Chapter 9
Nine
Kon
It’s been three days since I first touched her.
I've had women. Plenty of them. I know what desire tastes like, what satisfaction feels like, what walking away in the morning feels like when the sheets are cold and neither of you pretends it mattered.
This is none of those things.
This is a sickness. An obsession. A hunger that grows worse with every feeding, and I have fed it six times in three days.
Against the wall outside my office when she pressed too close during an argument about encryption protocols.
On my desk when she walked in wearing those black jeans and that high-collared blouse and told me she had more intel to trade.
In the training room after she watched me work the heavy bag for twenty minutes and then informed me I drop my left shoulder before I throw my hook, which turned into her bent over the weight bench with her jeans around her knees and my name ripping from her throat.
In the kitchen when she reached past me for the coffee carafe and her breast grazed my arm and whatever thread had been holding my control together snapped clean.
Every time, she walks away first. Straightens her clothes. Tosses a remark over her shoulder. Disappears into her room and closes the door.
Every time, I let her go. And every time, the silence she leaves behind sits heavier in my chest.
I'm compromised. I know it the way I know the weight of a gun in my hand, the way I know the exact pressure needed to snap a man's neck. Bone-deep certainty that doesn't require analysis.
I smirk. I should care more than I do. If Rafael knew the extent of my obsession he’d rip my head off.
Wednesday night, eleven-forty. I'm in the security room, bathed in the blue glow of six monitors showing every angle of The Foundry.
My fingers drum against the console in a restless rhythm I can't seem to stop.
She's two hallways and one closed door away, and every muscle in my body is pulled taut toward her, a gravity I can't override no matter how many perimeter feeds I cycle through.
I force myself deeper into the chair, grip the armrests, and stare at the screens until my eyes burn.
Standard protocol. Perimeter check. The lies I tell myself to justify sitting here instead of walking down that hallway, pushing open that door, and burying myself in the taste of her that still lingers on my tongue from this afternoon.
My eyes find her screen without conscious thought.
She's in her room, cross-legged on the bed, laptop balanced on her thighs.
Working on her files, probably. The investigation she's still building, the one I should confiscate and don't because somewhere between the first time I kissed her and the sixth time I buried myself inside her, I stopped treating her as an asset and started treating her as mine.
The camera angle catches her in profile.
She bites her bottom lip when she concentrates, her teeth pressing into the soft pink flesh until it goes white.
She taps her fingers against the keys in staccato bursts, pausing, typing, pausing again.
When she's thinking, she tilts her head to the left and her dark hair falls across her cheek, and she tucks it behind her ear with an absent gesture that makes my chest constrict.
I could watch her for hours.
Damn she's beautiful and that's the fucking problem.
But beautiful women are common in my world.
I've sat across from plenty of them without losing a single night of sleep.
Onyx is a different kind of threat. She challenges me with those sharp blue eyes that refuse to drop when I stare her down.
She pushes the limits of my patience with questions that dig beneath the surface of every answer, mining for the truth I've spent decades burying.
She tests my restraint every time she bites that bottom lip while she's thinking, every time she leans forward and the collar of her shirt shifts to expose the hollow of her throat, every time she argues with me in a voice that goes low and breathless when she knows she's winning and doesn't realize what the sound of it does to the blood in my veins.
Beautiful I can walk away from. This woman dismantles me one question at a time, and she doesn't even know she's doing it.
I’ve never given in and told another soul my whole truth. With her it seems as natural as breathing.
I shut off the feed. The screen goes dark and my reflection stares back at me, sharp jaw, hard mouth, the scar bisecting my eyebrow a pale slash against the blue-tinged darkness.
The face of a killer watching a woman on a security camera.
If Onyx could see me now, that journalist brain of hers would have a field day.
She'd study me with those sharp blue eyes, tilt her head, and catalog every pathetic detail of a man who can't stop watching a woman he has no business wanting.
She wouldn't be wrong.
I go to my room. Try to read. Dostoevsky, which usually anchors me, pulls my mind into patterns of logic and philosophy that quiet the noise.
Tonight the words blur on the page. All I can think about is the way she gasped my name this afternoon.
Not "Beast." My actual name. Konstantin.
The syllables pulled from her throat against her will, her back arched against the kitchen counter, her fingers digging into my shoulders hard enough to draw blood.
I close the book and toss it on the nightstand.
Blyad'. Fuck.
My feet carry me down the hallway before my brain grants permission.
The concrete is cold against my bare soles.
The Foundry is quiet at this hour, nothing but the low hum of ventilation and the distant pulse of the city beyond the walls.
Moonlight cuts through the tall windows in silver bars that stripe the floor.
I stop outside her door and my hand hovers over the knob, fingers curled but not gripping, suspended in the narrow space between discipline and desire.
The metal is cool against my palm. On the other side of this door, she's warm and alive and wearing my shirt, and every rational thought I've built my survival on is screaming at me to turn around.
Walk back to my room. Pour a drink and let the burn replace the ache.
This isn't strategy. This isn't a perimeter check or an intelligence debrief or any of the dozen lies I could tell myself to justify what I'm about to do.
There's no tactical advantage to standing outside a woman's room at midnight with my chest cracking open and my hand on a doorknob I have no business turning.
Every protocol I've lived by for twenty years says walk away.
Every instinct I've honed in the service of survival says this woman is a vulnerability I cannot afford.
My hand tightens on the knob. I push the door open anyway, because Konstantin Vetrov has survived bullets and blades and four years of barbed wire against my bare skin, but I cannot survive another night lying in the dark pretending I don’t need to be in the same room as her.
When the door swings open, I find her on the bed working.
The laptop screen casts white light across her face, illuminating the soft line of her jaw and the dark fan of her lashes.
She's wearing one of my t-shirts again and nothing else.
The fabric shifts when she uncrosses her legs and I catch a glimpse of bare hip that makes my mouth water with the need to taste her beautiful pussy again.
She looks up when I enter, and the expression that greets me carries no surprise.
“Kon.” She draws on a wispy breath that I swear is connected to my fucking heartstrings.
And I am not ashamed to say hearing my name on her lips has my dick rock hard.
Those pretty blue eyes find mine in the dim room, heavy-lidded and unhurried, with an expression that says she heard my footsteps.
The glow from the screen catches the fullness of her lower lip where her teeth have been working it, the skin flushed pink and swollen, and the urge to cross this room and bite that lip myself hits me so hard my fingers dig into my own arms.
My t-shirt pools in her lap, the hem riding high enough on her thighs to reveal the smooth curve of bare skin that disappears into shadow. One shoulder has slipped free of the collar, exposing the line of her neck and the delicate ridge of her collarbone, and she makes no move to fix it.
Her dark hair spills loose across that bare shoulder, and she tucks a strand behind her ear with a slow, deliberate gesture that she might not realize is an invitation but my body reads as one anyway.
I lean against the doorframe and cross my arms, letting the silence stretch, giving her time to decide what happens next.
But her eyes make the decision for her. They drop from my face to the bare expanse of my chest, tracing the barbed wire inked across my collarbone, following the lines down through the roses, lingering on the ridges of muscle along my stomach before drifting lower to where my sweatpants hang low on my hips.
The drawstring hangs loose, the fabric barely holding on to the cut of bone and muscle beneath.
Her lips part on a slow exhale, and when her gaze finally drags back up to mine, the blue has gone dark with a hunger she's not bothering to hide.
She doesn't say a word. She doesn't have to. Her body just told me everything.
“Onyx,” I return several heartbeats later.
She closes the laptop. The click echoes through the quiet room, and the light dies, leaving us in nothing but moonlight from the sky light above and the charged silence of two people who both know why I'm standing in her doorway.
"You have another question for me already?" One eyebrow arches, her lips pulling into that crooked half-smile that does strange things to my willpower.
Such a playful little thing. "Nyet."
"Oh? Then what?"