“Look at me,” he snarls.
I force my eyes open. His face is savage, beautiful, contorted with a need that mirrors my own. Sweat drips from his jaw onto my chest. “Mine,” he says against my throat. Low. Certain. The word that wrecked me the first time, that I spent a year trying to unknow the feeling of, to bleach from my vocabulary. His teeth graze my pulse, biting down just hard enough to mark, to brand. “This pussy is mine. This mouth is mine. This life you tried to give away allmine.”
“Yours,” I whimper. The word dissolves any lingering ghost of a man who thought he could have this.
“Mine,“ he says again, and this time I don’t argue. I can’t.
My hands grip his back, his shoulders, whatever I can reach, and hold on as he destroys me. He drives deeper, rearranging my cells, his hand sliding under my hip to tilt me up so he can sink even further, until I am nothing but a vessel for his reclaiming. He pulls a sound out of me that I’ve only ever made for him—involuntary, broken, tuned to this exact man—and his whole body responds, his muscles locking, his rhythm faltering for a fraction of a second before he growls and regains control.
“Only me,“ he says. Not a question. A demand for the final truth.
“Only you.” Honest. Completely and finally honest. Tears prick my eyes, not from pain but from the exquisite, brutal relief of being known. “It has always only been you.”
The sound he makes at that is not a word. It is an animal noise of victory and anguish, of a man who has found his home after walking through fire. He drives deeper, his hand between us pressing exactly the right place with his thumb, and I come apart with his name breaking across my lips like a prayer and a curse. My orgasm rips through me with the force of a year’s worth of denial, my body clamping down around him, milking him, pulling him into the abyss with me. His arms lock aroundme like steel bands, his face burying in my curls, and he follows me over with a roar that he smothers against my neck.
He spills inside me, hot and endless, and in that moment I am branded. I am his. There is no Larry. There was never Larry. There was only ever this man, this moment, this unbearable, perfect truth.
The mountain holds its silence around us. I lie with my cheek on his chest, wrecked and satisfied in the way of a body thoroughly claimed. His arm is around me. His hand has found my curls again — that slow, unconscious movement I have thought about more times than I will ever tell him. His heartbeat slows. Mine takes longer.
Outside, the snow presses against the windows, patient and indifferent. Inside, this stone room holds the two of us and the considerable wreckage of the day and the year before it, and I let myself be still inside it for a moment. Just a moment.
“Satisfied?” He asks in a rough-edged careful voice.
I lift my head and look at him.
“No.” I hold his gaze when he turns to look at me. Clear. Certain. “I am not satisfied.” My hand opens over his chest, over the heartbeat that is not quite steady. “You can do this to me every day for the rest of my life, and I will not be satisfied.” He goes still under my palm. “Not until you tell me why. The real why. Not the surveillance, not Artur’s family or the safe house.” I hold his eyes. “Why you sent me home that morning. Why you came back. What this actually costs you, because I can see it costing you and you won’t say it out loud.”
His jaw works once.
He says nothing.
“I’m not going anywhere,” I tell him. “You made sure of that.” I settle my head back on his chest, ear over his heart. “So when you’re ready.”
His arm squeezes around me. His heartbeat gives him away. He says nothing. But it says everything.
6
Maxim
She’s asleep. Has been for an hour. Her cheek against my chest, her soft curls spread across my arm, her breathing the slow and even rhythm of someone who decided—consciously or not—to trust the place they’ve landed. I’ve been awake the whole time.
This is the part I don’t have a protocol for. I know how to leave. I’ve been leaving for twenty years — efficiently, cleanly, no damage that can’t be managed. I know how to maintain distance from a soft body in a dark room. I have extensive experience with that discipline.
What I don’t know is this. What to do with my arm that’s gone around her without asking my permission. What to do with the weight of her, the warmth of her, the way she fits against my side like someone measured for it.
The folder on my laptop never had a name. She does. That’s the problem. That has always been the problem.She wakes slowly, the way she does everything—with a kind of deliberate attention, like consciousness is something she’s choosing ratherthan something that happens to her. The shift comes before she moves. The change in her breathing. The small tension of a person taking stock of where they are.
“Good morning,” she says, to my chest.
“Morning.”
She’s quiet for a moment, her fingers tracing one of the smaller scars on my forearm — not the shoulder, not anything she’s asked about before. Just tracing. Like she’s reading something in it.
“Have you been awake a long time?” she asks.
“Yes.”
“Thinking about what?”
