Standing between me and the north exit with the immobility of a man who’d deny he was blocking the door.
He checks my gear. His hands move across the vest closures, the shoulder straps, the fit at the waist. I let him finish.
He stops. His palms rest on my shoulders. The corridor is empty. Everyone else has already moved to the staging point.
His eyes on mine.
Something in his face that has no business being there. So far behind the control that if I didn’t know every line of him from memory, I’d miss it entirely.
Then his hands are in my hair, my back hits the wall, and his mouth is on mine.
The kiss isn’t gentle. It’s the kind that leaves bruises on the inside. His body pressed against mine, his hand gripping the back of my neck, every line of him saying what his voice won’t. I grab the front of his shirt and pull him closer and kiss him back just as hard because I understand what this is. This is the version of goodbye that can’t fit inside words.
His hands slide down my body, grip the backs of my thighs, and lift. My legs wrap around his waist, my shoulders press into the wall, and his hips pin me there.
His mouth moves to my neck. The spot below my ear, and he works it with his lips and his teeth until my head drops back against the wall and my breath comes in pieces. My fingers twist into his hair. I pull. He growls against my throat and the vibration runs through my skin and settles low.
He grinds into me over our layers of clothing. Slow. Deliberate. The hardness of him pressing exactly where I feel it most, and the sound that comes out of me isn’t quiet. His mouth comes back to mine and swallows it.
He does it again. And again. Each roll of his hips finding the same angle, the same pressure, his hand tightening on my thigh every time my breath catches. The friction builds and builds and I stop thinking about the corridor and the strike team and the building forty miles south. My fingers dig into his shoulders. My head drops back against the wall. His mouth finds my throat and he doesn’t stop moving.
How does this feel this good?
My back arches off the wall. My thighs lock around him. The wave crests and I come apart against him with his mouth on my neck, my hands fisted in his shirt, and the wall holding me up because my body has stopped doing it.
He holds me through it. His forehead against mine. Both of us breathing harder than we need to. He rolls his hips against mine a final time, sending shockwaves through me.
His thumb traces my jaw once. His eyes hold mine from inches away.
“This is what you need to come back to,” he says. Low. Against my mouth. “This. Do you understand me?”
“Yes.”
He sets me down. My legs don’t hold right away. His hand stays on my hip until they do, and the look on his face when he feels me unsteady is pure satisfaction.
His control slides back into place. His hand drops. He steps back.
I straighten my vest. My pulse is still pounding, my legs are shaky, and I can still feel him everywhere he just was.
Great. Now I’m breaching a Konstantin facility in wet underwear.
“Run it tight,” he says. The command voice. The one that expects the universe to comply. “Get them out.”
“Every one of them,” I confirm.
His mouth pulls at one corner.
I turn. Walk toward the north exit. I don’t look back. His footsteps turn toward the command center.
The team is at the north exit.
Julian with his comm kit. Alexei in dark clothes, no tactical gear.
I look at each of them. “The people in those facilities didn’t choose to be there. They didn’t choose any of this.” I hold for one beat. “We did. We get them out. Every one of them.”
We run.
Vampire speed through rural Georgia. The landscape shearing past in streaks of dark green and black, pine canopy overhead and red clay underfoot, the highway a distant ribbon of headlights half a mile to our left.
