His next breath lands hot against my skin, turning my knees to liquid fire I need to quench fast. He senses it, his hand at my hip guiding me down those inches until my body presses fully against the wall again, solid and unyielding. He tips my chin with two fingers—not to control, but to realign, and I follow, the kiss shifting from measured to a freefall where we could both halt it, but neither does. Thoughts of those texts intrude like shards in the quiet, spiking anger through me; I inhale it sharply, and he reads it etched on my face.
“They can’t get in here,” he says, lips brushing mine, voice forging a barrier as solid as steel. “Not to you. Not tonight.”
It doesn't mend the world outside, but it stitches something raw inside me, letting me sink deeper.
I tilt my head and kiss him harder, bruising, tomorrow's swell on my lips a badge I'll wear without regret. He meets it head-on, no retreat—the response an echo to my demand, raw and reciprocal. I asked; he answers.
The rest unfolds without inventory, because tallying it cheapens the grit: his hand sliding under the slip, fingers finding the soaked fabric between my thighs, pushing it aside to stroke my folds, parting them with deliberate pressure that makes my hips buck. My cunt aches for fullness, and he obliges, two fingers plunging in slow, curling against that spot that sends sparks up my spine, his thumb grinding circles on my clit with unerring rhythm. I grind down, riding his hand, the wet sounds filling the room like the rain outside, my breaths turning to ragged moans I don't stifle.
He watches my face, checks once with words—“This?”—and I nod, fierce, before he pauses again, lifting his gaze, waitingfor my silent yes. I give it, full-bodied, and he drives deeper, faster, until the coil snaps, my walls clenching around him in shuddering waves, release flooding me hot and unrelenting.
The robe puddles on the floor at some point, the slip rucked up uselessly around my waist. I tug his shirt wrong, buttons popping like confessions, and he laughs low, the vibration loosening knots in my chest better than any scripted reassurance. When I reach for him, palming the hard length straining his pants, he doesn't stop me—his breath hitches as I free him, stroking the thick shaft, veins pulsing under my grip, pre-cum beading at the tip. I guide him between my thighs, slick and ready, and he enters me in one controlled thrust, filling me to the hilt, the stretch burning sweet as we find a rhythm—his hips snapping forward, my legs wrapping his waist, nails raking his back as the wall bites into mine. He checks non-verbally, a pause in the thrust, eyes locked; I nod, pulling him deeper, and we chase it together, sweat-slick and urgent.
When I trace the scar on his chest, fingers pressing the raised line, his breath stutters, but he covers my hand with his, holding it there—yes to the vulnerability, warm and alive under my touch.
It crests raw, and unpolished as I shatter around him again, cunt gripping his cock in vise-like pulses, pulling his release from him with a guttural sound from his throat, hot spurts filling me as we grind through the aftershocks. No grace, just the honesty of bodies chosen on purpose. The wall anchors us; he holds me through it, breath syncing in the quiet that follows.
Afterwards, I lie against his chest, body still thrumming with echoes of the high, skin sticky and marked where his gripbruised just enough. “Now you’ve shown me,” I whisper, voice hoarse, fingers tracing idle patterns on his sweat-damp skin.
He murmurs back, lips brushing my temple, “Not yet. But soon.”
My phone buzzes again across the room, the glow cutting through the moonlight like an intruder. Neither of us moves to answer, the world outside held at bay in this shadowed space we've claimed.
Chapter 35 – Cassian
She is asleep in my bed.
Aurora lies on her stomach in the quiet aftermath of the night, one knee crooked, one hand fisted under the pillow like she means to hold the corner of it through a storm. The lamp I left on low turns her skin to warm bronze and throws the soft shadow of her shoulder across the sheet. If I were the man I keep telling everyone I am, I would take the image in, set it somewhere calm in my brain, and start reading the overnight reports from Caldwell’s committee without letting my pulse get involved.
I am not that man around her. I’m the one I promised I’d never be again—awake too early with too much heat in my chest and not enough distance in my hands.
The phone buzzes. I force my eyes to the screen.
REID:Caldwell’s staff worked the north list again at 03:17. Second attempt at a resident’s cousin. We cut the call. No disclosure.
REID:Subpoenas served on two shells in the Boston lattice. Deadline: forty-eight hours.
REID:Staffer “B.” didn’t badge out, didn’t badge in. We’re checking her lease.
I type with my thumb quietly.
ME:Move the cousin to Echo and keep her off personal devices for seventy-two. The shells—route to Armitage. He loves subpoenas. Find “B.” before breakfast. If she’s not a leak, she’s a body.
REID:Copy.
REID:Also—press is pushing Caldwell’s line that we’re “private black clinics.”
ME:Let them push. We’ll own the adjective before lunch.
I set the phone down. My eyes go back to her. I catalog the little things I missed last night while adrenaline was writing over everything else: the smear of charcoal she forgot to wash from the base of her thumb, the faint line at her jaw where she bit back a laugh when I tore the buttons, the quiet at the corners of her mouth that wasn’t there before and is now. Peace looks good on her. It startles me that I can give it.
A darker crescent on the sheet near her thigh catches my attention. It is nothing at first, until the part of my brain that spent a decade in triage registers color, weight, and edge. Not a wound. This was light fresh blood. I follow the logic I don’t need to think about: her body turned the page without telling the clock. For a second the world narrows to this single fact and the shape it makes in me.
I stand, barefoot, because I know where every board creaks and I don’t want to wake her yet. The ensuite is ten steps down the hall: marble, steam, shelves with the things most houses pretend they don’t need. When I built these rooms, I stocked them for the worst days someone could have. Towels warmed by the hidden coil, painkillers in blister packs with times written in marker along the edge, soft cotton shorts in every size in clean stacks, and a drawer most men never think about. I open it and take what I need.
The bath is the old, deep kind that holds heat like a vow. I turn the water until it runs warm but not burning; a medic’s hand at the tap, the memory of too many patients flinching away when they expect punishment instead of help. Steam ghosts the mirror. I test the temperature with the back of my wrist out of habit and glance at the reflection. A scar under my ribs like a line drawn by someone who can’t forgive. I ignore it and let the tub fill.
When I step back into the bedroom, the light has shifted a fraction. She hasn’t moved. I set the stack of folded cotton shortsand an oversized shirt on the bench at the foot of the bed, lay two warm cloths on top of the towel, and put the sanitary pads where she’ll see them first, so she doesn’t have to ask.
