“Fuck me, please, Armen.”
Something changes in his expression. The calm stays but an edge joins it. He grips my hips harder and drives up into me. Hard. The sound I make is loud and raw and I don’t try to muffle it.
“Harder,” I say.
He flips me. On my back, him on top, one hand pinning my wrists above my head. His hips drill me, deep and relentless. His mouth is on my neck, my collarbone, my breast. I arch into him, wrapping my legs around his back and pulling deeper.
“You good, baby?” he growls against my skin.
“So good.”
He fucks me hard enough that the bed frame hits the wall and neither of us cares. His hand releases my wrists and slides between us, his thumb finding my clit, pressing and circling. The combination is devastating. The rage in my body is converting into something else. Heat. Pressure. A wave building from my core.
I come with his thumb on my clit and his cock buried deep. My whole body locks around him. He follows me seconds later, his rhythm breaking, a groan pressed into my shoulder, his hands gripping the sheets on either side of my head.
We lie there, his weight on me, my legs still wrapped around him, both of us breathing hard.
After a minute, he lifts his head and looks at me with those steady eyes. Even post-sex, even breathing hard, even with sweat on his temples, his eyes are calm.
“Feel better?” he asks.
“What? Was that a pity fuck?” I ask, smiling.
Who cares if it was? It was awesome.
“He’ll come around, Vi.”
“Don’t talk about Sting right now.”
“Okay.” He rolls off me, onto his back. I curl into his side because Armen’s body is warm and the only thing in this building that feels safe at the moment.
We don’t talk at all. I lie there with my head on his chest and his arm around me, and I let the anger drain out of me until what’s left is just tired.
Tomorrow, I’ll figure out how to get those papers with or without Sting’s permission. Tomorrow, I’ll be the woman with a plan.
Tonight, I’m the woman in Armen’s bed.
21
STING
Four days.
It’s been four days since Vi stood in the Skylight Room and asked me if I’d already made up my mind about her father. Four days since I didn’t answer. Four days of meals and work shifts and corridor crossings and the ordinary machinery of life inside the Rot, all of it running smoothly, our strange existence notwithstanding.
Vi hasn’t raised the subject again. She hasn’t argued, pushed, pleaded, or deployed any of the tactics I’d prepared myself for. She’s done something worse.
She’s been polite.
Not cold or hostile. Not even obviously distant. Just… civil. The kind of civil that leads to death by a thousand cuts, so slow you don’t feel it until it’s too late. Sure, she speaks to me at meals in the same tone she uses with Runts at the work hub, all pleasant and efficient but completely stripped of anything personal. She answers direct questions asked of her, and doesn’t hang around any longer than she has to.
Anger I could work with, if she were to throw that my way. Anger has structure, it’s almost tangible. It has a beginning, a middle, and an end. I know how to navigate anger because angry people want something, and wanting something means there’s a conversation to be had.
So this isn’t anger. It’s withdrawal. And withdrawal doesn’t want a damn thing from me.
I notice shit. That’s on me, it’s always been my cross to bear. The machinery in my head remembers and cross-references and refuses to let a single thing pass unexamined. I can’t turn it off. Never been able to. And it’s served me well, especially during the downfall of the city of Rothwell. Hell, I came out on top compared to a lot of people, if you can consider life inside the Rot something desirable.
And now, my brain is focused on Vi with the same relentless precision I apply to everything else around me, except the data it’s collecting isn’t tactical.
