Until she had to figure out if this flutter in the pit of her stomach had to do with seeing him, or was dread about seeing him walk out those doors on a mission.
This was what it meant to be part of this world. These women learned to live in the space between goodbye and come-home-safe.
Even if she was given a choice, Ellory didn’t know if she wanted to be part of it at all—especially when she wasn’t sure if she had what it took to survive it.
NINE
Ash was halfway through a plate of meatballs and a deep study of Ellory across the dining room table when new intel came in.
It wasn’t unusual for the team to scramble in the middle of a meal, but as he scraped his chair back with his brothers, the look on Ellory’s face made his chest tighten.
When they reached the war room, Dante pulled up new satellite imagery showing they needed to strike fast because the target site had gone hot—vehicles arriving, heat signatures inside the warehouse multiplying. Whatever operation Cipher’s people were running, it was already underway.
Con dismissed them with a single nod that set them all in motion. Ash was out the door before the others had fully pushed back their chairs.
He moved fast through the corridor and hit the stairwell, taking the steps two at a time. It was in that climb—in those few seconds when his body was occupied and his mind had half a breath of space—that a memory surfaced. Of Melina.
She always entered his thoughts before an op. It wasn’t grief—not anymore—but something quieter and more permanently part of him. A reminder of what could go wrong.
He hadn’t made that call fast enough. Hadn’t changed course after receiving new intel the way Con had. And for that, Melina died.
He didn’t let himself stop moving. He just let the memory do what it always did—sharpen him like an edge of a steel blade.
He pushed up the last flight of stairs and turned toward the only thing he cared about in this moment.
He knocked once, then opened the door before Ellory could answer.
She sat at the small desk with her laptop open, glasses sliding down her nose, legs crossed in that prim, sexy secretary way that had his balls clenching with need.
As he burst in, she pushed halfway out of her seat, something moving through her expression that made his heart slam.
In three steps, he crossed the room and pulled her up out of the chair. Before either of them could think too hard about it, he kissed her without holding back, slamming his lips over hers. Taking. Claiming.
She issued a tiny sound against his mouth, and then her hands were on him, gripping his shirt, twisting to bring him closer.
He yanked her flush against his body and kissed her the way he’d been imagining all goddamn day. When she was across the table in the war room with the whole team surrounding them, he wanted to sink his tongue between her sweet lips.
When she sat across the dining table from him, twirling her pasta around her fork, he wanted to leap over the table, pin her to the wall and kiss herjust…like…this.
He plunged his tongue inside her mouth, and she stroked it in return, as unhurried as he was urgent.
He fisted a hand in her hair to tilt her head back, and the other spread over the small of her back.
In some distant, still-functioning part of his brain, he registered he had only twenty-five minutes left. He was not going to regret spending a single one here.
She sank her fingers into his shoulders as she anchored herself against him, pressing onto tiptoe to kiss him back like she understood what he couldn’t say.
With a deep rumble of want, he walked her backward until her shoulders met the wall, breaking the kiss just long enough to drag his mouth along the line of her delicate jaw.
Her breath caught at his ear, the small undone sound that had been its own spotlight in his memory since last night.
He swept his mouth down the arch of her throat to the smooth point where her pulse was tripping fast and hard. When he pressed his mouth there and felt how crazy he was making her too, he let his eyes drift shut.
He made himself memorize the rhythm, because twenty-three minutes wasn’t enough time and he needed something to carry with him.
She slid her hands up into his hair and curled against his scalp as he traced her throat with his lips, taking his time even though time was exactly what he didn’t have.
When he found her waist and worked his hands under the hem of her shirt to spread across the bare, warm skin of her back, her breath hitched.
