The orgasm hits with the force of a breaking wave. My vision goes white, body convulsing as wave after wave of white-hot bliss crashes over me. I’m screaming his name, fingers clawing at his shoulders.
He doesn’t stop. He thrusts hard and fast, his own control finally breaking. He lets out a roar, body locking up as he spends himself inside me. He comes hard, shaking above me, the barrier between us the only practical thing left in the room.
He collapses against me, weight pinning me to the server rack. We stay like that, hearts slamming in sync. The silence of the room returns, but it is not peace. It is the pause before we remember what is still waiting.
He shifts us, somehow, without ever letting me go—down off the rack, onto the floor where our clothes make a poor blanket over cold concrete, and he takes the cold for himself, my body arranged over his like something rescued. Under my ear, his heart is still sprinting. The great, controlled Alessio Costa, decorated keeper of this family’s every secret, and his heart is galloping like a teenager’s because of me.
“You’re smug,” he says to the ceiling.
“I’m comfortable. You’re a very expensive mattress.”
His laugh moves under me, low and unguarded, and I press my palm flat over it like I could keep some. Two hours ago we were pulling Vane’s secrets out of a network. Two minutes ago I couldn’t have told you my own name. The vault hums around us, patient, and neither of us reaches for our clothes.
His fingers find my spine and travel it slowly, one vertebra at a time, like he’s memorizing. Not medical. Nothing like medical. A man learning a country he intends to die in.
“Again,” he says. Not a question. Not quite a command either—something lower, something that has given up pretending to be casual.
“You’re not serious.”
“I have wasted eleven years in this room.” He rolls me under him with that terrifying, easy economy of motion, and the cold concrete is at my back for half a second before his forearm slides beneath me and takes even that. His mouth grazes my jaw, my throat, unhurried now, deliberate where before he was starving. “I don’t waste time anymore.”
The second time is nothing like the first.
The first was a dam failing. This is a man building something. He moves down my body like the work matters, like the sounds I make are data he’s collecting for a lifetime of use—the catch of my breath when his mouth closes over my breast, the way my hips rise when his hand slides between my thighs, slow, slower, until I’m the one begging and I don’t even recognize my own voice.
“Alessio—”
“I know.” His mouth against my stomach, my hip. “I’ve got you. I’m just slow tonight. Complain to management.”
“Management is—oh, God—management is compromised?—”
“Thoroughly,” he agrees, and then his mouth is on me and language stops being one of my skills.
He takes me apart with a patience that borders on cruelty, builds me up and eases me back twice until I’m cursing his entire bloodline, and when he finally settles over me and pushes inside, both of us groan like it’s the first time all over again—slow, deep, his forehead dropped to mine, his eyes open.
That’s the part that undoes me. He watches. Nobody has ever watched me like that, like the point of it is my face.
“There you are,” he murmurs, rocking into me, unhurried and devastating. “There’s my girl.”
It builds like weather this time, far off and inevitable, and when it breaks I don’t shatter—I dissolve, waves and waves of it, his name in my mouth like something I’ve been saying my whole life. He follows me down with a low, broken sound, my name buried in my hair, his arms closing around me like the answer to a question I’ve been asking since Atlanta.
For a long while, the vault just hums.
“I can hear you thinking,” he says at last.
“I’m not thinking. I’m doing inventory.” I stretch against him, boneless, ruined for all other mattresses. “One lockedstudy. One whiteboard. One extremely thorough man. Zero regrets.”
“Zero.” He says it quietly, testing the number.
“Zero,” I confirm, and feel something in his chest come untied.
He’s quiet for a while, his hand tracing lazy lines on my shoulder, and when he speaks again his voice has that stripped-bare register it only finds in the dark.
“Eleven years, this room was the loneliest place in Chicago.” He says it to the ceiling. “I used to finish a night at that whiteboard and stand at the door with my hand on the light switch, and the click when it went off was the loudest sound in my life. Every night. One click, eleven years.”
I press my mouth to his sternum, right over the steady thunder of him.
“And now?”
