We don't make it to the floor by choice. Vix hooks her leg behind my knee and shifts her weight, and the result is both of us on the ground with papers scattering and neither of us caring. Her back hits the floor and I'm over her, pulling at her trousers while she shoves at mine, and the graceless urgency of it is more honest than anything either of us has said in this room. I get her trousers down her thighs and she kicks them the rest of the wayoff one leg, leaving them tangled around the other ankle because neither of us is willing to waste the seconds it would take to finish the job.
She shoves me backwards and straddles me, one hand braced on my chest, and sinks down before I'm ready. The wet heat of her is a shock that travels the full length of my spine, and the groan that tears out of me is low and rough and sounds nothing like control. Vix rolls her hips in a slow grind that takes me deep and holds me there, and the way her lips part and her breath catches tells me she feels it the same way I do.
She sets a pace that is punishing, deliberate, her thighs flexing against my hips, her nails digging crescents into my chest through the cotton of my shirt. I grip her hips and watch her move above me, her hair falling forward around her face, her shirt open and the skin beneath flushed and damp, and the sight of her is something I will carry long after this floor has cooled.
She rides me until I can't let her, until restraint becomes something my body simply refuses. I grip her jaw, sit up into her, and the angle change drags a sharp exhale from her that resonates off the walls.
I roll us and pin her beneath me with my weight and my hands and a thrust that buries me deep enough to feel the resistance of her body yielding. Her response is all challenge. Her nails rake down my back hard enough to score through the fabric of my shirt and her teeth find the muscle at the cap of my shoulder and the pain mixes with the slick, tight heat of her until every sensation collapses into a single frequency I haven't felt since Vienna.
I drive into her with a rhythm built from absence and carrying every year of it, slow on the withdrawal and hard on the return, and Vix wraps her legs around my hips and takes every stroke with a ferocity that matches mine. Her shoulders willcarry the marks of this floor the same way my back will carry the marks of her nails, and neither of us slows down.
"Harder." The word leaves her mouth on a breath that breaks in the middle, and I comply because there is no version of this where I deny her anything she asks for with that voice. I brace one hand beside her head and drive deeper, and her back arches off the floor and her hand grips the front of my shirt so hard the fabric strains at the seams. The angle shifts with her arch and I feel her tighten around me, a rhythmic clench that tells me she's close.
My hand slides between us. My thumb finds her clit and presses with a firm, circling pressure that makes her gasp and clamp down around me hard enough that my vision blurs at the edges.
I keep the pressure steady, keep the pace relentless, and watch her face as the tension builds across her body. Her jaw tightens. Her breathing fractures into short, ragged pulls, and her hips cant up to meet every thrust with a desperation that strips away every layer of control she maintains in every other room of this compound.
Vix comes with her teeth buried in my shoulder and her body locking around mine with a force that drags me to the edge and holds me there. The orgasm rolls through her in waves I feel from the inside, and the rhythmic pulse of her around me shatters whatever remained of my restraint.
I bury myself as deep as her body allows, and the release whites out the briefing room, the display, the maps. Nothing survives it except the heat of her and the grip of her hand on my jaw and the raw, gutted sound I press against her throat.
We lie on the briefing room floor with our breathing ragged and scattered papers around us. The display still glows with Prague maps. The coffee on the table has gone cold. I can feel her pulse where my mouth rests against her neck, fast and hard, andthe skin there is damp with sweat and faintly bruised where my teeth must have landed.
"Still changes nothing," Vix says. Her voice is steady. Her fingers are still wrapped around my jaw.
I press my mouth against the curve where her neck meets her shoulder and taste the salt on her skin. "Liar."
She doesn't argue, and she doesn't agree. She releases me and pushes herself up, pulls her trousers from where they're tangled around one ankle and dresses with an efficiency she brings to harder things than this. She buttons her shirt from bottom to top without looking at me, runs her fingers through her hair once, and walks toward the door without looking back.
I stay on the floor longer than necessary. The LED lights hum overhead with the flat tone they always carry inside this mountain. I can still feel her on my skin, the weight and heat and friction of her body against mine, and the absence of it is a loss I register in terms that have nothing to do with sentimentality.
My body spent years forgetting what it felt like to be hers, and now it remembers, and the remembering is worse than the forgetting ever was.
I stand and straighten my own clothes, then begin collecting the papers that scattered when we stopped pretending the briefing was about Prague. I sort mission timelines and approach routes and Committee personnel files and Baumann's intelligence summary into the precise stack Vix maintains, the organizational habit that makes her intelligence work look effortless to people who don't understand what it costs.
The last page stops me.
The Prague operational timeline fills the final page, annotated in her handwriting, approach windows marked in blue ink and contingency protocols noted in the margins. The detail is meticulous, every variable accounted for, every risk assessed with the thoroughness I've come to expect from thewoman who ran the most effective independent intelligence network in Europe.
At the bottom of the page, beneath the final contingency notation and written in the same precise blue ink, is a single line:
Don't die in Prague. I'm not done being angry at you.
I fold the note and put it in my pocket. It sits against my chest like a second heartbeat, and it is the closest thing to a love letter I've received in ten years.
17
VICTORIA
Prague, Czech Republic
Prague smells like rain and old stone, and the cobblestones under my heels are slick enough to remind me that vanity kills in this business. The shoes are part of the cover, Italian leather with a heel that adds enough height to shift my center of gravity, and I chose them because the woman I'm pretending to be tonight would own nothing less. A Committee financier with access to asset redistribution channels does not arrive at a Cold War-era restaurant in Mala Strana wearing tactical flats.
The last time I walked through this district, I was running from destruction. Weeks ago, though it feels longer, I moved through Prague like a ghost burning the last of her network, warning Marek in his Vinohrady flat, handing him cash and telling him to disappear. He was dead before the warning could matter.
This time is different. I am different.
The earpiece sits flush against my canal, invisible beneath the fall of my hair. Sarah comes through from Echo Base, crisp and efficient, already hours into the Montana night shift.
