He looks at me for a moment.
"The wanting was there before I held still," he says.
"I know."
"I'm not going to stop."
"I know that too."
He puts his hand on my jaw—cold, steady, the weight of his palm tilting my face up—and the claiming mark at my throat goes warm.
I knew he always knew. The cover—Clara Merris, merchant's assistant, perfectly executed for thirty-one days—he had my real file before I crossed the boundary. He ran the magic with the name in front of him. He called meMiss Merrisand watched me perform and knew the whole time, and I knew he knew and performed anyway because the mission required it, and all of that was true and also it didn't save me and I still feel the specific bitterness of it, the way you feel a bruise even when you understand exactly how you got it.
Clara was never anyone he had to fool. She was only ever mine to maintain.
He leans down and puts his mouth on mine.
The spy runs underneath.I'm entirely in it, fully present, but there's a part of me taking notes—trying to locate the line between what I feel because I feel it and what I feel because six weeks of proximity and court magic have trained me to feel it. I've been trying to find that line for three days. I cannot find it. His mouth is on mine and the bond runs warm and I cannot find the line, and at a certain point the search is its own kind of absurdity.
He undresses me the way he does everything—unhurried, completely certain, the fastenings of my dress giving way under his hands like they were always going to. His cold palms spreadacross my ribs and my waist and I shiver and he feels the shiver and keeps going. When he undresses himself both cocks come free—the upper curved and flushed dark, the lower straight and heavier beneath it—and I look at them the way I have looked at them since the first anatomy lesson, when I spent forty-five minutes trying to take professional field notes and kept losing my place in the same paragraph. My thighs press together. He watches me look and says nothing. This is, somehow, worse than any response he could have given.
His mouth finds the claiming mark at my throat.
The sensation isn't pain and isn't pleasure. It's the third thing, the bond carrying it down through my chest and into my belly, and I hear myself moan and reach for his arm and pull him closer. The mark at my collarbone is different—broader, spreading outward, going down through my chest and below. My cunt clenches around nothing. This has been happening since the heat broke. I have stopped pretending it hasn't.
"You could do that for an hour," I tell him, my voice already unsteady, "and I wouldn't be able to think."
"I know." He lifts his head and meets my eyes. "Is that what you want."
"No. I want to keep thinking. As long as I can."
Something moves in his face—that small and unguarded thing, the one that arrives before his control catches it. He saysall rightin a way that tells me I've given him something by asking for it, which goes in the drawer next to everything else that's going in the drawer tonight, because the drawer is the only structure I have left.
He lays me back on the bed and his hands move down my body slowly. My breasts, his thumbs brushing my nipples, and my back arches at the contact before I've decided to arch it. My stomach. The insides of my thighs. Every place he touches thebond warms and I hate the automatic quality of it and it doesn't stop.
"Soaked," he says, when his hand reaches the inside of my thigh. Flat. Not a question.
My face goes hot. "I know."
"Your body has been very clear about what it wants." He presses his thumb through me—cold, steady, not moving, just there—and my hand fists in the sheet.
He makes me come with his hand first. Two fingers inside me and his thumb on my clit, patient and precise, learning the exact angles that make my hips try to jerk up against his hold and then holding them flat. His pace. Not mine, not rushed, entirely his. My body stopped arguing about this weeks ago and apparently didn't bother informing me until I'd already embarrassed myself several times.
I come with my hand in his hair and his name in my mouth, clear and deliberate, not wrecked—I gave myself that much—and he works me through every aftershock until my thighs stop shaking and then moves up the bed.
He enters me face to face, the curve of the upper cock finding depth immediately, the cold of him inside me sharp enough that I gasp—my back lifts off the bed—and then the vibration starts, a low sustained frequency from inside my walls. His hands bracket my hips and hold me down.
"Tell me about the drop schedule," he says.
I blink at him. "What."
"The dead drop rotation. The one you reviewed this morning." His hips move forward a fraction, just enough to make the vibration shift inside me. "Tell me."
He is completely serious. He is going to make me explain intelligence tradecraft while—I gather myself. The drops run on a fortnightly cycle, staggered so the interval between them is never the same two rotations in a row, which means anyonewatching can't predict the timing even if they've spotted the location once. Two pickup windows per rotation, minimum six hours between them, so if the first window is compromised you still have a fallback. Each window uses a separate cipher keyed to the date.
"Fortnightly," I say. "Staggered by three days each cycle so the interval is never predictable. Two pickup windows per rotation, minimum six hours apart." My voice only shakes a little. "Separate cipher for each?—"
The vibration ticks up without warning and the sentence dissolves. I make a sound I didn't decide on.