He withdraws his fingers and positions himself at my entrance. He grasps his cock and rubs a slow circle around my clit with the head, making me gasp. I arch up toward him, and he pushes inside with one slow, steady thrust. I wrap my legs around his waist and pull him deeper. The stretch fills me completely, and we stay still, locked together, and breathing against each other’s mouths for seconds that feel endless.
He starts to move. The rhythm is slow and deep, matching the pace we’ve set all night, and each thrust carries intention rather than desperation. I move with him, lifting my hips to meet each stroke, and the coordination between us has the same effortless quality it had on the plane. His touch is so familiar and right that it feels like we’ve done this countless times instead of just two before tonight.
“Don’t hold back,” I say, feeling him measuring each thrust while controlling the pace to make it last, and I don’t want restraint now. I want the version of him that loses it.
He listens. The pace increases, and his thrusts deepen until I’m gripping his shoulders and the headboard is hitting the wall. He reaches between us and presses his thumb against my clit, and the combination builds faster than I expect. I come hard, my pussy clenching around his cock, and cry out against his neck without trying to muffle it because there’s nobody to hear us tonight. The room is virtually soundproof.
He follows me over the edge with four hard thrusts, his cock pulsing inside me while he grips my hips. When he comes, he cries out against my shoulder, making no attempt to be quiet. This is Adrian without filters, and I hold on to him through it.
We lie together afterward, tangled in sheets, with his arm around me and my head on his chest. The room is quiet except for our breathing and the faint bass from below. His heartbeat is steady under my ear, slowing gradually from the pace it was keeping a minute ago.
“I’ve stopped thinking of this as temporary.” I say it to the dark room, not to his face, because saying it while looking at him requires watching his reaction, and I’m not ready for whatever that might be.
He tightens his arm around me. He doesn’t answer, but he pulls me closer, and the pressure of his arm across my ribs says what his words haven’t yet. I close my eyes and let myself rest against him without analyzing what this means, where it leads, or if I’m making a mistake.
I just stay.
14
ADRIAN
Viktor arrives at the Key Largo property at eight in the morning with coffee from a gas station and a folder thick enough to concern me. He sets both on the kitchen table, pulls out a chair, and doesn’t sit in it. He stands behind it with both hands on the back.
“Hayes is escalating.”
I get my espresso from the machine and sit. “How?”
“He’s harassing Marisol Cruz aggressively. Her attorney sent a formal cease-and-desist to his precinct. Marisol’s lawyer, Rebecca Fischer, is aggressive and competent, but Hayes has the badge and the institutional cover to absorb a cease-and-desist without changing his behavior.”
Viktor opens the folder. “He’s also interviewed seven former Echelon employees in the last ten days. He pulled partial entry footage from three businesses surrounding the club, whichmeans he’s building a timeline of who entered and exited the night Dominic disappeared.”
“Has he found Aurora on any of the footage?”
“Not yet. Grigor’s wipe was thorough for Echelon’s own systems, but the neighboring businesses use independent security that we couldn’t access without leaving a trail. There’s a convenience store across the street with a camera pointed at the sidewalk. If Hayes pulls that footage and cross-references it with the Echelon timeline, he could see Aurora leaving through the rear corridor.”
“Could or will?”
“The footage is what…five weeks old? Most convenience stores overwrite their security recordings every two to four weeks. Grigor is monitoring the store’s system remotely to determine whether the relevant window still exists.” Viktor turns a page in the folder. “If it does, we have a narrow opportunity to address it. If Hayes has already obtained a copy, we’re working with a different problem.”
I drink my espresso. “What else?”
“He’s made two unofficial attempts to reach Aurora outside normal police channels. The first was a text message sent from a personal phone to a number associated with Aurora’s former apartment building, apparently hoping the building manager would forward it. The second was a message passed through a former Echelon bartender who still has Aurora’s personal number.”
“Nathan Reyes?” Just saying his name sparks a surge of cold anger.
Viktor sneers. “After thetalkFedor had with Reyes, he won’t tell Karpov anything unless he’s being tortured. He knows he’ll no longer be communicating with anyone if he crosses us again. This was a different bartender. The messages were intercepted by Grigor. Both were phrased as welfare checks, but the language was personal, not procedural. He’s asking where she is, whether she’s safe, and if she left voluntarily. That last question appears in both messages.”
Eric Hayes is no longer conducting a police investigation. He’s hunting a woman he believes he has a right to find, and he’s using the badge to justify it.
“There’s one more thing.” Viktor pulls a second document from the folder. “Grigor recovered the primary archive of Dominic’s recordings from a cloud server Dominic was using as a backup. The archive is now secured and wiped. The virus Grigor deployed should prevent any recovery.”
“And Karpov’s copies?”
“He has residual copies. He downloaded files before Dominic died, and those give him leverage, but the complete archive is now in our hands. Grigor confirmed that Karpov’s last download happened three days before Dominic was killed. Nothing from those final three days reached Karpov’s server.”
I narrow my eyes. “Can we be certain?”
Viktor hesitates. “Not completely. Grigor found no evidence of a secondary backup system, and the virus he deployed destroyed the server infrastructure, but if Karpov has another storage location we haven’t identified, that’s a gap we can’t close from this end.”
