"Harder."
He obeys.
The pace shifts. Faster. His hand grips the headboard. I wrap my legs around him and pull him deeper. Sounds I've never made. I hear them and they're mine and I don't care. He shifts angles. Searching. Precise even now, even with his breath ragged and his composure dissolving. He finds it.
"There?"
"Yes… there…please…"
He doesn't stop. His hand slides between us, finds me, works me while he moves, and I can't — the dual sensation — I can't think. My back arches. His rhythm falters for the first time. His hips stutter and a sound tears from his chest, raw and low, the sound of a man who controls everything losing control.
My hand finds his face. I make him look at me. His eyes. My eyes. Everything between us. The arrangement. The terms. The separate bedrooms. The blood. The knock. The hallway. The thirty feet. The fourteen nights. All of it. Right here.
"Nico —"
"Siobhan —"
I shatter. The orgasm hits like a detonation, radiating outward from where we're joined, my whole body clenching around him. He follows me over. Two thrusts. Three. And his whole body shudders and my name is the only sound in the room, broken and reverent, and he buries his face in my neck and I hold him through it. I hold him the way I held him after the warehouse, the way I've been holding him since the first morning he made me coffee. I hold on.
The silence after is different from any silence I've known.
Not the heavy silence of the hallway. Not the careful silence of the kitchen. Not the loaded silence of two people deciding what they mean to each other. This silence is warm. Full. A silence that has nothing left to carry because we just set everything down.
He stays inside me. His forehead against mine. Our breathing returns in stages. Fast, then slower, then slow. His heartbeat under my palm finds a rhythm that matches my own and I think about the first time I put my hand on his chest, in his office, when he grabbed my wrist and pressed my palm flat and said you feel it too. His heart was racing then. It's racing now. But the register has changed. Then it was challenge. Now it's home.
He pulls back enough to look at me. His eyes are warm and wrecked and soft in a way I've never seen.
"Stay. In my bed. Tonight."
"Okay."
He pulls free gently. I stare at the ceiling of his bedroom and think about the woman who stood in a different room an hour ago folding a t-shirt and putting on silk and I don't know her anymore. I'm someone else now. Someone who knocked. Someone who stayed.
He settles beside me. His arm comes around my waist, and I fit myself against his chest and there's a geometry to it. The angle of his shoulder, the curve of my back, the way my head finds the hollow below his collarbone. A geometry that suggests our bodies have been planning this longer than we have. His hand rests on my hip. My fingers trace the scar on his ribs one more time, idly, learning it in the dark the way I'll learn it in daylight tomorrow.
I fall asleep in the arms of a killer and have never felt safer.
Chapter 17
Nico
* * *
She sleeps.
I don't. Not yet. I lie in the dark with her body pressed against mine and her breathing slow and even against my chest, and I try to remember the last time another person slept in this bed.
No one has.Ever.
I don't sleep beside people. Proximity triggers the tactical brain. The one that catalogs exits and threats, the one that runs scenarios while the body rests, the one that made me the youngest head of a Greek organization in forty years because it never, ever turns off. Women I've been with understood the rules: their place or a hotel, never here, never this bed, never the vulnerability of unconsciousness in the presence of another person.
She's here. In my bed. Her hand on my chest. Her hair across my pillow. Her breathing the only sound in a room that's been silent for years.
The tactical brain is quiet.
Not gone. Not disabled. Quiet, the way a guard dog goes quiet when it recognizes someone who belongs. She belongs here. In this bed. In this room. In the space I built to keep everyone out.
She knocked. She walked through the door. She traced the scar that no one has ever touched, and she looked at me with eyes that held everything. The gun. The blood. The man. The monster. And she stayed.