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She laughed against his mouth, low and startled, and he caught the sound like he intended to keep it, hands finding the hem of her shirt with a patience that had nothing rushed left in it anywhere. The city carried on below them, indifferent and glittering, uninterested in the two people rearranging every careful boundary either of them had spent weeks pretending still mattered.

She pushed him back against the cushions instead of letting him keep leading, straddling his lap, fully intending to enjoy being in charge for once tonight, and pulled her own shirt over her head before he could do it for her.

“I had a plan for that.”

“Your plan can wait its turn.” She braced both hands on his chest, a low, appreciative sound rumbling under her palms. “I’m cataloging too. Turns out it’s contagious.”

His hands curled around her hips and stayed there, patient, letting her set every inch of the pace the way she wanted it, right up until she leaned down to kiss him again and the last of his control went, gently, completely.

“You’re staring.”

“I’m reconsidering my plan.” His hands slid up her spine, easy, and he flipped her beneath him in one smooth motion that had nothing rushed in it despite the sudden change of terrain. “This works too.”

He finished undressing her slowly, unbuttoning with the same care he gave anything worth keeping, stopping to press his mouth to each new place he uncovered like he was committing the whole map to memory this time rather than racing through it. The open sky offered nothing but firelight for warmth, and none of it read as cold. His hands and his mouth kept every inch of her warm as he went, slow, and she found herself arching into the slowness instead of chasing past it, some deep-set part of her finally willing to let a moment last as long as it wanted to.

“You’re allowed to go faster.”

“I know.” He didn’t. He kissed the inside of her wrist, her throat, the curve of her shoulder, learning her with a patience the wall had never allowed either of them, nothing of that first desperate hour anywhere in it. “I’ve waited a month to have you like this, with nowhere else to be. I intend to use every second of it.”

She gave up trying to hurry him somewhere around the third slow pass of his mouth against her collarbone, gave up on the idea that there was anywhere else either of them needed to be. His hands moved over her like he had all the time in the world to spend, which, given the centuries sitting on the other side of the equation, he really did, and she stopped keeping track of anything beyond the next place his attention landed.

His body finally covered hers fully, bare skin against bare skin, fire pit light catching the sharp lines of his face, and he stopped there long enough to look at her — a real look, total and easy, utterly without pretense, same as everything else about him.

“Look at me,” he said again, softer this time than the wall had ever allowed.

She stopped narrating somewhere in the middle of that sentence — no witty deflection ready, no running commentary, only her hands in his hair and her breath catching on his name as he finally, finally settled over her and into her, slow enough that she felt every single inch of the slowness arrive.

He held her eyes through it, the way he had the first time, except gentler now, deliberate in a way that said more than either of them had managed all night with actual words. The rhythm he set was slow and thorough, no urgency driving it beyond the simple fact of wanting to stay inside this exact moment for as long as either of them could stand to. She said his name once, quietly, and he answered by pressing his forehead to hers, breath mingling, nothing staged anywhere between them.

Every place his hands found, he stayed a while — her hip, the curve of her spine, her fingers laced through his against the cushion beneath them, an anchor rather than a restraint. She wrapped her legs around him and pulled him deeper, and he groaned low against her throat, the last careful thread of his own restraint giving by inches instead of all at once.

When she broke, it arrived slow and total, a wave instead of a shock, and he followed her into it without hurry, holding her through the whole of it like he intended to keep holding her long after it ended.

Afterward, wrapped in his jacket against the cold, tucked against his chest with the fire dying down to embers, she didn’t reach for a joke. Neither did he. The silence held them both, comfortable in a way silence had never once been comfortable for her before, and for once neither of them rushed to fill it with anything at all.

She traced a lazy line along his forearm, the ordinary human warmth of him settling under her palm instead of the eight hundred years, and he let her, still and settled beneath her hand in the way he only ever managed after a genuine quiet had settled the animal behind his ribs.

“Stay up here a while longer.”

“I intend to.” He pulled her closer, tucking her more fully under his arm, chin resting against the top of her head. “I have nowhere else on earth I’d rather be found tonight, and no meeting worth trading this for tomorrow either, or the day after, if I have any say in the matter.”

“That’s a dangerous precedent to set. I might start expecting it.”

“Good. I’d like you to. I’ll keep setting it until expecting it stops feeling like a risk to you at all.”

Down in the atrium, visible through the terrace’s glass rail if anyone had thought to look, Jen Solis sat at her desk long after her shift had ended, laptop open, the overnight security rotation glowing on the screen in front of her. An access window sat highlighted, flagged, considered. Her finger hovered over the trackpad a long moment, the hesitation of someone doing arithmetic they’d rather not be doing, weighing a number against a decision she’d already made weeks ago and was only now finishing.

She closed the laptop the second she heard footsteps in the corridor. Nothing unusual there. She’d worked late for twelve years running. Nobody had ever once thought to ask why.

Mrs. Petrov crossed the lobby below at that exact hour, stopped beneath the atrium’s soaring glass, and glanced up toward the roofline where two silhouettes stood close against the last of the city light. She’d been tracking this development for weeks, ever since the day she’d first noted him watching a glass artist from the mezzanine rail like the rest of the hotel had stopped existing, and she allowed herself, briefly, the quiet pride of someone who’d called it correctly from the very beginning.

“About time,” she announced, to absolutely no one, and continued on toward the elevator with the deep satisfaction of a working theory finally, thoroughly vindicated.

SIXTEEN

NORDEN

The dinner had been planned for two weeks, which gave both sides far more time than either of them needed to prepare an argument.