MAN FOUND DEAD IN SUSPECTED MUGGING
Kyle-John Jones, 39. Found in an alley behind a shuttered laundromat. Single stab wound to the chest. Wallet missing.Police are treating it as a robbery gone wrong. No witnesses. No suspects. Investigation ongoing.
She reads it twice. Then she folds the paper and sets it down and picks her coffee back up.
"They bought it," she says.
"You staged it well."
"It wasn't complicated. Take the wallet, leave the body, let the scene tell the story." She takes a sip. "The police don't look hard at men like Kyle-John Jones. He had a record. A history of low-level violence. People like him die in alleys and the investigation file gets buried under cases that matter more to someone with a badge."
There's no guilt or second-guessing in her voice. She speaks in that flat, factual tone of a woman who has done this before and knows exactly how the system works, because she's spent six years operating in the spaces it refuses to cover.
"How do you feel?" I ask.
She looks at me. Considers the question. "The same way I always feel after. Quiet. Like the noise stops for a while."
I pour my own coffee and sit across from her. The morning light is coming through the kitchen window and it catches the side of her face as I think about how many mornings I want exactly this. Her in my shirt. Coffee on the table. The paper between us with evidence of what we are folded neatly beside the fruit bowl.
Every morning. That's how many.
"Can I ask you something?" she says.
"Anything."
She wraps both hands around her mug. I've noticed she does this when she's about to say something that costs her. The mugis a prop. Something to hold onto while the words find their way out.
"I want to know if there's something more I can do. For you. In bed."
I set my coffee down. "More?"
"I don't have a frame of reference, Yevgeny. Everything I know about sex I've learned in the last three days from you. Which means everything I do is either instinct or imitation. And I don't want to just imitate. I want to know what you want. Specifically."
The honesty of it is raw and somehow surprising. Most women I've been with came to bed with assumptions and performances and a list of things they thought men wanted. Stefania comes with none of that.
"You're not lacking anything," I say. "What we've had has been—"
"I know it's been good. I can tell by the way you respond to me. But good isn't the same as everything, and I told you I don't do things halfway." She lifts her chin. "Tell me. Whatever you want. I'm not fragile and I'm not going to break. You know that better than anyone."
I look at her across the table. My wife who killed a man two nights ago and staged the scene like a professional and is now sitting in my kitchen asking me to teach her how to please me with the same focus she brings to a target profile.
I should not find that as sexy as I do.
"There is something," I say.
She waits.
"I want to watch you touch yourself."
Her coffee mug pauses halfway to her mouth. A flicker of something crosses her face. Not discomfort. Surprise. This is territory she hasn't considered.
"I've never..." She stops. Recalibrates. "I've done it, obviously. But alone. In the dark. It was functional. Quick. I never thought of it as something someone else would want to see."
"That's exactly why I want to see it."
She sets the mug down. Her eyes are steady on mine but I can see the pulse jumping in her throat. "Why?"
I lean forward. "Because you've spent six years controlling everything. Every movement, every expression, every part of yourself that the world gets to see. When you touch yourself for me, you can't control what your face does. You can't control the sounds you make. You can't hide." I hold her gaze. "I've watched you take down a man twice your size without flinching. I want to watch you come undone with nothing but your own hand and my instruction."
