Every last thing I know about the eastern cell is gone. I am saying please. His name and please and yes and sounds that are not words. There is nothing professional left in any of it. I am past the last of it entirely, and I come apart.
Hard and sudden. He doesn't stop. He rides through it steady, and the orgasm keeps going, prolonged by the vibration and the fullness and the weight of him, until I'm sobbing and gripping the headboard and begging him with syllables that stopped being words several minutes ago.
"The knot," I manage. Barely sound. "Please. Vaelis, please?—"
Both knots come at once.
The expansion is soft and full—filling every space, locking us together in two places simultaneously, nothing to do but breathe through it. His release comes in two waves: the cool silver of his court magic first, flooding through from both sides, and then the warmth of the seed after. I feel both. I have all of myself to feel both with, which is the difference from the heat—I'm here, entirely, taking the full account.
The bond runs wide open. What comes through it is his wanting—cold and specific and aimed at me. His. But mine to receive.
I sayyoursinto his throat. I mean it completely. I am aware of every way this is professionally catastrophic and I mean it anyway, and he makes a sound above me that is quiet and genuine and his hands move into my hair.
After.The knot holding. The bond quiet. The marks warm at my throat.
I ran a negotiation forty minutes ago and won archive access and told him I knew the shape of everything he was doing and came down the corridor anyway. Both of those things are true at once. I know what I am. I know what I did while he was between my legs—yoursfour times andpleaseandgood girlhitting me like approval from a handler, which it was, which I know it was, and my body responded like it was the highest praise I'd ever received and I could not stop it. I know what I said while both his cocks were inside me. I know the sound I made that has never belonged in a professional debrief. I know about the drawer and the six times I visited the memory of his mouth and the structural state of the drawer.
I am going to think about all of it later. I am not going to think about it tonight.
"The secondary logs," I say, into his throat. "Tomorrow morning."
"Tomorrow morning," he says.
His hands are in my hair. I close my eyes and let the knot hold me and I stay exactly where I am.
14
VAELIS
She comes to the debrief at seven, and she is three steps from Lena Riley's confirmed position, and both my cocks are hard against my breeches.
All three facts are equally present. I note this about myself without particular approval.
Three steps means: she has the relay point at grid 7-9. She has the October traffic that places the network's eastern anchor. She needs the routing tables to complete the triangle. The routing tables would give her the overlap between the eastern and northern transit corridors, and at the centre of that overlap is a farmhouse that Lena Riley has used for correspondence since spring, and once she has that farmhouse she has Lena's confirmed location, and she will have built it herself from the files I gave her without understanding what she was building toward.
The order is signed. The operation moves in eight days. I need her not to reach the farmhouse first.
She's been working since before breakfast—the lamp burning in the workroom, the scratch of her pen carrying through the corridor wall. She assembled grid 7-9 two days faster than I expected. She is sitting across my desk now with her notebook open to a page of her own shorthand, ciphered notations I only partially recognise, and she is looking at me with the expression that finds the seam in everything.
"The relay point," she says. "Grid 7-9. I want to know who else is routing through it."
"Secondary traffic analysis takes time." I run the illusion magic up—barely, a fraction of a degree, the specific warmth that settles under a suspicion before it fully sharpens. She doesn't know yet what she's three steps from. I need to keep it that way for eight more days. "I'll have it flagged for the next cycle."
She looks at me. "Next cycle is two weeks."
"Yes."
"I can triangulate it myself from the existing logs if you give me the routing tables."
If I give her the routing tables, she has the overlap in an afternoon. She is exactly the kind of operative who would have the overlap in an afternoon. "The routing tables are operational security."
"I know. I'm asking anyway."
Through the bond I feel the sharpening—that quality of her attention when a shape is starting to resolve, when the loose threads are about to become a picture. I run the magic up another fraction. The warmth settling underneath it, smoothing the edge.
She tilts her head. "You just did something."
I go still.