My Beretta in her hands. The gun that sits on the nightstand she sleeps beside, the gun I used in the warehouse while she watched from the doorway and didn't flinch. She held it like she holds everything. With precision and the absolute refusal to be afraid.
The recoil surprised her the first time. Not the second. By the fifth round, she was adjusting her stance without being told. By the tenth, she hit center mass. I stood behind her, close enough to feel the tension in her shoulders, and watched Siobhan O'Brien learn to kill with the focus she brings to boardrooms and crisis management and the systematic dismantling of every wall I've ever built.
I should not have found it arousing. But I did.
Now it's evening. Day four of the war. The maps on the bedroom desk have been redrawn twice. Viktor has gone quiet since the safe house hit, which is worse than noise because silence means planning. Lex checked in an hour ago: nomovement, no intercepts, nothing. The absence of information is its own kind of violence.
I'm at the desk. The Beretta is disassembled in front of me. I've cleaned it three times today. The ritual of control when everything else is chaos: slide, barrel, spring, frame. My hands know the sequence better than they know anything except her body, and the fact that those two things now occupy adjacent space in my mind should concern me more than it does.
Four days. Four days of holding the war together with my hands and my phone and the cold focus that made me the youngest boss in forty years. Four days of being the weapon instead of the man. Andreas is dead. Viktor is watching. My wife sleeps in my bed with a gun on the nightstand and I taught her to use it today because the world I built isn't safe enough for the woman I?—
I stop the thought. I've been stopping that thought for days.
She appears in the doorway.
I know she's there before I see her. The shift in air pressure, the particular displacement of silence that happens when she enters a room. My body has been calibrated to her presence since the night she knocked, and the calibration gets more precise every day.
She crosses the room. I don't look up. I'm holding the slide, running the cloth along the rail, and if I look at her right now I will see the woman who hit center mass and I will stop functioning as the boss and start functioning as the man and the man is not what's needed right now.
Her hand finds my jaw. Turns my face to hers.
"Nico."
I look at her.
Whatever she sees. And she sees everything, this woman who reads rooms the way I read threat assessments. She doesn't step back. The rage. The fear. The four days of coiled tensionthat's been compressing behind my ribs like a spring wound past tolerance. She reads it all and her eyes don't waver.
She kisses me.
Hard. Not the morning kiss, not the goodnight kiss, not the soft press of lips I've been rationing myself because if I kiss her the way I want to kiss her right now I'll break apart and the boss can't afford to break. This kiss is a match to a fuse. Her mouth opens against mine and her tongue finds mine and her hands grip my shirt and she pulls me out of the chair.
"Let go." Her voice against my mouth. "Just for tonight."
My control snaps.
I don't decide it. The decision is made for me by four days of pressure finding its first exit and the exit is her mouth, her body, the permission she just gave me to stop holding everything together. I'm on my feet. My hands find her waist, her hips, and I'm moving her backward, walking her across the bedroom until her back hits the wall and the impact makes her gasp and the sound reaches a place with no name and no restraint.
I pin her. My body against hers, pressing her into the plaster, and I can feel her heartbeat through her shirt. My shirt. She's wearing my shirt. The white oxford she stole from my closet, the one with the buttons done wrong, the daily declaration that she belongs here. My mouth finds her neck. The hollow below her ear where her pulse is hammering and I bite down gently and her head falls back against the wall and the sound she makes. Low. Wanting. A sound that goes straight to my cock. Undoes the last thread of whatever I was holding.
My hands drag down her body. Find the hem of the shirt. My shirt. I push it up her thighs, my fingers trailing over skin that's hot under my touch, and I discover she's wearing nothing underneath.
Nothing.
The sound I make is guttural. Not a word. Not the controlled "Christ" from our first night. A sound from the basement of a man who's been civilized his entire life and is, in this moment, not.
"You want this?"
"Yes."
"Even when I'm like this?"
Her eyes find mine. Clear. Certain. The same certainty that sat in my chair and negotiated terms and walked thirty feet of hallway and knocked.
"I want all of you. The control. The chaos. All of it."
The words break a seal. She's not saying rough sex is acceptable. She's telling a man who hides his darkness that she wants every version of him. The one who washes her hair, the one who kills with precision, the one who is shaking right now with four days of terror he couldn't show because the boss doesn't shake.
My hand slides between her thighs. She's wet. Already wet. Has been, maybe, since she walked in and read my face and decided. My fingers find her and she gasps, her hips rocking forward against my hand, and the slickness on my fingers is evidence that she wants this as badly as I need it. I work her with the focus I bring to everything. The attention that reads rooms and builds strategies and learned her body three nights ago in this bed. But there's no patience now. I find her clit and her whole body jerks against the wall.