I collapsed on top of him, my breath ragged against his neck, and he held me close. His cock was still half-hard inside me, his come leaking out around the stretch, and I could feel the sticky mess of my own release smeared between us. We hugged close, the only sound in the room was our harsh, uneven breathing, the occasional creak of the bed as our bodies settled.
Finally, Novak spoke, his voice was rough, almost hesitant. “Mine.”
I turned my head just enough to press my lips to his wrist, my own voice a wrecked whisper. “Yours.”
Epilogue
CALEB
FIVE MONTHS LATER
“This isn’t a date,”I said, keeping my voice low as I adjusted the lens and zoomed in on the building across the street.
“We’re together,” Novak replied from beside me. “That meets the criteria.”
“That’s not how dates work.”
“It is now.”
I huffed out a breath that might have been a laugh and leaned against the cold brick, eyes back on the target, the quiet rhythm of a stakeout settling in around us—cars passing, distant voices, the hum of a city that didn’t know we were watching it.
He stood close, his attention split between the building and me in a way that didn’t make sense and somehow made perfect sense at the same time.
“I can’t believe you planned surveillance as a date.”
“It’s optimal,” he said after a moment. “Me. You. Together. We get work done.”
“Dinner and candles might be better.”
He shot me a glance. “You’d prefer that?”
Would I? I shook my head. “No. Me. You. Together. Getting work done,” I said with a smile.
“Best date so far,” he said.
Now that I didn’t believe. “Better than the firing range? Or the time you made me stalk Killian as practice?” I asked.
Killian had spotted me in under thirty seconds, walking straight up to us, and saying, deadpan, “If you’re going to follow me, at least commit,” before taking my coffee out of my hand and drinking it while Novak recalibrated in real time. Novak had sat me down afterward and called it a data point, told me it was commendable I’d lasted that long. I’d laughed it off at the time, but it stuck with me—because that was how he worked, how he understood the world, and somehow I understood him right back, wanted him anyway, wanted all of it, the way he thought, the way he chose me, the way he’d become something that wasn’t separate from me anymore but threaded through everything I was.
Because he might’ve been a possessive asshole, and had gone past casual acquaintance in a heartbeat, to deciding I was his, to telling me I was his forever in as many meetings, but I called him boyfriend and learned new things every day, determined to have my own journey in this relationship.
He still had nightmares, but I’d never woken up with his hands around my neck. I never asked him about his time at the convent or in the military, and he never offered it to me. Apart from dreams that woke him, he didn’t spend time in the past, and couldn’t understand why anyone would want to, but that was okay.
Whatever had shaped him, I loved the man he was. He was determined to protect me in everything I did, but fuck, I protected the man I loved straight back.
Levi had asked me once how it worked between us, and I hadn’t had an answer for him, just that itdid—that Novak choseme, and I chose him back, and somewhere in that, it became real and something I wasn’t willing to lose.
I adjusted the camera again, caught movement in one of the upper windows, logged it, filed it, did the job I always did, and then my phone buzzed in my pocket.
I ignored it.
It buzzed again.
“Check it,” Novak said.
“I’m working.”
“It’s not being covert,” he said.
