“Gregory, please—”
He didn’t slow down. He drove harder, his fingers bruising my hips as he pushed us both toward the cliff. I arched my back, my own release hitting me with the force of a landslide, my muscles clenching around him in a series of agonizingly perfect pulses.
A second later, he let out a shattered, guttural groan—the sound of a man finally losing the argument with himself. He surged into me one last time, his body shuddering with the force of his own climax, pinning me into the mattress as the world finally, mercifully, went still.
The room returned to us in pieces: the hum of the refrigerator, the distant siren on the street, the cooling sweat between our bodies. He didn’t pull away. He stayed heavy and warm, his face buried in the crook of my neck.
He was still there. I could feel the heat of him behind me, the slight shift of the mattress when he moved, and the silence between us had a specific quality—not the absence of conversation but its opposite, a fullness that was waiting to resolve in some direction.
“This won’t change my hatred for you,” I said. I said it to the dark, to the wall, to the particular space in front of my face that wasn’t him.
I heard him exhale. A short, dry sound that wasn’t quite a laugh.
“Likewise,” he said.
And then neither of us spoke.
Behind me, Gregory shifted. His hand found the back of mine in the dark—not holding, just contact, fingers resting against my knuckles with the uncertain tentativeness of a gesture that hadn’t been planned. I didn’t move away. I didn’t close my hand around his either.
We lay in that space between, and the night pressed down around us, and something at the very back of my mind was quietly assembling a shape I wasn’t ready to look at directly yet.
I would have to look at it eventually.
But not tonight.
Tonight I let his hand stay against mine, and I breathed slowly in the dark and let myself pretend, for a few more hours, that this was simple. That it was just warmth and exhaustion and the particular refuge of another body in the room with you when the world outside it felt like it was preparing to move.
Tomorrow, Gregory and I would still be whatever we were, and my father would still be three time zones away, and the three days I’d given myself would be two.
But for now, the room was dark and quiet, and he was here. I hadn’t asked him to stay, and he hadn’t offered. Somehow, he was staying anyway, and I held that small, unreasonable fact close to my chest like it meant something.
Chapter 12 – Gregory
I woke before she did.
I lay on my back in the dark with her warmth pressed against my side and her breathing slow and even, and the ceiling above me offering nothing useful, and I did what I always did when I’d made a decision I couldn’t reverse: I assessed the damage.
Her hair was loose across the pillow. Her shoulders rose and fell with the specific rhythm of someone who had finally, thoroughly exhausted themselves. My hand was still resting against her knuckles. I hadn’t planned that either.
I moved it away carefully.
In the kitchen, visible through the open bedroom door, the edge of her folder caught the gray light beginning to filter through the windows. I hadn’t looked at it. I was aware of it, but simply chose to ignore it. I’d followed her instead of the trucks.
I needed to call Matvey.
The thought arrived with the particular cold finality of a thing you had been postponing until you couldn’t anymore. I’d information—real information, solid and usable, the kind that could shift the entire direction of this investigation—and I’d been sitting on it in the dark in Sofia Alvarez’s apartment watching her sleep instead of making the call that my mission, my loyalty, and twenty years of discipline all required me to make.
I got up without sound. I found my jacket on the kitchen floor, my boots near the door, and I got dressed quietly. The fold of cold air from the window above the sink found the back of my neck. I stood still for a moment and breathed it in, looking at her folder on the counter. She had built something in there. Whatever she had found, she had built it systematically, the way a person built something when they needed it to hold. I’d seen the timestamps from across the room, the organized rows of documentation. She had a mind like a knife—precise, directed, harder than it looked.
I pulled on my jacket and didn’t look at the folder again.
I was at the door when she spoke.
“Where are you going?”
Her voice was rough with sleep but fully awake underneath it, which told me she had not been as asleep as she seemed—or she had surfaced quickly, tuned to the exact frequency of my absence before I’d even reached the door. I stood with my hand on the doorframe and felt the familiar déjà vu of this moment settling around me, the one I’d constructed once before in this apartment. I already knew the shape of what was coming.
I turned.