22. Mikhail #2
I settled between her thighs and stopped there, right on the edge of it, because I wanted her face in the second we stopped being two people who’d signed a contract and became a thing with no paperwork anywhere for it.
She lifted her hips and took the decision away from me entirely, and I sank into her by slow degrees, feeling her body stretch and yield and draw me deeper on a broken breath, until there was nothing of me left to give her and we were as close as two people are ever allowed to be.
The sound I made then was one I have never once let another living soul hear.
She was tight and slick and impossibly warm around me, and for a moment we both went still.
We only breathed, both of us understanding that the wall we’d built wasn’t cracking now.
It was gone, burned clean off its foundation.
There was no more talking. She took me the way she does everything once she has stopped performing it, completely, with her whole self, and the last of my control left me on a sound I didn’t recognize as my own.
I set the pace, and then I lost it. I have kept time my whole life.
I stopped keeping it. There was only her, the heat and the grip and the pull of her, and her mouth at my ear saying my name, my actual name, not the boss’s and not the mark’s, only Mikhail, again and again, as though she were the one person who had ever bothered to learn it.
I had intended to be gentle. I had promised myself gentle.
But she rose to meet me stroke for stroke and dug her heels into the small of my back and told me, in the filthiest whisper anyone has ever handed me, precisely what she wanted, and gentle went out the window along with my restraint and my discipline and every other thing I’d carried through the door still owning.
I gave her everything. I felt her tighten and break around me, felt her cry out against my shoulder and hold on as though I were the only fixed point in a falling world, and only then, when she had gone soft and shuddering beneath me, did I let the last of it go and follow her down, over an edge I have spent a lifetime refusing to walk toward.
All my life I have needed to know what comes next. With her, for the first time, I let myself not know, and survived it. Better than survived. I have never been so unmade, or so alive.
After, we lay tangled in the ruin of the bed with the city glittering beyond the glass, and neither of us reached for a weapon or a phone or a lie, which for two people built the way we are built is the most naked thing there is.
She had her head on my chest. My hand was in her hair.
And the word I’d refused to say alone in a dark room, the word I’d withheld from a brother and a sister-in-law and a ceiling, came all the way up my throat and stood behind my teeth.
“Nora.”
“Mm.” She was half asleep already, undefended, a version of her nobody had ever let me see.
I opened my mouth to say the thing there is no taking back.
And then I didn’t, because to say it tonight would make it one more gift handed to a woman on the single night she had nothing left to guard herself with.
If I was going to give her that word, I would give it to her in daylight, sober, with her armor back on, so she would know I meant her and not the dark.
So I said the smaller true thing instead.
“Sleep. No one reaches you here.”
She turned her face into my chest at that, the way an animal finally stops listening for the thing in the trees, and something in me that had stood guard since I was a boy quietly, after all those years, sat down.
She did, which is its own kind of trust, and I lay awake and held it like something I’d been handed and told never to drop.
I watched her sleep the way I’ve watched for threats for as long as I can remember, except that there was no threat in the room, only the rise and fall of her breathing and the impossible fact of her in my bed with her guard finally all the way down.
And I let myself think the sentence the code warned me about before I was old enough to shave, the one every made man is taught to fear worse than dying, that there is no woman, no love, no softness on this earth worth the family, worth the empire, worth the work.
They teach it to you young, the men who raise you into this life.
Before the first gun and the first body, they teach you that the softness is the door the enemy walks through, that a man with something to lose has already lost it, that love is a debt the whole family settles in blood.
I believed it. I’d watched it prove itself true on harder men than me, men buried by the exact tenderness they couldn’t bring themselves to give up.
I built everything I am around the lesson and never once questioned the arithmetic of it.
I turned the forbidden sentence over, and I answered it. I would burn all of it to keep her. The routes and the cities and the name my grandfather bled into the ground for, I would put the whole of it to the torch and not turn around to watch it go, to keep this one woman breathing in this one bed.
Then I waited for the terror that thought was supposed to bring, the terror the code had promised would come the day I ever thought it.
It didn’t come at all. That was the most frightening thing that happened to me on my wedding night, and DeLuca had sent men to circle my door.