“Let’s go inside,” she said.
Not uttering another word, we went back into the house and somehow, without tripping while kissing each other senseless, we landed on the bed.
Foreplay was a luxury neither of us could afford in that moment. The way her eyes shone, and her hands roamed my back, told me she was as impatient as I felt. Our clothes were a pile on the floor in a second.
“I want to see you,” I told her, pulling her towards me as I sat up against the headboard.
Guiding her by her hips, I led her to ride me, taking me in inch by inch. She threw her head back as she took all of my length in. Then she started moving, her hips moving in slow circles, which soon became faster movements.
I kissed her neck as she held on to my shoulders. Her breasts bounced as she moved, driving me even crazier.
Our hands didn’t leave each other’s bodies. Our intimacy was more emotional than it was physical. I could admit to feeling that much.
My mouth covered her left nipple as she reached her climax, arching her back. I followed in seconds, a groan escaping my lips.
Minutes later, as I held her beneath the covers, it was with the conviction that whatever darkness was coming, we’d face it together.
Chapter Fifteen
Sofia
I woke at 5:15 am and lay still for several minutes.
It was not insomnia. I had slept well, and the waking was not the gasping, disoriented kind.
Viktor was asleep.
He was on his back, which I had learned was not how he slept—he slept on his side, facing the room. On his back meant deeper sleep than usual, the unfamiliar environment having done what unfamiliar environments sometimes did to people who kept themselves perpetually vigilant: forced a depth of rest that the body had been accumulating debt for and was now collecting.
I had slept with my head on his chest and woken with my hand on his ribs, which I moved carefully now, and accomplished without disturbing the rhythm of his breathing.
I sat up. Looked at the window. The desert outside was the specific dark that precedes dawn—not night anymore, not yet morning, the sky at its eastern edge a shade lighter than theory, the first hesitation of light that arrives before any visible sun.
I got up.
The secondary phone was in my bag.
I had not used it since the estate. I had erased the thread, had told myself I was finished with it, had stood in the Golovin guest room and made a private statement about finishing whatI’d started—and then I had spent four days at a desert property with Viktor, walking scrub land, eating shared meals, and standing under stars while he told me things about twelve-year-old Viktor Golovin that I had not expected him to know how to tell.
Erasing the thread had not made me innocent of the thread. Deciding I was done had not undone the confirmation I had provided, the footage I had enabled, the ballroom I had indirectly filled with chaos and gunfire. Those things had happened regardless of what I decided from this point forward.
And Cruz’s organization knew my contact number. If I went silent, they would draw conclusions from the silence. They would assess the risk that I had been turned—that Viktor had identified me, that I was now feeding the Golovin operation rather than them. That assessment would produce action. The kind that didn’t ask first.
If I made contact, I could manage the narrative. Could tell them something that satisfied without delivering what they had asked for. Could buy time, keep the silence from becoming a threat signal, and maintain enough of the communication that I was not immediately categorized as a liability.
I sat on the low stone step at the back of the property and looked at the desert.
The contact message came through forty minutes later.
“Your silence is noted. Circumstances require confirmation that you are not compromised. Provide current location and security configuration, or we assume the worst.”
I read it three times.
Assume the worstwas not ambiguous. I had spent enough time in the proximity of dangerous men to understand the operational meaning of that phrase, which was not, ‘we’ll be disappointed in you,’ but something with harder edges. They had invested in me as an asset. Assets that went dark were liabilities. And liabilities were managed.
I thought about Viktor asleep on his back with his jaw set even in unconsciousness. I thought about his hand finding mine in the car, which he had done without.
I thought about his voice in the dark when he said, ‘I will burn the Strip before I let them use you.
