"Nico —"
I circle. Press. Read the way her breath catches, the way her hips tilt, the way her hand grips my shoulder hard enough to bruise. She's close already. Wound tight herself, days of tension in her body too, the cage and the surveillance photos and the dead soldier. We've both been carrying this.
I push two fingers inside her while my thumb works her clit and she cries out, her back arching off the wall, and I curl my fingers and find the spot that made her shatter three nights ago and she's clenching around me, her whole body tightening, and I watch her face while she comes. Her eyes squeeze shut. Her mouth opens on a sound that's half my name and half a prayer. Her thighs shake against my hand. I hold her through it, my other arm braced against the wall beside her head, and the sight of her coming apart on my fingers is the most beautiful thing I have ever watched.
She hasn't finished shaking when I spin her.
She faces the wall. Her hands flatten against the plaster, bracing herself. I press against her from behind and she pushes back into me and the contact. My cock against her ass, the heat of her skin through the shirt I'm still wearing. Makes me groan into her neck.
I push the shirt higher. Bare her completely from the waist down. My hand traces her spine through the oxford, and I grip the fabric at her shoulder and hold her.
"Is this too much?"
"No." Her voice is wrecked. Raw. "More. Give me more."
I push inside her.
Skin to skin. Nothing between us. The heat and the tightness and the raw closeness of being inside her with nothing separating us. I feel every inch of her, the way she stretches around me, the way her body grips me, and the sensation is so intense my vision whites out for a second. She gasps. Her hands press harder against the wall. Her head drops forward.
I pull back. Push in again. Harder.
She moans. A sound that bounces off the walls of a bedroom that never held sounds like this before her. I find a rhythm. Not slow. Not careful. The rhythm of a man who's been holding himself together for four days and has finally been givenpermission to stop. Hard. Deep. Each thrust pushes her up the wall half an inch and she braces and takes it and meets me.
"You'remine." The words pour out. I don't choose them. They escape from the place the guttural sound came from. Involuntary. Primal., the vocabulary of a man stripped to instinct. "Viktor Reznikov thinks he can touch you? He'll die before he gets close."
"Yes —"
"Say it." My hand grips her hip. I pull her back onto me with every thrust and the sound of our bodies is obscene and perfect. "Say you're mine."
"I'm yours." Her voice breaks on my name. "Nico… I'myours."
I reach around her body. My hand slides down her stomach, between her thighs, and I find her clit again. Slick and swollen from the first orgasm. I work her while I fuck her. The dual sensation. My cock inside her, filling her, hitting deep, and my fingers on her clit, circling, pressing. She can't form words anymore. The sounds coming from her throat are fragmented. My name, "please," "God," syllables that dissolve before they become language.
I feel her building again. The tightening around my cock. The way her breath goes ragged and her hands scrape against the wall. I'm close too. Four days of pressure cresting, the wave building at the base of my spine, and I'm trying to hold on long enough to take her with me but my control is gone. She shredded it with three words: I want all of you.
"Come for me." My mouth against her ear. My fingers pressing harder. My hips snapping against her. "Let me feel you."
She comes screaming. Not muffled against a shoulder, not bitten off. A scream that echoes off the bedroom walls, her body clamping around me so tight I can't breathe, her back archingagainst my chest, and the force of it pulls me over. I bury myself inside her as deep as I can get and the orgasm tears through me — not release but purge. Four days of fear and rage and the weight of dead men pouring out of me in waves, and she takes it. She takes all of it.
I press my face into her neck. My body shudders. The shudder goes on and on, aftershocks, my arms wrapped around her waist holding her against me while the last of it drains. My knees are shaking. Hers too. We're both breathing in gasps that might be sobs but aren't.
We slide down the wall. End up on the floor, her in my lap, my back against the plaster, both of us trembling. She turns in my arms and her hand cups my face and her eyes find mine and she looks at me like I'm something worth keeping. After what I just did. The roughness. The possession. The raw uncontrolled need. She looks at me like that.
I carry her to the bed because the floor is cold and because carrying her is the only tender thing my body knows how to do right now. I lay her down. Pull the blanket over us. She fits against my chest. The hollow below my collarbone. The place that only she fits. My hand rests on her stomach, idle, warm, feeling her breathe.
"Thank you."
"For what?"
"For letting me be... this. With you."
She's quiet for a moment. Her fingers trace my jaw. The touch is so gentle after the violence of what just happened that my throat tightens.
"You don't have to be anything but what you are with me."
Silence. The city through the east-facing window. Her breathing slowing. My hand on her stomach, feeling the rise and fall. The rage is gone. The fear is banked to embers. For the first time in four days, I can breathe without the weight and I breatheher in. Sweat and shampoo and the particular warmth of her skin after sex.
I start to drift. She's warm. The bed is warm. The beast in my chest that's been clawing at the walls since Viktor's photograph has gone quiet.