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These thoughts sat side by side in my chest, refusing to cancel each other out the way they should have.

I closed the tablet and put it back exactly as I’d found it, angled the folder back to the precise inch it had occupied before, and straightened before leaning back. The shower cut off down the hall a few seconds later, and I had just enough time to smooth my dress again before the bathroom door opened.

He came back in a plain white shirt and dark pants, hair still damp, and something in the way he moved had changed. He was slower and quieter now. He was barefoot, which struck me as strange given how carefully he dressed for everything else in his life. He crossed the room and stopped in front of me, studying my face the way he studied everything, and for one terrifying second I was certain he already knew.

He didn’t. He reached out instead and tucked a loose strand of hair behind my ear.

“You’re here,” he said, like he hadn’t quite believed it himself.

“You invited me.”

“I did.” He said it like an admission, like the invitation itself had surprised him more than it had me. His thumb traced the line of my jaw slowly, and I felt the softness of the touch somewhere far deeper than my skin.

This time when he kissed me, there was none of the frantic heat from his office. His hands moved slower, deliberate in a different way now, less like a man losing control and more like one memorizing something he intended to keep. He walked me backward toward the bedroom without breaking the kiss, unhurried, pausing once at the doorway like he was giving either of us a chance to change course. Neither of us took it.

The next minute we were both fully naked at the center of his large bed, with him hovering over me, holding himself up with his hands on either side of my body. Then his lips moved from mine down to my neck and then my chest. I let out a breath as his mouth covered my left nipple and his finger flicked the other nipple slowly like he had no plans of doing anything else. Then he moved to the other nipple, his tongue and lips driving me crazy with desire and making my pussy throb.

He lifted his head again, meeting my eyes for a few seconds before kissing down my stomach. He parted my legs and, without any more warning, his tongue slid over my clit, making my back arch involuntarily. I couldn’t hold in my moan as he applied suction. His hands held my waist down as he drove me to orgasm with his tongue. I came on his tongue, my whole body vibrating like we didn’t just have sex in his office.

When he eventually slid his dick into me, his guttural sounds mingled with my own. My hands explored the width of his strong back and ran through his hair while his gripped my waist, kneaded my breasts, and held my face.

I kept waiting for him to slip back into the man who’d taken me apart against his desk, all heat and impatience. But he took his time with every part of me, watching my face the whole way through like he was seeing a painting he’d never seen before but suddenly needed to understand. It should have felt clinical, but it didn’t. It felt like being noticed in a way that terrified me. Yet, somehow, I stopped keeping track of which reactions were real and which I’d meant to fake.

“You’re about to come. Let go,” he uttered in a low voice, his eyes on mine.

I came with a shaky cry, and he didn’t stop moving inside me even as my whole body tightened and shook. Then he came too, low groans leaving his lips like he couldn’t control them.

I lay tangled against him with his hand resting at the small of my back, both absent and possessive at the same time. I could feel his heartbeat slowing gradually under my palm where it rested against his chest.

I should have been thinking about the photographs sitting in my cloud folder, about how fast I needed to get them to the editor. Instead I lay there noting the way his jaw had unclenched, the way his breathing had gone slow and even against my hair, and the way his hand hadn’t once let go of my waist even after his eyes had closed.

He fell asleep before I did. I hadn’t expected that. I hadn’t imagined a man like Nikolai Golovin ever let his guard down enough to sleep beside someone he still half suspected, someone he’d had his own security team tracking for a week. But his face in sleep lost every sharp edge it wore during the day; the permanent tightness had gone slack around his mouth.

He didn’t look like the monster I’d spent years building up in my head.

That thought scared me more than anything else that happened that night. I reminded myself that Nikolai Golovin ran a fight ring that chewed through young men and spat out the pieces. He laundered blood money through casinos three floors above where it was earned. Whatever this was, whatever softness I’d just watched cross his sleeping face, none of it changed a single fact I’d spent four months documenting, none of it erased a single name in that file under my bed.

It shouldn’t have mattered how safe I felt in his arms an hour ago. And yet some traitorous part of me kept replaying it, unwilling to let the feeling go even as I lay there condemning myself for having it.

I told myself that until exhaustion finally pulled me under too, his heartbeat still steady beneath my palm. I was already aware that I’d crossed a line I wasn’t sure I could walk back.

Chapter Eight

Nikolai

I woke to silence and a half-empty bed, still faintly warm, which told me she hadn’t been gone long. I lay there a moment, staring at the ceiling, running through the last several hours.

She had simply left.

Women didn’t leave my bed without a word. They lingered and made coffee they assumed I’d want. At the very least, they left a note or some deliberate trace meant to keep a door open I had no intention of walking back through. I understood that pattern well enough to have stopped noticing it years ago, the same way I’d stopped noticing the perfume that clung to a pillow after someone left it there on purpose.

Camila had left nothing on purpose.

I sat up, irritated at myself before I’d even identified what for, and dismissed the tightness in my chest as fatigue. I hadn’t slept well in longer than I could count. That was the only reasonable explanation for a feeling that resembled disappointment closely enough to be mistaken for it. And then there was the other anomaly: I’d slept.

Yuri called before I’d finished dressing, giving me some minor complaint from a pit boss about a dealer running short on his till. It was the kind of small thing I’d normally have handled without breaking stride. But I found myself answering him a few seconds late, having to ask him to repeat the number twice before it registered.

“Everything alright, boss?” he asked with an edge of genuine curiosity in his voice that told me the delay had been noticeable.