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I give her harder. I give her everything, my hips slamming forward, burying my cock to the hilt with each stroke, and she cries out and I do it again and again and again, and then something shifts and it’s not about her anymore, not about the sounds she’s making or the grip of her thighs or the scratch of her nails, it’s just the chase, just the heat and the friction and the relentless drive toward the finish line, my hips pistoning forward without mercy, without rhythm, just need, raw and mindless and animal.

I’m close. I can feel it building at the base of my spine, tightening, and I pump into her harder, faster, chasing it, my hands locked at her hips pulling her onto me with every stroke, and I’m not thinking about anything, not the deal, not the night, not her name that I don’t have, just the slick tight heat of her cunt and the way it grips me on every thrust and the pressure building and building until it breaks.

I come with my cock buried to the hilt, throbbing, pulsing hard inside her, and she feels it, feels the first hot pulse shoot into her and her whole body answers, her cunt clamping down around me in waves, milking every throb, and she comes with me, her back arching off the counter, a broken cry tearing out of her throat, her thighs shaking and locked around me while I pulse and fill her and she squeezes every last drop out of me and neither of us moves until there’s nothing left.

I pull out slowly, reluctant, and look at her. Her pussy is wrecked, swollen and slick, my cum and hers both spilling out of her and down the inside of her thigh, and something possessive moves through my chest at the sight of it.

I reach for the paper towels on the counter, run one under the tap, wring it out, and go back to her. She watches me, saying nothing for once, her eyes tracking my hands.

I clean her up carefully and gently, dabbing rather than wiping because she took all of me and I’m not a small man, and I know what that does. She draws a breath when I press the cloth to her, a small involuntary hiss, and that answers the question I didn’t ask.

“Sore,” I say.

“I’m fine,” she says immediately, which only confirms what I said.

I finish, drop the towel, and step back. She smooths her dress down with both hands, chin level, composure coming back online like a system rebooting, and I watch her do it and say nothing.

“So,” I say. “That was fun.”

I lean in and kiss her on the mouth. One hand at her jaw, slow, nothing like what came before, and she goes still for half a second before she kisses me back. She tastes like whiskey, and I take my time with it, and when I pull back, her eyes open, and there’s something unguarded in them that’s gone before she’s finished blinking.

She clears her throat.

“And that part was unexpected,” she says.

I grin. “I’m full of surprises.”

I straighten my jacket and walk back out.

3

Adrianos

“You’re smiling,” Evander says, finding my eyes in the mirror. “You don’t smile in cars. You sign things in cars. You end men in cars. I once watched you take a phone call that put four hundred people out of work, and your face did less than it’s doing now.”

“I have a range.”

“You have two settings, and I’ve named them. The charming one’s a costume you put on for rooms full of men you’re about to ruin. The other one’s just the quiet. I get the quiet, because you don’t bother dressing up for me, you haven’t in nineteen years. But this is neither of those, and that’s what’s got my attention.”

The city peels back along Park, Midtown softening into the long hush where the lights stop competing, and the buildings get older and quieter, like money that no longer has to prove anything. I leave my reflection in the glass and let him fish, because nineteen years buys a man the right to a hook, and because the thing he’s circling is the first thing in months I don’t mind being asked.

“Petros went the way Petros was always going to go,” I say. “He arrived certain he was the prize. He left certain it was his idea to hand himself over. I bought him two whiskeys and agreed with him until agreeing with me felt like his own conclusion.”

“You didn’t even raise your voice.”

“I never do with the loud ones. Volume’s the tell. A loud man fills the room with himself because there’s a draft underneath where the spine should be.” I roll my shoulders, the night still warm in them. “Tomorrow he signs and drives home humming. By the weekend he’ll tell the story at a dinner party, and I’ll be the man who saw his potential.”

“And the face.” Evander takes the turn past the park, black trees stacked against a blacker sky. “Don’t think I’ve lost the thread. The face has nothing to do with Petros. It must’ve come after.”

“The face came after a woman.”

The quiet that follows is one of his better ones. He lets it stretch the length of two blocks before he spends it. “At Lux. While on the clock. You, who once told a man his own daughter’s wedding wasn’t worth leaving a meeting for.”

“That man was stealing from me. The wedding was a laundering event.”

“You still missed cake for it.” His eyes flick back. “Tell me about the woman, or I’ll invent her, and my version will be worse.”

So I tell him. Not all of it, but enough. The black dress, the dark curls, the mouth on her.