9. Sofia
SOFIA
Two knocks pulled me up off the couch a little after three, sharp and familiar, though nothing about the hour or the tension still living in my shoulders felt familiar at all.
I checked the peephole out of habit even though I already knew, and found Maxim standing there with his jacket collar still turned up against a wind that had died hours ago, something in his face I hadn't seen from him before.
His knuckles were scraped raw on one hand, and he'd made no effort to hide it, which told me more about the last two hours than any explanation would have.
I opened the door.
"You're supposed to be asleep," he said, stepping past me without waiting for an invitation, already moving toward the window.
"I was. Loosely." I shut the door behind him and watched him test the latch on my window with two fingers, methodical, checking something that had nothing to do with whether it opened easily. "What are you doing?"
"Checking the locks."
"At three in the morning."
"At three in the morning." He didn't look up from the window, running his thumb along the frame like he expected to find something wrong with it that I'd missed for twelve days. "Humor me."
I let him finish the window, and the one in the kitchen after it, and I didn't ask what had happened at the terminal because some part of me already knew I wasn't supposed to, and another part of me, the part I liked less, already suspected how bad it had been from the set of his jaw alone.
"It's secure," he said finally, turning to face me in the low light of a lamp neither of us had bothered to switch off. "The building. The block. I made sure of it myself before I came here."
"You could have called."
"I needed to see it. Not hear it." Something moved behind his eyes, an admission he looked like he resented making even as he made it. "I needed to see you were still exactly where I left you."
"I'm not something that goes missing, Maxim."
"Everything I care about eventually does." He said it flat, no drama in it, which somehow made it land harder than if he'd shouted it. "I wasn't going to sleep until I checked."
"What happened out there tonight?"
"Nothing that concerns you." He must have heard how that sounded, because his voice gentled before I could push back. "Nothing I want following you into this apartment. That's the only part that concerns you."
"That's not an answer."
"It's the only one I'm giving tonight." He crossed the room and stood close enough that I had to tip my head back to hold his eyes, close enough that whatever adrenaline still lived in him seemed to transfer straight into the air between us.
"I keep telling myself I'll say goodnight and leave.
I've been telling myself that since I knocked. "
"You're not very convincing."
"I noticed."
The space between us had been shrinking for weeks, an inch at a time, careful, deniable, the kind of distance two people convince themselves they haven't noticed closing.
Tonight there was nothing careful left in either of us.
"You're still wound up," I said, watching the muscle in his jaw that hadn't unclenched since he walked in.
"I handled it."
"That's not the same as being fine."
"No," he agreed. "It isn't."
I didn't decide to close the last of the distance so much as simply stop resisting it, my hand finding the front of his jacket, and whatever restraint either of us had been running on finally gave out at once.
His mouth found mine like he'd been waiting for permission he'd stopped expecting to get, one hand sliding into my hair, the other flat against the small of my back, pulling me in until there was no space left between wanting this and having it.
I kissed him back with everything I'd spent weeks pretending I didn't feel, and he made a low sound against my mouth like something in him had finally stopped fighting too.
He walked me backward without breaking the kiss, unhurried despite the adrenaline I could still feel humming under his skin, like he'd decided this, at least, deserved to be done slowly no matter what the rest of the night had cost him.
My back found the wall beside my bedroom door, and he braced one hand against it over my shoulder, looking at me like he was memorizing something he was afraid to lose.
"Tell me to stop," he said, low, giving me the exit even as his thumb traced along my jaw like he was hoping I wouldn't take it.
"I'm not going to."
That seemed to be all the permission he needed.
He kissed me again, slower this time, deliberate, and I felt every place his hands found on me like the current of him hadn't fully switched off since the terminal, only redirected somewhere quieter.
We made it to the bed I hadn't slept in once since I moved into that apartment, and if some part of me registered the significance of that, I didn't let myself examine it, not with his mouth finding the curve of my neck and every rational thought I owned dissolving somewhere behind it.
He undressed me like it mattered, like every inch of skin he uncovered deserved its own attention, the waiting itself feeling like part of the point instead of an obstacle to it.
He found the hem of my shirt first, drawing it up slow enough that I raised my arms and helped him finish it, and the way his eyes moved over me after, hungry and unashamed of being hungry, made me feel more seen than any lingering glance ever had.
His hands went to the clasp of my bra next, patient with it in a way that told me he'd noticed my hands weren't steady enough to manage it myself, and when it finally gave way and slid from my shoulders, the rough sound he made against my throat was answer enough to whatever doubt I still had left about wanting this.
I reached for the buttons of his shirt and found my own hands weren't much better, and he noticed, and something in his expression softened further instead of hurrying me along.
"We have time," he said, low against my ear, like time was a thing he could actually promise me instead of a thing the whole night had already proven neither of us controlled.
I finished the last button myself, and he shrugged out of the shirt and let it fall somewhere neither of us cared to track, and the sight of him in the low lamplight, all lean muscle and old scars I didn't ask about yet, made something low in my stomach tighten in a way that had nothing to do with fear.
He laid me back against the sheets like I was something worth that much care, his mouth trailing from my jaw to my throat to the curve of my collarbone, slow and thorough, the same patience he'd given that chart.
His hand skimmed down over my ribs, my waist, the jut of my hip, and found the last of what still separated us, easing it down slow enough that I felt every inch of the retreat, and I arched into the emptiness that followed before I'd fully decided to, a small, helpless sound leaving me that I would have been embarrassed by with anyone else.
"That," he murmured against my skin, something satisfied and a little wrecked in his voice, "I want to hear again."
He made good on wanting it. His mouth moved lower, mapping every place that made my breath catch and lingering there until my hands were fisted in the sheets and his name had become the only word I still remembered how to say.
By the time he finally settled between my thighs and finished undressing himself, I was shaking with wanting him, and still he didn't rush, watching my face like my pleasure was the only thing in the world he still had control over tonight.
"Maxim." His name came out ragged, half plea, half warning.
"I know," he said, and the rough satisfaction in his voice undid something else in me entirely. "Not yet."
He didn't relent until I was trembling and open and past the point of caring what sounds I made, and only then did he finally rise over me, settling his weight between my thighs, the blunt, insistent heat of him pressed against exactly where I needed him most, both of us breathing hard before either of us had moved again.
"Look at me," he said once, quiet, when I closed my eyes against how much I felt.
I did.
I kept looking at him as he pushed into me slow, inch by inch, the stretch and heat of him drawing a gasp out of me that he swallowed with another kiss, a groan breaking low in his throat like the feel of me was costing him every last piece of his control.
He didn't stop until he was fully seated inside me, both of us going still for a moment just to feel it, his breath unsteady against my mouth, mine no better.
I kept looking at him through everything that followed, past every wall I'd built to survive this job, until I couldn't tell the difference anymore between what my cover wanted and what I did.
He moved slow at first, deep and steady, one hand braced by my head and the other gripping my hip like he needed the anchor, and every drag of him inside me built something tight and bright low in my belly that had no interest in waiting much longer.
"You feel like you were made for exactly this," he said against my ear, voice wrecked, and I answered with his name and my nails against his back instead of words I no longer trusted myself to form.
He was patient in a way that undid me faster than urgency would have, taking his time like the danger outside my door had taught him exactly how little of anything was guaranteed, rolling his hips in a rhythm that built slow and relentless until the tight bright thing low in my belly finally snapped and pulled me under.
I heard myself say his name like it belonged to me too, felt him follow me over a few thrusts later with his face buried in my neck and a groan that sounded like it had been locked up in him for years, not hours.
We stayed tangled there afterward, both of us breathing hard, his weight still braced carefully over me like even now, wrung out and spent, he hadn't stopped thinking about whether he was too much for me to hold.
He wasn't. I told him so, and he laughed, low and surprised, like a man who hadn't expected to laugh again that night.
Somewhere in the middle of it, the last of my resistance went quiet, and I let it stay that way.
After, we lay tangled in sheets that still smelled faintly of fresh paint underneath everything else, his arm heavy across my waist, his breathing slowing into something even and unguarded I doubted many people ever got to witness.
I watched him sleep for a long time, tracing the line of his jaw with my eyes instead of my hand, since I didn't trust my hand not to wake him.
This was the part nobody trained me for. Not the wire, not the paperwork, not even the danger. Nobody sits you down and tells you what to do with the ache of falling for the exact man you were sent to end.
I'm falling for him, I thought, and the thought didn't even surprise me anymore, which scared me more than the falling itself. I don't know how to stop. Worse, I wasn't sure I wanted to.
Ninety days had sounded like plenty of time when Callahan first handed me this assignment, a clean number, a clock I could respect without ever thinking I'd lose my footing over the man it was counting down on.
Nobody had warned me what happened when the clock started running out and I found out I wasn't rooting for it to.
I thought about the wire still sitting untouched in my kitchen drawer, the file with his real name on it back at the office, and the version of me that had walked into this apartment twelve days ago certain none of this would ever feel like more than a job.
That version of me felt like a stranger now, someone I could describe in detail but didn't quite recognize anymore.
I thought about what Nina would say if I told her the truth instead of the edited version she usually got.
I wasn't ready to find out. And I thought about Maxim's face when he'd said everything he cared about eventually went missing, and understood, lying there in the dark, exactly what that admission had cost a man who never admitted anything.
It should have made me more careful. It made me want to stay exactly where I was instead.
I lay awake a long time after that, listening to him breathe, memorizing a version of this night I already knew I wouldn't be allowed to keep once the sun came up.
Somewhere before dawn, sleep finally took me too, heavier and more complete than it had any right to be given everything sitting unresolved on the other side of it.
I woke to gray light and an empty half of the bed still warm enough to prove he hadn't been gone long.
The apartment looked different in the early light, the boxes still taped shut, the couch I'd finally stopped sleeping on, the whole sparse, unfinished shape of a life I'd built to be temporary.
For the first time since I'd moved in, none of it looked temporary to me anymore, and that scared me almost as much as the note did.
A note sat on the pillow where his head had been, his handwriting sharp and slanted, the handwriting of a man who had never once in his life written anything he didn't mean.
Gone to fix what almost got fixed permanently last night. Lock the door.
I read it twice, turning the words over for whatever he wasn't saying inside them, and reached for my phone on the nightstand instead, its screen lit with a notification I hadn't heard come through.
FIRE AT CALUMET WAREHOUSE, the alert read, first responders on scene, cause under investigation.
I sat there in the gray light with the note in one hand and my phone in the other, the night before already starting to feel like it had happened to someone else. Whatever peace I'd found in that bed had ended before I even opened my eyes.
Calumet Warehouse sat two piers down from the terminal, close enough that whatever fire was burning there tonight almost certainly traced back to whatever Maxim had gone to fix.
I read the alert a second time, then a third, my thumb hovering over Callahan's name in my contacts before I made myself set the phone down instead.
Whatever I owed the job this morning, I owed myself sixty more seconds first, sitting in a bed that still smelled like him, deciding which version of me was going to get out of it.
Reality didn't knock. It walked straight in, uninvited, the way it always did.