his belt without taking his mouth off hers.
The metal clinked, a small bright sound.
Her hand slid down his chest, fingers shaking, and found his waistband.
She looked at him then, really looked, like she was checking that he was still made of the same parts he’d been five seconds ago. He was and he wasn’t.
“Tell me what you want,” he said, voice fierce with possession. “Say the words.”
“I want you to listen,” she said, her nails biting into his shoulders as if to secure herself.
“I am,” he shot back, breath harsh against her mouth. “I hear every sound you make, every word. Say it, Mariah. Say it like you mean to make me bleed.”
Her body trembled and her lips curled into something between defiance and surrender. “I want you,” she said, the admission tearing out of her like it cost her pride to give it.
Leif’s mouth twisted in a hard, dangerous smile. “Good. Because wanting me is the only way you’ll survive me.”