“You like this, sweetheart?” he pants, voice wrecked. “Me fucking you like I mean it?”
“Yes—Jon—don’t stop.”
He shifts, grabs my thigh, pushes deeper—hits something inside methat makes me see stars. I scream his name, no shame, just desperation.
“You’re mine,” he growls. “No one touches you like this. No one fucks you like this.”
I nod, frantic, tears slipping down my cheeks—not from pain, but from everything. From release. From relief. From how much I feeleverythingwhen he’s inside me like this.
He kisses them away. Whispers, “I’ve got you. Let go.”
And I do.
I shatter under him, clenching hard around his cock, dragging him over the edge with me. He curses, grinds deep one last time, and collapses onto his forearms, buried inside me while we both tremble.
We stay like that, wrapped up in each other, the only sound is our heavy breaths and the distant buzz of the world we left behind.
His lips brush my temple. “You okay?”
I nod, eyes closed, with a small sniffle. “Yeah. You?”
He exhales like he’s still catching up. “Not even close. But I’m not going anywhere.”
And neither am I.
Chapter 20
Delilah Barrinheart
I wake to the soft scrape of sunlight across my eyelids, the room quiet except for the faint hum of the base in the distance. For a second, I don’t remember where I am. My chest rises and falls, heart still a little too fast, and I lie there in that blurred space between sleep and waking, waiting for memory to catch me like a tide.
It does.
Not all at once. Not in one clean hit. It comes in pieces. The weight of sheets tangled low around my legs. The ache in my ribs that is no longer just injury but aftermath. The low burn between my thighs, the kind that makes heat crawl up my throat because it doesn’t belong to fear. Then the scent reaches me—cigar smoke sunk into fabric, that sharp clean trace of soap, the unmistakable scent of him—and suddenly my whole body remembers before my mind fully catches up.
Jon.
Last night.
His hands bracketing my face in the dark. His voice asking, not taking. The way his mouth moved over mine like he was tryingto ground both of us at once. The way my body, for once, didn’t flinch. Didn’t freeze. Didn’t go somewhere else.
My stomach twists. Not with regret. Not exactly. Something more complicated than that. Something heavier. More dangerous.
It wasn’t a dream.
I press the heels of my palms to my eyes for a second, breathing through the flood of it. I should feel wrecked by what it means. I should feel ashamed. I should feel guilty enough to choke on it. Instead, what I feel most is the dull, impossible relief that it happened and didn’t break me. That I wanted it. That I chose it. That for a handful of hours in the dark, my body belonged to me again.
That realization is almost scarier than the night itself.
I push myself upright, tossing the blankets aside, letting the evidence of him and me and everything that happened fade into the edges of the day before it can swallow me whole. I can’t dwell. Not now. Not when there are worse things waiting. Not when this morning isn’t just a morning—it’s a setup. A stage. A target dressed like a birthday party.
The briefing came through last night. The man who held me, who tore everything apart, is back in play. Mikhail is still moving, still calculating, still alive. There’s no room for regret or lingering desire or the dangerous, tender ache of remembering Jon bare-chested in the dark saying my name like it mattered. There’s no room for waking up soft.
I swing my legs over the side of the bed and force myself into motion. My kit is already laid out in pieces, half practical, half camouflage. I move through it methodically now, hands steady because fear sharpens focus like a blade when you don’t let it turn on you first. Every strap, every weapon, every hidden blade, every backup comm falls into place with the precision ofsomeone who knows exactly what’s coming—or at least knows how to pretend she does.
I pause over the dress draped on my chair.
White.
