Chapter 13 #2
He's broken and dangerous and guilty of things that will haunt us both.
But he's also true. In a world where everyone I encounter, from defendants to colleagues to sometimes even friends, operates behind layers of calculation and self-interest, Mateo Reyes stands in front of me with his interior exposed and says here, this is what I am, all of it.
That doesn't excuse what he did. It doesn't erase the alley or the van or the fear. But it does mean something, something I won't put words to yet but refuse to pretend isn't there.
I get up, walk to the door of my room, and open it. The hallway is dim, lit by a single lamp in the living area. Mateo's door is closed.
I knock.
"It's me," I say.
A pause, then footsteps. The door opens.
He's standing in a white T-shirt that's too tight across the shoulders, his hair still damp from the shower. He looks at me the way he always looks at me, as if I'm the first real thing he's ever seen.
"The FBI agent is gone?" I ask.
"For now. He'll be back in the morning."
I step past him into the room. It's identical to mine, beige walls, slatted blinds, and a bed that's too firm and completely anonymous.
"I told Jon about the case," I say. "He's going to arrange a meeting with the U.S. Attorney. I'll present the cooperation proposal myself."
"You don't have to do that."
"Yes, I do. Because if someone else handles it, they'll offer you a deal that doesn't reflect the value of what you're bringing. And I didn't spend days in a farmhouse building a case with you to watch someone else botch the resolution."
He almost smiles, that thing I've seen flicker across his face a handful of times, the suggestion of a capacity for warmth that he's spent years suppressing.
"Thank you," he says.
"Don't thank me yet. What you're delivering is unprecedented, and I believe I can argue for full immunity.
But nothing is guaranteed until the U.S.
Attorney signs off, and the kidnapping complicates the optics.
The cooperation agreement will require full disclosure of every job you've done, every body, every scene. "
"I know."
"You'll be testifying against the cartel, against people who will try to kill you for it. Witness protection isn't optional."
"I know that too."
"And after all of it, after the trial and the testimony, you come out the other side with a new identity and nothing to your name." I pause. "I need you to understand what you're choosing."
He looks at me across the dim room, and I see it again, the clarity I saw at the farmhouse when he decided to destroy the cartel, the clarity of a man who has finally stopped lying to himself.
"I'm choosing the truth," he says. "For the first time in my life, I'm choosing something that's real. Whatever that costs."
I should leave, go back to my room, and maintain the distance that professional ethics and basic self-preservation demand.
I close the door behind me instead.
The click of the latch is small and definitive, and we both hear it, and we both understand what it means. This is not the farmhouse. There is no locked door, no captor, no captive. I am here because I walked here, and I can leave whenever I want. I don't want to.
"Sofia." His voice is rough and careful. "You don't have to do this."
"I know I don't have to. That's the point.
" I cross the room to where he's standing by the window.
The blinds cast thin lines of streetlight across his face, across the scar along his jaw, across the mouth I kissed on a kitchen floor in a different life.
"The last time, I wasn't free. You knew it and I knew it. And it poisoned everything."
"Yes."
"I'm free now. I walked into this room on my own feet, through an unlocked door, in a building full of FBI agents who would arrest you if I screamed. There's no ambiguity here, no power imbalance, no doubt about what I want."
"What do you want?"
I put my hand against his sternum and feel his heartbeat beneath my palm, rapid and hard, the heartbeat of a man who is holding himself still through sheer force of will.
"You," I say. "Without the guilt. Without the context. Just you."
He exhales like a man who's been holding his breath since the farmhouse.
His hand comes up and covers mine, and then he's pulling me in, slowly this time, giving me every opportunity to change my mind, and when his mouth finds mine it's different from the kitchen.
It's slower and deeper, the kiss of a man who is not taking but receiving.
At first.
I pull his shirt over his head and press my mouth to the dark ink on his collarbone, the script along his ribs, the hard planes of muscle beneath scarred and tattooed skin.
His fingers thread through my hair and his breathing goes ragged as my lips travel south, across his stomach, following the trail of dark hair that disappears into his waistband.
I drop to my knees.
He makes a sound like I've punched him. His hand tightens in my hair, not pulling but holding, as I work his sweats and briefs down his hips and he kicks them off. His cock springs free, thick and hard and already leaking at the tip, and I wrap my hand around the base and look up at him.
He's staring down at me with an expression I've never seen on his face before, not the controlled blankness or the dark intensity but something stripped bare and almost frightened, the look of a man watching something he's wanted so badly he didn't dare imagine it.
"You don't have to..." he starts again.
I take him into my mouth and the sentence dies.
The sound he makes, low and guttural, rumbles through his body and into mine. I take him deep, relaxing my throat, and his hips jerk involuntarily before he catches himself. His hand in my hair tightens and loosens and tightens again, the war between restraint and need playing out in his fingers.
I pull back slowly, dragging my lips along his shaft, tonguing the sensitive ridge beneath the head, and then take him again, deeper. His thighs are trembling. The tendons in his forearms stand out in sharp relief as he grips the windowsill behind him with his free hand, his knuckles white.
"Dios mío, Sofia." His voice is shredded. "Your mouth. Fuck, your mouth is incredible."
I hollow my cheeks and suck hard, my hand working what I can't reach, and he groans loud enough that I'd worry about the agents down the hall if I cared about anything right now besides the taste of him on my tongue and the sound of a dangerous man coming apart because of me.
I find a rhythm that makes his breath stutter, alternating between long slow strokes and tight suction on the head, and his hand in my hair goes from holding to guiding, tilting my head to the angle that makes him curse in Spanish.
"Stop." He pulls me off gently but firmly. His cock is slick with my saliva, flushed dark, twitching. "If you keep going, I'll come in your mouth, and I need to be inside you."
He pulls me to my feet and kisses me, deep and filthy, tasting himself on my tongue, and the possessiveness that was simmering beneath his restraint breaks the surface.
He yanks the borrowed sweatshirt over my head, unclasps my bra with one hand, and fills his palms with my breasts, rough and kneading, his thumbs rolling my nipples until I whimper.
"On the bed," he says. It's not a request. The man from the kitchen is back, and the tentative patience he was showing a minute ago has burned away.
"I thought I was in charge tonight."
"You were." He hooks his fingers in the waistband of my sweats and drags them down along with my underwear, his knuckles trailing fire down my thighs. "You were in charge and you got on your knees for me and now I need to fuck you so hard you forget we're in a federal safe house."
He lifts me and puts me on the bed, and then his body is covering mine, all heat and weight and hard muscle, and his mouth is on my neck and his hand is between my thighs, two fingers pushing into my pussy without preamble.
I'm already soaked, have been since I dropped to my knees, since before that, since I knocked on his door knowing exactly where the night was going. His fingers curl inside me and I arch off the mattress, grabbing his wrist not to pull him away but to hold him there.
"So wet," he murmurs against my throat. "So fucking wet for me. Were you this wet on the kitchen floor?"
"You know I was."
"I know you were. I know you came so hard on my cock that you screamed.
" He adds a third finger and stretches me, his thumb finding my clit with the same accuracy he brings to everything.
"And then you cried. And I hated myself.
But right now, in this room, with that door unlocked, you're going to come on my fingers and then on my cock and you're not going to cry.
You're going to look at me and know that you chose this. "
I'm already close, his fingers working me with relentless precision, his thumb circling my clit in tight strokes that send lightning through my pelvis.
He lowers his mouth to my breast and sucks my nipple hard, and the dual sensation breaks me open.
I come on his hand with a sharp cry, clenching around his fingers, my hips grinding against his palm as the orgasm rips through me.
He doesn't give me time to recover. He pulls his fingers out, slick with my arousal, and positions himself between my thighs. The head of his cock presses against my entrance, hot and thick, and he pushes in with one deep stroke that fills me completely and punches the air from my lungs.
"Fuck," I gasp. My nails dig into his back. He's so deep I feel him everywhere.
"You feel incredible." He pulls back and drives in again, harder. "Every time. Like you were made for my cock."
He sets a punishing pace, his hips snapping forward with controlled violence, each thrust bottoming out inside me.
The bed frame hits the wall and neither of us cares.
I wrap my legs around his waist and take everything he gives me, my pussy clenching around him on every stroke, the wet sounds of our bodies filling the room.
He shifts his weight to one arm and hooks my leg over his shoulder with the other, folding me nearly in half, and the new angle sends him impossibly deeper. I scream into the pillow and he pulls it away.
"No. I want to hear you."
"The agents will hear."
"Let them hear." He drives into me and I cry out, my hands fisting in the sheets. "Let them know that the woman they're protecting is getting fucked by the man they're supposed to arrest. Let them hear what you sound like when you're mine."
The word hits like a concussion wave. Mine. On the kitchen floor it would have been a threat. Here, after everything, with the door unlocked and my freedom intact, it's a declaration, a truth I'm choosing to accept.
"Yours," I hear myself say, and his eyes go black and he fucks me harder, driven past restraint by a single word.
He reaches between us and works my clit, rough and fast, and the second orgasm builds with terrifying speed. I can feel it gathering at the base of my spine, in my thighs, in the place where his cock is hitting the deepest part of me over and over.
"Come with me," he says, his voice breaking. "Sofia. Now."
I shatter. The orgasm tears through me and I clamp down around him so hard he groans through his teeth, and I feel him follow, his cock pulsing inside me, filling me with heat while he buries his face in my neck and says my name like it's the last word he'll ever speak.
We collapse together on the double bed, gasping, sweat-slicked, tangled in sheets that have come completely untucked. He's still inside me, and I can feel the wetness between my thighs, the mix of us leaking onto the government-issued mattress, and I don't care.
This time, I don't cry.
This time, when his arms tighten around me, I let them. When he curves his body around mine and presses his lips to my shoulder, I press back against him and close my eyes and let myself be held by a man I am not finished being angry at but am finished pretending I don't want.
"Stay," he murmurs against my hair.
"Yes."
Tomorrow is going to be hard. The meeting with the U.S. Attorney, the cooperation agreement, the long grinding process of turning everything we've built into a weapon that will end the cartel and reshape both our lives.
But tonight, in a double bed in a safe house in Yonkers, I sleep. For the first time since the alley in Jackson Heights, I sleep deeply and dreamlessly, with his heartbeat against my spine and his arm across my waist and the door still unlocked.
The door is still unlocked. For the first time, that feels like safety instead of danger, and six months ago that contradiction would have been impossible, but tonight it just feels like the truth catching up.