“I know.” His voice was low. “I counted.”
I closed my eyes.
When he reached the last button, he didn’t step back immediately. He stood there for a moment, hands still at the base of my spine, not moving, not pressing—just present, the way a question exists in the air before anyone has the courage to ask it. I felt his breath against the back of my neck, slow and controlled, the breathing of a man being very deliberate about something.
“Sofia,” he said. Just my name. Nothing attached to it.
I turned around.
I don’t know what I intended when I did it—whether it was confrontation or something else, whether I was going to say something that had been accumulating in my chest all week and finally needed releasing. But when I turned and found him looking at me, the speech dissolved. He was too close, and the expression on his face was the one I’d seen exactly once before, in a hospital corridor when he thought I wasn’t watching him. He looked like a man standing at the edge of something and deciding whether to step off.
“You don’t have to say anything tonight,” he said.
“I know I don’t.” My voice came out steadier than I felt. “I know exactly what I’m obligated to do and what I’m not, Gregory. I don’t need you to manage my expectations.”
Something shifted in his jaw—not hurt, exactly. More like recognition. “I’m not trying to manage anything.”
“You’re always trying to manage something.”
“Not this.” He held my gaze with the steadiness of someone who had decided this was worth the exposure it required. “Not you. Not anymore.”
I should have had something to say to that. I’d been carrying words around for a week—sharp ones, accurate ones, assembled in the sleepless hours of his guest room when I lay awake and rehearsed the conversation we hadn’t had yet. About the mission. About the months of watching me while I thought he was something he wasn’t. About Nico’s voice in that basement about being used—and the nauseating recognition that I hadn’t entirely been able to dismiss it.
But standing in front of him now, in the partial dark of his penthouse, with the city spread out behind the glass and the thirty-two buttons undone and his hands no longer touching me but the warmth of them still registering on my skin—the words wouldn’t organize themselves into the weapons I’d spent a week sharpening them into. They sat in my chest like stones, heavy and uncomfortable.
“I’m angry at you,” I said. It was less than what I’d rehearsed but more honest.
“I know.” He didn’t look away. “You should be.”
“I’m not asking your permission to be angry.”
“I’m not giving it.” A pause. “I’m just telling you it’s justified.”
I took a step back. Not away—I didn’t have anywhere to go—but enough to think.
“What happened to needing separate rooms?” I said.
“The rooms are still separate.” His eyes didn’t move from mine. “That hasn’t changed unless you want it to.”
The way he said it—unless you want it to—put the weight exactly where it was, which was with me, which was either the most respectful thing he’d ever done or the most strategic, and I was no longer entirely sure those two things were as distinct as I’d been treating them.
I looked at him for a long moment. At the scar tracing the line from his cheek toward his temple. At the hands that had undone thirty-two buttons with a patience that had nothing of management in it. At the expression he was still wearing, open in a way I suspected cost him considerably, held steady for me.
“Don’t be gentle because you feel guilty,” I said. “I don’t want that. If you touch me, it needs to be real.”
Something moved through his face—quick, unguarded, the flicker of a man who had just been told exactly what he needed and hadn’t expected to be told it directly. His throat moved.
“It’s real,” he said.
He didn’t reach for me. He let me close the remaining distance, which I did with the same stubbornness I brought to everything—not because I’d forgiven him, not because the week of accumulated hurt had resolved itself in the last five minutes, but because I’d been honest with him and he had been honest back and the current between us had always preceded my better judgment and I was tired, in the most fundamental sense, of pretending I could outrun it.
When I kissed him, his hands came up to my face with a gentleness that was so unlike every version of this we’d had before that I felt it in my sternum. He kissed me back like it was something he was allowing himself rather than taking, and that distinction—the difference between allowing and taking—was the thing that finally dismantled what remained of my defenses.
He knelt between my legs, his hands hooking behind my knees to pull me to the very edge of the bed. He didn’t rush. He started with a slow, swirling exploration of my inner thighs, his tongue tracing the lace of my garter belt until I was arching off the sheets.
“Look at me,” he commanded, his voice muffled against my skin. “I want to see you when you break.”
I dragged my eyes open, but I couldn’t even see him—everything was just a blur of heat and jagged light. He didn’t flinch, even when my body finally snapped. The first wave of release hit me like a physical blow, a hard, rhythmic throbbing that made my teeth chatter.