"The warmth. It arrived while you were about to answer." She's watching my face with the quality she usually keeps fordocuments—systematic, nothing left out. "That's not the first time."
Seven times. She has registered it seven times and has been counting, and I am looking at a woman I have been running a working on for months who has been building a list. She does not yet know what the list adds up to. She is, however, getting there.
"The routing tables," I say. "I'll look at what I can release."
"That's not an answer to what I just said."
"No," I say. "It isn't."
She's deciding something. The jaw sets, the slight forward tilt she makes when she's already past deliberation. "All right," she says, and sets her pen down. "Show me the relay point traffic from October. Just October. Archived logs—the security classification drops after ninety days."
October. The month my people placed eyes on Lena Riley's network. The month the grid references began to assemble into something conclusive. The month the operation became possible.
If I give her October, she has the farmhouse by morning.
I move around the desk.
She watches me do it. She knows what this is—I can see her knowing, the mouth pressing together, the spy reading the move in real time. She stays seated.
"This is a deflection," she says.
"Yes."
I put my hands on the desk on either side of her and look down at her, and her breath changes—just slightly. The claiming marks warm at her throat and her scent sharpens. The specific scent of her that has been a constant in this study since day three and which has made both my cocks very aware of her proximity for almost as long.
I am aware of what I am doing. I am running a deflection using the bond and the magic and two months of her body learning to respond to the cold of me. I am buying eight days. I have been doing this with clear eyes since I signed the order, and I know exactly what I am doing, and I am doing it.
This is not the part I don't have a name for.
"I know what you're doing," she says. Her voice is entirely steady. "You do it every time I get close to something. Proximity and touch, and then the warmth running underneath."
"Yes."
"Does it work if I know you're doing it?"
"You tell me."
Her jaw tightens. The answer is yes and we both know it. She is slick already—I can smell it—and she knows I can smell it and she hasn't moved.
I reach for her.
I pull her up from the chair by the waist and she comes—not willingly, not unwillingly, the complicated middle ground she's occupied since the claiming—and I set her on the edge of the desk and step between her thighs. Her legs spread around me and her breath catches.
"The October logs," she says.
"Tomorrow."
"You've said that before."
"And I've delivered."
I put my mouth on the claiming mark at her throat, and her whole body shudders—that third thing running through the bond between the mark and her. Her hands come up to my shoulders. Not pushing. Not pulling. Just there, holding on.
I take my time with the marks—throat, then collarbone, back and forth between them, slow and unhurried—until she is gripping my coat with both hands and her hips are rocking forward against the edge of the desk. Then I push her skirts up.
She's soaked. The fabric of her underthings clinging to her, slick running through, and I press my palm flat against her and feel the heat through the cloth. Both my cocks throb against my breeches.
"Still going to want the October logs," she says. Slightly wrecked already.