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She stood. The chair scraped back against the stone. “I know my father.”
“You know what he was. You know what he did to a six-year-old girl in a house nobody checked on. That doesn’t make you a strategist. It makes you someone who survived him.”
The kitchen went quiet. Rain tapped the window behind her. The bond sat between them like a wire pulled taut, carrying a frequency she could feel in her back teeth.
“Say that again,” she hissed angrily.
He didn’t repeat it. He stood at the counter with his hands flat on the edge, his jaw set, his breathing even in a way that told her the evenness was costing him effort.
“You think surviving him doesn’t count,” she accused, her hands trembling.
“I think you’re making operational decisions based on a man you knew when you were six years old, and the man circling this compound is not the same man who left those notes on your pillow.”
“He’s exactly the same man.”
“Then why can’t you stop him?”
The words hit her below the ribs. She felt them land, felt the impact spread through her stomach into her legs. Her hands curled at her sides.
“I held that line for two minutes alone,” she said, her voice dropping low. “Five wolves, two minutes, while you were on the other side of the compound.”
“I know you did.”
“Then stop talking to me like I’m the girl on the cot.”
Chris pushed off the counter. He crossed the kitchen until three feet separated them. He was still damp from the patrol, water darkening the collar of his shirt, his skin flushed from the cold. His eyes held hers without flinching.
“You are not the girl on the cot,” he said. “You haven’t been the girl on the cot for a long time. But you keep putting her between us like a shield because if I’m looking at her, I’m not looking at you.”
Her pulse hammered against her wrists. “You don’t know what you’re looking at.”
“I know exactly what I’m looking at.” His voice had gone quiet. Not soft. Quiet in the way a room goes quiet before pressure drops. “I’m looking at a woman who walked into Kahn’s briefing room uninvited and made every person at that table listen. Who mapped twenty miles of perimeter in a day and found gaps Viktor missed. Who taught herself to fight in the dark because nobody ever showed up to fight beside her.”
Her throat closed. She swallowed against it.
“I’m looking at a woman who burns toast on purpose because her aunt did, who trains at five-thirty because the compound is empty and she can let her guard drop for a bit before anyone wakes up.” He took another step. Two feet. She could feel the heat coming off his body, could smell the rain on his skin. “I’m looking at you. And you’re terrified of that, because every man who ever looked at you wanted to own what he saw. I don’t want to own you. I just want you to stop hiding.”
Before she knew what she was doing, she had moved forward and was kissing him.
Not the way she’d kissed him in the training yard. This was harder, faster, her hands grabbing fistfuls of his shirt, dragging him down. She kissed him with her teeth, with the full force of the fury still burning through her chest, and his mouth opened under hers and he kissed her back with a sound from his throat that vibrated against her lips.
His hands found her waist. She shoved him backward against the counter. The edge caught his hips, his back curved over it, and she pressed into him, her body flush against his, feeling him hard through the fabric between them. The bond blew wide open. Heat flooded her stomach, her thighs, the base of her spine, a rush so acute she ground her hips against him and watched his head drop back.
“Bedroom,” she said against his mouth. “Now.”
He picked her up. Her legs locked around his waist, her hands braced on his shoulders, and he carried her down the corridor without breaking stride. Her back hit the doorframe going through. She didn’t care. He dropped her on the bed, followed her down, and his weight settled over her, heavy, warm, his mouth finding her neck.
She pulled his shirt over his head. Ran her palms across his chest, the scar along his ribs from the Marcus fight, the muscle that tensed under her touch. He reached for the hem of her shirt. She lifted her arms.
He slowed.
She felt the shift before she understood it. His hands stayed on the fabric, holding it bunched at her ribs, his eyes moving over her stomach, the curve of her waist, the skin she usually kept covered. He wasn’t rushing. He was looking at her the way he’d looked at the map, at the ward anchors, at the training yard. With attention.
She grabbed his wrist. “Don’t stop.”
“I’m not stopping.” He pulled the shirt the rest of the way off. His mouth came down on her collarbone, slow, open, his tongue tracing a line to the hollow of her throat. She arched up, her fingers digging into the back of his skull, and when his lips moved lower, following the line of her sports bra, she felt her breath shake loose.
He unhooked the clasp. She helped him pull it away. His hands cupped her breasts, his thumbs circling over the fullness, and his mouth closed over her nipple with a pressure that sent electricity straight through her belly. She hissed through her teeth. He did it again. Slower. Reading her the way he read rooms, adjusting, recalibrating, finding the exact point where pressure tipped into pleasure.
