Chapter 8 #2
"I know." I lift her. She wraps her legs around my waist and I press her back against the wall, hard, pinning her there with the weight of my body. The impact drives the air from her lungs in a sharp exhale, and the sound goes straight to my cock. "Tell me to stop."
"No."
Her hands are in my hair, pulling, and the edge of pain clarifies everything.
I roll my hips against her and she moans, grinding back against me through too many layers of clothing.
I can feel the heat of her through the fabric, can feel how wet she already is against the ridge of my cock, and the knowledge that this defiant, furious woman wants me despite everything makes something dark and possessive unfurl in my chest.
Mine.
The thought arrives fully formed and unapologetic.
She's mine. Has been mine since the moment she walked out of her unlocked room and stood in the hallway with fury in her eyes and not an ounce of surrender.
Every woman I've touched before this was a transaction, a body against a body, forgettable before it was finished.
This woman I would burn cities for, and the certainty of that is as terrifying as anything the cartel has ever asked me to do.
I pin her wrists above her head with one hand. She doesn't fight it. Her eyes go wide and dark and blazing, and when I hold her there, pinned between the wall and my body with her arms stretched above her, she arches into me and says my name like a profanity.
"Mateo."
"Say it again."
"Fuck you."
"That's not what I asked for." I press my mouth to the side of her neck, drag my teeth along the tendon, and she shudders. Her pulse is hammering against my lips. I bite down, marking her, and she cries out.
I let go of her wrists. She drops her hands to my shoulders and digs her nails in as I pull the flannel shirt open.
Buttons scatter across the linoleum. There's nothing underneath but her bra, black and practical.
She stopped wearing the blouse from the kidnapping after the first day, and the flannel against bare skin has been quietly driving me out of my mind ever since.
I unclasp the bra with one hand. Her breasts spill free, full, the nipples already hard, and I cup one roughly, rolling the nipple between my thumb and finger until she hisses.
I lower my mouth to the other and suck hard, pulling the peak between my teeth, and her fingers twist in my hair and her back arches off the wall.
"This doesn't change anything," she says, even as she grabs the hem of my shirt and yanks it up. Her voice is wrecked but the words are deliberate, a line drawn in sand even as the tide rushes in. "This doesn't make what you did okay."
"I'm not asking for okay." I pull the shirt over my head and her hands are on me immediately, nails dragging down my chest. I catch her hands and bring them to my mouth.
I kiss her knuckles, then bite the pad of her thumb, and her breath hitches.
"I'm taking what you're giving me. And you're giving me everything tonight, Sofia. I can see it in your eyes."
"You arrogant..."
I silence her by sliding my hand between her thighs and pressing the heel of my palm against her pussy through her skirt.
She chokes on the insult, her hips bucking into my hand, and the wet heat I feel through the fabric confirms everything I just said.
She's soaked for me. Despite hating me, despite everything, her body is begging for what her mouth won't ask for.
"You're so wet," I murmur against her ear. "You've been thinking about this. How long, Sofia? Since the first morning? Since I handed you the knife?"
"Shut up."
"No." I work my hand under the waistband of her skirt, past her underwear, and slide two fingers through her folds.
She's slick and swollen and burning hot, and when I find her clit and circle it with my thumb, her whole body jolts against the wall.
"I want you to hear yourself. I want you to hear what you sound like when the man you hate makes you this wet. "
She grabs my wrist but doesn't pull my hand away.
Her grip tightens as I push two fingers inside her, curling them, searching for the spot that makes her legs shake.
I find it. Her knees buckle and I pin her tighter against the wall with my hips, my fingers working inside her, my thumb on her clit, and she's making sounds she can't control, broken gasps and half-formed curses in English and Spanish.
"That's it." I bite the shell of her ear. "Let me hear you."
"Fuck," she breathes. Her hips roll against my hand, riding my fingers, chasing the pressure. "Fuck, Mateo, I need more."
"Tell me what you need."
"More. I need more."
I pull my fingers out and she whimpers at the loss. I bring them to my mouth and taste her, holding her gaze while I lick her from my skin. She watches me with blown pupils and parted lips and an expression that's somewhere between outrage and need so desperate it looks like pain.
"On the floor," I tell her.
"Make me."
I take us down. She hits the linoleum and pulls me on top of her, her legs wrapping around my hips, her hands tearing at my belt with frantic purpose.
She gets it open, shoves my jeans and briefs down, and wraps her hand around my cock.
Her grip is firm and sure and unapologetic, and I groan into the curve of her neck as she strokes me, her thumb rubbing over the head, smearing the precum that's already leaking.
"Mierda." I thrust into her fist. She tightens her grip and strokes faster, and I let myself feel it for exactly three seconds before I grab her wrist and pin it to the floor beside her head because if she keeps going I'll come in her hand and I need to be inside her when it happens.
I hook my fingers into her skirt and underwear and pull them down her thighs, off her legs, gone. She's bare beneath me on the cold kitchen floor, her thighs falling open, her pussy glistening in the dim light, and she is the most devastating thing I have ever seen.
Mine. Every inch. Mine.
"Stop looking at me like that and fuck me," she says.
I notch myself against her entrance, the head of my cock pressing into wet heat, and I pause.
Not to tease but to memorize. The way she looks right now, spread open on the floor of my safehouse with her hair in a dark halo around her head and her chest heaving and her eyes burning with a need that matches my own.
"Eyes on me," I tell her. She locks her gaze on mine. I push inside her in one long relentless stroke, burying myself to the hilt, and her mouth falls open and her back arches and the sound she makes is raw and shattered.
She's tight, so tight her body grips me like a vice, and the sensation is so intense I have to hold still with every muscle locked, breathing through the overwhelming urge to pound into her until we both shatter.
"Move," she orders. Her heels dig into my lower back. "Move, Mateo."
I pull almost all the way out, feeling the drag of her walls clinging to my cock, and drive back in hard. The impact rocks her body against the linoleum and she gasps, her nails scoring my shoulders.
"Again," she demands.
I give her again. And again. Each thrust is deep and punishing, the kind of fucking that leaves bruises, and she takes every inch with a ferocity that matches mine.
Her hips slam up to meet me, her pussy clenching around me every time I bottom out, her moans escalating from sharp gasps to raw throaty cries.
I brace one hand beside her head and grip her hip with the other, tilting her pelvis, and the change in angle makes her scream, full-throated, the sound of a woman who has found the thing she didn't know she was looking for and is terrified by how good it feels.
"Right there," she chokes out. "God, yes, just like that, harder."
"You feel that?" I'm driving into her relentlessly now, the wet sounds of our bodies obscene in the quiet kitchen.
"That's what you do to me. Days of watching you walk around this house in my shirt, days of listening to your voice, days of wanting to bend you over this table and fuck you until you forgot your own name. "
"You're insane."
"And you're coming on my cock in about thirty seconds, so what does that make you?"
Her laugh breaks into a moan as I shift my weight and reach between us, finding her clit with my thumb. I circle it in tight relentless strokes while I fuck her, and her body winds tighter with every pass, her walls fluttering around me, her breathing fragmenting into staccato bursts.
I slide my free hand up her body, between her breasts, and wrap it loosely around her throat. Not squeezing, just holding. A question.
She puts her hand over mine and presses down.
"Cristo." I thrust harder, the angle ruthless, and she takes it, takes all of it, her body opening for me completely. I can feel her right at the edge, her thighs trembling, her pussy clenching rhythmically around my cock, and I lean down and put my mouth against her ear.
"Come for me, Sofia. Let go. I want to feel this perfect pussy squeeze every drop out of me."
She shatters. She comes so hard her whole body locks up, her back arching completely off the floor, her mouth open in a scream that breaks into a sob.
She pulses around me in tight rhythmic contractions that drag me to the edge, and I bury myself as deep as I can and come inside her with a groan that feels like it's ripped from somewhere primal, filling her while she trembles and clenches and milks every last pulse from my cock.
Afterward, the silence is enormous.
We lie on the kitchen floor with the cold of the linoleum finally registering against overheated skin.
I'm still inside her, softening, and her body gives an involuntary aftershock that makes us both hiss.
She's staring at the ceiling. Her hair is spread across the floor like dark water.
Her lips are swollen, her neck marked with the imprint of my teeth, her throat pink where my hand held her.
My come is leaking from where we're still joined, slicking her inner thighs.
Mine.
The thought is savage and absolute and completely at odds with the devastation that's about to follow.
I hear it before I see it. A small broken sound that she tries to swallow, a hitch in her breathing that becomes another and another, and then she's crying. Real tears, the kind that come from the body's deepest reserves, the ones you can't control because they bypass every defense you've built.
She pulls away from me, my cock slipping from her body, and rolls onto her side, pulling her knees to her chest. She cries into her hands, and the sound is quiet and devastating, the sound of a woman who has been strong since the moment I took her and has just spent the last of that strength on something she isn't sure she wanted.
I reach for her. She flinches.
I pull my hand back.
"Don't touch me," she says into her hands. "Not right now."
So I don't. I lie on the cold floor a foot away from her and listen to her cry and hate myself with a thoroughness that is almost impressive.
Because she was right. She is my prisoner.
However she initiated this, however much she chose it in the moment, the context poisons everything.
She is here because I took her. She is trapped because I trapped her.
And whatever passed between us on this kitchen floor is tainted by that foundational violence.
Her choices have been constrained from the moment I put my hand over her mouth in that alley, and nothing that happens inside those constraints can ever be fully free.
I can still feel her on my skin, still taste her on my lips, can still feel the ghost of her pulse under my palm, the way she pressed my hand tighter against her throat, the way she screamed when she came.
And the dissonance between the woman who did those things and the woman crying into her hands one minute later is a wound I don't know how to close.
She stops crying eventually. She sits up and pushes her hair from her face with hands that are steady again, because Sofia Navarro's hands are always steady, even when the rest of her is falling apart.
"I need a shower," she says. Her voice is flat and professional. The prosecutor is back, armored and impenetrable, and the woman who cried on the kitchen floor has been filed away in whatever compartment she keeps things she can't afford to feel.
"Okay. I'll find you something clean to wear. There are clothes in the other bedroom that might fit."
She stands and gathers what's left of her clothes. She doesn't look at me.
"This doesn't happen again," she says.
"Okay."
She walks down the hallway. The bathroom door closes and the lock engages. Moments later the water starts, and I lie on the kitchen floor and stare at the ceiling and catalogue every way I have failed as a human being.
The list is long. But what happened in this kitchen is at the top.
I get dressed. I clean the kitchen. I dig through the other bedroom and find a pair of sweatpants with a drawstring waist and a T-shirt that will be too big on her but will be clean, and I set them outside the bathroom door with a quiet knock.
Then I return to the kitchen and make coffee because it's the only thing I know how to do right now that doesn't involve hurting someone.
The routine of it, the measuring and pouring and waiting, is a mercy.
It gives my hands something to do that isn't reaching for a woman who told me not to touch her.
When she comes out of the shower in the clothes I left for her, her hair wet and her face scrubbed clean, she sits at the table and picks up the napkin marked DIEGO as if the last hour didn't happen.
"We need to talk about the Salazar problem," she says.
I set a mug of coffee in front of her. She doesn't thank me. I don't expect her to.
"Yes," I say. "We do."
And we sit in the kitchen that still smells faintly of us, of sex and tears and the particular electricity of two people who have crossed a line they can never uncross, and we plan.
Because that's what survivors do. They plan, even when the plan is made of bad ideas and worse coffee and the fragile fractured alliance of two people who have just shattered each other.