“Well?” she said.
Her eyes were dark and entirely steady and about eight inches from mine, and I was acutely aware of every individual detail of her—the slight elevation in her breathing, the set of her jaw, the way her pupils had done the thing I’d noticed before, that fractional widening that had nothing to do with the lighting and everything to do with proximity and the current that moved between us with the reliability of something that had been established and couldn’t be unestablished.
I saw it.
She knew I saw it.
Neither of us addressed it, because addressing it would have required stopping, and the momentum of the moment had its own logic that neither of us was quite managing to override.
“You’re not going to answer me,” she said, and her voice had dropped slightly, the anger underneath it mixing with something else that made it more complicated and considerably more difficult to maintain professional distance from.
“You’re not going to like the answer.”
“I don’t like most things you say. I survive.”
I reached out and caught her wrist when she turned to leave.
The touch was immediate and reflexive—not planned, not strategic, just the instinct of a man who had decided he wasn’t done with this conversation and whose hand had acted on that decision before his judgment could weigh in. Her wrist was warm. Small in my grip, though I held it loosely enough that the only thing keeping her there was the same thing that had been keeping her in every conversation we’d had—her own decision to stay.
She stopped.
Looked down at my hand around her wrist.
I kissed her.
It was full of buried anger at the sight of her at the loading bay with her clipboard and the way she looked at me with those completely honest eyes and said,Ask directly,like she had no idea that direct was exactly what I couldn’t afford to be.
She kissed me back, and for approximately fifteen seconds, the mission and the folder and Tomas Alvarez’s name were all somewhere else entirely.
Then I pulled back.
She stared at me, breathing slightly elevated. Eyes bright. The composure partially reassembled, but not all the way there yet, which was the version of her I found the most—
I stopped that thought.
“If all this is about scratching the itch,” she said, and her voice was controlled and even and carrying something underneath it that I recognized because I’d put it there once before and was apparently doing it again, “then we shouldn’t meet again.”
The words were quiet. Final-sounding. The voice of a woman drawing a line and meaning it.
I said nothing.
She picked up her bag. Smoothed the front of her sweater with one hand, and then she walked away from the bar without looking back, and I sat there and watched her go and said nothing, because nothing I could say in that moment was honest, and I’d apparently reached some threshold below which I was unwilling to lie to her directly.
That threshold was new.
I didn’t examine it.
I ordered a drink. Sat with it. Ran through the practical architecture of what came next—the mission, the decision I’d arrived at, the thing I’d been moving toward since the loading bay and had now committed to fully by sitting down on this stool and opening this conversation.
Get close to Sofia.
Use the access.
Get the evidence that confirmed or denied what I thought I knew.
Report to Matvey.
Clean. Linear. Mission-shaped.