Page 32

“Watching me figure it out. It’s distracting.” But her hips don’t slow; if anything, they pick up, like getting caught makes it better instead of worse, and I feel her thighs tighten against mine, feel the small catch in her breath every time she finds the spot that does the most.

“More,” she says, frustration creeping in. “I can’t get the angle from here; I need—”

“Up.” I get my hands under her thighs and stand, her still wrapped around me, still seated, and I turn and set her down on the edge of the desk, papers scattering, a pen rolling off and hitting the floor that neither of us looks at.

“The desk,” she says, eyes wide. “We’re doing the desk. This whole office needs an inventory after tonight.”

“I’ll have it cleaned.”

“Not the reassurance you think it is.” But she’s already leaning back on her hands, hips tilting, and I push back into her from this angle, deeper, and whatever she was going to say dissolves into a long sound she doesn’t try to catch.

I get a hand flat against her stomach, pressing her back, and start moving, harder, and the new angle has her gripping the desk’s edge with both hands, head falling back, curls spilling over papers I’ll find creased tomorrow and won’t care. Every thrust drives a raw sound out of her, nothing dry left in it.

“God, right there,” she gets out. “Don’t stop, please don’t stop—”

I don’t. I can feel her getting close, the way she tightens around me on every other stroke, her hips losing rhythm and just chasing instead.

“Turn over,” I say, and she blinks, dazed, then understands, twisting to get her knees under her on the desk, bracing on her forearms. I get behind her and push back in, and the sound she makes into her own arm is muffled and helpless.

This angle is deeper still, and I can see everything, the stretch of her taking me, her back arching to meet each thrust. I get one hand in her hair, holding rather than pulling, the other at her hip, and move with no patience left in either of us.

“There,” she chokes out. “There, don’t move, don’t change anything, just like that—”

I give her exactly that, same angle, same depth, again and again, and I feel her come apart, arms shaking under her, clenching around me in waves that get longer with every stroke, until she breaks completely, a sound tearing out of her with nothing held back, and I follow her, hips pressed flush, buried as deep as I can get, filling her, forehead dropping between her shoulder blades while we both shake through the end of it.

Neither of us moves for a long moment. I can feel her heart under my hand where it’s spread against her back, slowing gradually, and my own breath isn’t steady either, not for once.

“Okay,” she says eventually, voice wrecked, muffled against the desk. “That helped. Filing it under helped.” A pause, quieter, something more serious threading under the usual dryness. “For what it’s worth, I don’t think the blood’s only yours tonight. I think some of it’s mine now too. Just wanted you to know that, in case the accounting felt lonely.”

I don’t answer right away. I just stay there, my chest against her back, the city still moving below us, and for the first time since the call I’m not thinking about Petros, or the blood, or the line that doesn’t exist. I’m just here, with her, and for now that’s enough.

19

Elena

I make it forty-three minutes, which is apparently the outer limit of how long my brain is willing to lie beside a sleeping man while pretending the last twenty-four hours have not rearranged half the furniture inside my head.

Adrianos is asleep. Probably. He has one arm thrown across the empty half of the bed I abandoned seven minutes ago, his face turned toward the pillow, his breathing slow enough to qualify as evidence. I watched him for longer than I am willing to record before deciding that counting his breaths was an objectively worse use of insomnia than financial crime.

So I leave.

I steal one of his shirts because my clothes are somewhere between his office and the scene of several decisions I will eventually need to unpack with a licensed professional. I button it badly, carry my laptop down the hall, and step into the silence of the penthouse.

It has an expensive kind of silence. Thick walls. Triple glazing. No pipes complaining behind plaster, no neighbor dropping something at two in the morning, no sirens making the windows tremble. Adrianos has purchased peace by the square foot, and tonight it is doing absolutely nothing for me.

I reach the office and turn on one lamp. The desk looks mostly respectable again, although someone will have to explain the crease across three financial reports tomorrow. That someone will not be me.

I sit, open my laptop, and Petros is waiting.

Not literally, obviously. He has had a catastrophic week for literal waiting. His name sits inside the folder I built after we left his office yesterday, along with transaction histories, corporate registrations, insurance filings, employee records, and enough banking metadata to make normal people reconsider ever opening a checking account.

I haven't been able to stop thinking about him. Not his body, because I haven't seen it, and that's part of the problem. Petros exists for me now as a photograph beneath a headline and the look Adrianos had over breakfast when I accused him of murder.

I press my lips together as the memory resurfaces. Excellent work, Elena. Very measured. A triumph of professional restraint.

Petros talked, and then Petros died. That much is clean. He gave us something useful; we went looking; the office had already been scrubbed; a car tried to flatten us against brick; and by morning Petros was dead with the wolf-crown carved into him.

Sequence matters. Sequence always matters.