I watched her rise, a study in defiance carved from ruin. She moved with a stiff, painful grace, a queen dethroned but refusing to kneel on the debris of her defeat. Her body was a map of my claim: the mess of slick and seed on her inner thighs, the faint flush on her cheeks that she couldn’t hide, the quivering of her legs as she tried to get a hold of herself, and the red of my handprints on her gorgeous ass. Each mark was a sentence in the story I’d just written on her naked skin.
The sun was merciless, highlighting the tremor in her limbs and the lift of her chin as she straightened her spine. That was the spark I’d seen from the beginning, the one that made her more interesting than a simple target.
The one that made meveryinterested in her.
I let the silence stretch, letting her feel the shame of her own nudity, her complete exposure, allowing the contrast of her small naked form to my large, looming, fully clothed body sink into her consciousness. The sea air was warm on my skin, but Iimagined it felt like a thousand needles against her heated flesh. Her nipples were still tight, hard points from the aftermath, or maybe from the breeze sweeping over the water, or maybe from the sheer, defiant pulse of adrenaline that hadn’t yet faded.
She lifted her chin higher. It was a small movement, but it was everything. Her dark hair was a tangled, wild mess around her face, framing eyes the color of a coming storm. They weren’t vacant, though. They weren’t defeated. They were burning with a cold, intelligent fury. A storm that had been raged against and was now gathering its strength for the next assault. She looked at me not as a victim, but as a strategist surveying the battlefield, already calculating her next move.
I could see the struggle playing out across her face, the war between the humiliated, used woman and the unbreakable agent. The agent was winning, but just barely. Her body trembled with exhaustion and the lingering echoes of her pleasure, but her gaze was proud and unflinching.
This wasn’t over and that made my dick throb even though I’d just come twice already.
A slow smile touched my lips. It was the first genuine emotion I’d allowed myself since stepping aboard this boat, and it was one of pure satisfaction. I hadn’t broken her. I’d just given her a new reason to fight.
And that was so much more interesting.
“Get dressed,” I said, my voice soft.
I didn’t watch her, at least not directly, but I heard the shift of her weight on the deck, the soft hiss of her breath as she moved. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw her look down at the scraps of her swimsuit lying near her feet. It was a tattered, pathetic thing,the delicate ties I’d snapped useless. She looked at it for a long moment, her expression unreadable.
Then, with a dignity that was almost impressive, she bent down and retrieved it. Her movements were slow, stiff, each one a small act of rebellion. She didn’t try to hide her body from me. She didn’t shrink away either. She simply performed the task, her back straight and her head held high.
She shimmied into the ruined swimsuit, the flimsy fabric clinging to her curves. She secured the broken ties as best she could, the knots clumsy but effective enough to hold. Then she reached for a silk robe she’d apparently laid aside earlier when she started sunbathing and pulled it on.
She stood before me, clothed but not covered, a portrait of ravaged dignity and beauty, and I couldn’t get enough.
To put it frankly, she looked fucking radiant that way.
She waited.
I let her wait.
I poured myself a glass of the mineral water on the table beside her lounge, the ice cubes clinking in the quiet. Taking a slow sip, my gaze finally returned to her. I studied her, the way the sun painted gold highlights onto the dark strands of her hair, the set of her jaw, the flicker of defiance in her eyes that refused to be extinguished.
“Let’s try this again,” I said, my voice coolly conversational. “Who are you, Kara Lennox?”
CHAPTER 14
Kara
The sea had turned molten in the late afternoon sun, a sheet of gold broken only by the yacht’s slow drift. Dmitri hadn’t moved since he’d last spoken. He just stood there, hands in his pockets, displaying that measured calm that made other people babble to fill the silence.
But I wasn’t like that.
“You want the truth?” I said finally. “Fine.”
He didn’t answer. That was Dmitri’s superpower, or so I was learning. He didn’t need words to command obedience. Roman charmed people into doing what he wanted. Lev was something of a bully. Dmitri simplyexisted, and people folded.
“ARCHEON isn’t a branch of any government,” I began. “They’re not even an agency, really. They are their own entity. Think of them as a private market for order versus chaos. They buy instability for one side, sell stability to the other, and take a cutwhen the dust settles. It’s simply their business model and they make a lot of money doing it. A lot.”
His gaze didn’t waver. “And you’re one of their agents.”
“Not exactly,” I said. “More like… an employee of circumstance. ARCHEON blackmailed me into working for them. Four years ago, they fabricated a dossier. Inside it, there are charges for an international assassination that never happened. Blurred photos, falsified travel logs, my name on offshore accounts I’d never heard of. If they flip that switch to put that document in Interpol’s hands, I become a global fugitive.”
“Convenient,” Dmitri murmured.
“For them, yes.” I gave a short, humorless laugh. “For me, it’s a permanent leash. They pull, and I move.”
