Only then does he ease back, kissing the inside of each thigh like they’re something precious. When he finally crawls up my body, his lips are swollen, chin glistening, eyes blazing with satisfaction and something deeper. Worship.
“Hi,” he says quietly.
I laugh.
The sound surprises both of us.
He smiles fully then, and the sight of it feels like something breaking open inside my chest.
“There she is,” he murmurs.
I pull him down for another kiss, tasting myself on his lips and feeling a strange intimacy settle into something warm and familiar.
“More,” I whisper against his mouth.
He searches my face again.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, I trust you.”
Something shifts in his expression.
He settles between my thighs, guiding me gently, his voice quiet and steady as he tells me to stay with him.
The first press of him makes me tense instinctively, but he waits until my body relaxes before moving again. The pain sharpens briefly before softening into something fuller, deeper.
“More,” I moan.
He builds the rhythm gradually, every movement drawing a new response from my body until pleasure begins rising again, stronger this time.
When the second climax breaks through me, it feels like the ground shifting beneath my entire world.
Killian groans and buries himself deep as his control finally shatters.
Killian
Twelve days married. Five days since she knocked on my door in the middle of the night.
Five days since everything changed.
I'm leaning against the kitchen doorframe with a coffee I've forgotten to drink, watching my wife laugh at something my sister just said, and the sound of it hits me in the chest the same way it did the first time.
Katya laughs now. Not often, but when it comes, it transforms her face so completely that I have to remind myself to breathe. The sharp lines soften. The careful composure dissolves. And underneath it all is a woman I'm only beginning to know, warm, dry-witted, unexpectedly funny in the quiet, deadpan way that catches you off guard because you're not expecting the blade to come from that angle.
Iris is the one who draws it out most consistently. My sister has a gift for disarming people, a relentless, cheerful insistence on treating everyone like she's known them her entire life. She decided on day two that Katya was her new best friend, and Katya, who I suspect has never had a best friend, or possibly any friend at all, didn't stand a chance.
They're sitting at the kitchen table, heads bent together over Iris's phone, and whatever they're looking at has Katya pressing her hand over her mouth to contain the laugh that's alreadyescaped. Iris has no such restraint. She's cackling with the full-body commitment of a woman who has never once in her life been told to be quieter, and the contrast between them; Iris's sprawling, unapologetic loudness and Katya's careful, emerging joy, makes something expand in my chest that I don't try to contain.
She's different. The core of her, the sharp intelligence, the watchful precision, the composure that sits like a second skin…that's all still there. But the texture has changed. The composure is looser now. Less armor, more habit.
She eats without checking for permission first. Has done since the morning after our first night together.
She speaks in meetings. Not just when I create the space for her, but unprompted. Two days ago, she interrupted a conversation between me and one of our contacts in Tallinn to point out a discrepancy in the shipping manifest that neither of us had caught. The contact looked at her, looked at me, and I watched him recalibrate his assessment of the Orlov operation in real time.
"Your wife has sharp eyes," he said afterward.
"I know," I replied. "That's why she's in the room."
