“Yes.” She pulled back enough to look at me, her eyes dark and certain. “Don’t overthink it. I spent three weeks thinking about it for both of us.”
I kissed her again — slower this time, one hand cradling her jaw, the other pressed flat against the railing behind her. She made a sound against my mouth that I felt in my spine.
“Here?” I said against her lips.
“Here.” Her hands worked at my belt, and I felt the slight tremor in her fingers — not uncertainty, I understood now. Emotion. The specific physical expression of something too large for the body to contain quietly. “Now. I need to feel alive. I need to feel you.”
I kissed down her neck, tasting salt and perfume, her pulse jumping under my lips. Her dress was the professional armor she wore to face the world — structured, precise, buttons down the front. I undid each one slowly, watching her skin appear in the amber glow of the city below us.
“You’re shaking,” she observed.
“I’ve wanted this.” I pressed my lips to her collarbone, the curve of her shoulder, the soft skin above her heart. “Wanted you. Every night in that empty penthouse, thinking about how badly I’d failed us. About what I should have done differently. About the specific, devastating sound you make when you finally stop fighting what you feel.”
“We failed each other.” She pulled my shirt free from my trousers, her palms spreading warm against my stomach. “Now we get to rebuild.”
I lifted her onto the wide stone railing, her legs wrapping around my waist, my hands steady at her hips. The city wind caught her hair. The Chicago skyline stretched out behind her, all those lights that had witnessed everything — the gala, the investigation, the slow unraveling and the slower rebuilding — indifferent and vast and somehow appropriate.
I dropped to my knees.
“Bash—”
“Let me.” I pressed my lips to her inner thigh, felt her muscles jump beneath my mouth. “Let me show you what you mean to me.”
I took my time — learning her again after three weeks, returning to the specific things that undid her with the focusedpatience of a man who had been given something back that he’d thought he’d lost. She gripped my hair. She said my name in the broken way she only did when she’d stopped being able to manage it into something quieter. When she came apart the sound she made disappeared into the city noise below us, and I held her through every wave until she was pulling weakly at my shoulders.
I stood, and she reached for me immediately — warm and certain, her hand wrapping around me and drawing a sound from my throat that had nothing controlled about it.
“Tell me you want this,” I said.
“I want you.” Her voice was wrecked and beautiful. “I always wanted you. Even when I shouldn’t have.”
I pressed into her slowly — watching her face, giving her time, feeling the tight heat of her surround me with the specific devastating completeness of something that had been missing and was finally, exactly, back where it belonged.
“Look at me,” I said.
She opened her eyes. In them I saw everything she’d been carrying for three weeks — the hurt and the anger and beneath it all, the thing that had never gone away no matter how many times either of us had given it reason to.
Trust. Fragile, re-forming, genuinely earned.
“I see you,” she whispered. “All of you. The control freak and the protector and the boy who couldn’t save his mother. I see you, Sebastian.”
I started to move, and rational thought dissolved.
The city lights blurred. She met each movement with her whole body, her nails raking down my back, her legs locked around my waist, both of us building toward something that had nothing to do with strategy or control or the careful management of outcomes.
“Mine,” she gasped against my neck. “You’re mine too, you know. It goes both ways.”
The words hit me like a physical force. I buried my face in her shoulder and let go of every carefully constructed wall I’d ever built — let go of all of it, the whole architecture of a life designed never to need anyone — and followed her over the edge with her name in my mouth like the prayer it had always been.
Afterward, I held her against my chest, both of us breathing hard in the cold night air. The city hummed below. Somewhere in its maze of light and glass, my empire was crumbling and reforming simultaneously — board members plotting, investors recalculating, the machinery of consequence grinding forward.
I had never felt more at peace.
“The board meeting is tomorrow,” she said eventually. “They’re going to try to force you out.”
“Probably.”
“Do you have a plan?”
