HE WAITED 1,095 DAYS TO CLAIM ME

Chapter 14

The envelope sat on the table between us, and neither of us touched it.

Raze had sent everyone out twenty minutes ago—Silas, Carver, Fen, and the two men stationed at the inner corridor. The operations room was empty now except for the two of us and the maps we hadn't rolled back up, and the particular quality of silence that settled over a compound after a long operational day had wrung everything useful out of it.

I should have opened the envelope and read what was inside.

I didn't.

I was standing at the window with my arms crossed and my eyes on the yard below, watching the last of the evening light go flat across the ground, and I was aware of Raze the way I was always aware of Raze. Constant. Peripheral. The specific frequency of a presence I had spent three years trying to untune myself from and had failed at so completely that coming back felt less like returning and more like admitting something I had known the whole time.

"You're not going to open it tonight," he said.

Not a question.

"No," I said.

I heard him move. Not toward me—toward the cabinet at the far wall, the one that held the compound's decent whiskey and two glasses that were always clean because my father had kept them that way and apparently Raze had continued that particular habit along with everything else.

Without asking, he placed a glass on the table next to me. I picked it up.

We stood at the window together. Not touching. The yard was nearly dark now, the compound's exterior lights coming on in sequence, the guards rotating at the perimeter with the quiet efficiency of men who had been doing this long enough that it no longer required thought.

"She underestimated you completely," he said.

"They briefed her wrong," I said. "Someone gave her a profile that was three years out of date."

"Or someone inside gave them a profile that served a purpose."

I looked at him. He was taking a look at the yard. "You think the bad information was deliberate."

"I think your father was very good at controlling what people knew about you," he said. "I think he may have been doing it from the beginning."

It was warm down his throat, the whiskey. I thought about my father building a false version of me into the faction's intelligence, patient and long-term, a decoy daughter, soft and manageable and safe to underestimate. I thought about how that was exactly the kind of thing he would do and never mention and expect me to understand only after.

"He made me the trap," I said.

"Yes," Raze said. "I think so."

The word landed with weight and also with something else. Pride was too simple for it. Recognition, maybe. The specific feeling of understanding a move someone made on your behalf before you were old enough to know you'd need it.

I set my glass down.

I was not planning what happened next. I turned from the window and Raze turned at the same moment, the way we had always moved in relation to each other without coordinating it, and he was close and the room was dim, and I had been carrying the wanting for long enough that it had stopped feeling like wanting and started feeling like weather. A thing that was without a cause or origin. Something you stopped noticing until it was directly in front of you and unavoidable.

I put my hand on his chest.

He went still. Not pulling back, not moving forward. Just still, the way he went still when he was giving me the full weight of his attention and had decided not to direct it anywhere.

"Nyra."

"Don't say anything," I said.

He didn't.

I pushed him back one step and then another until his shoulders met the wall, and I reached up and pulled his mouth down to mine and kissed him the way I had not let myself kiss him in the library, not slow and deliberate, not patient. This was three years of distance and one week of proximity and the specific unbearable accumulation of wanting something you kept deciding not to take.

He kissed me back with the same quality of focused attention he gave everything, both hands at my waist, not grabbing, just holding, and that restraint made it worse, made everything in me pull toward him, made my hands go to his shirt and stay there.

"Here?" he said against my mouth.

“If you don't have a better place in mind.”

He moved then. One hand spread flat at the small of my back and the other at the back of my neck, and he walked me backward toward the table, clearing the maps with one arm without looking, setting me on the edge of it, and stepping between my knees. I tugged at his shirt, and he let it go, and I had my hands on his skin, and he slowly exhaled through his nose.

His mouth went to my throat. Curves of my shoulder. He found the hem of my shirt and stripped it over my head and looked at me for a moment in the low light, unhurried, the way he did everything, with the full weight of his attention like I was the only information in the room.

"You've been driving me insane," he said quietly. "Since the morning in the yard."

"Good," I said.

He made a low sound and pulled me to the edge of the table, and his hands went to my waistband, and I lifted my hips, and he pulled my trousers and underwear down in one motion, and then his hand was between my thighs, and I was already slick, and he felt it and made that sound again, low and controlled, pressed against my temple.

"Three years," he said.

"Stop counting," I said into his jaw. "Just—"

Two fingers pushed inside me, and I stopped talking.

He worked me with the same precision he brought to everything, slow and deep, his thumb finding my c**t with the kind of accuracy that came from specific knowledge and specific memory, and I gripped the edge of the table with both hands and kept my face against his neck and let the wanting that had been sitting in my chest for days, for years, finally have somewhere to go.

I came with my teeth pressed to his shoulder and his name held tight in my chest, where he wouldn't hear it.

He gave me two seconds.

Then his hands were at his belt, and I reached for him and helped, and when he pushed inside me, it was deep and immediate, and I exhaled all at once, and he held still for a moment, forehead pressed to mine, both of us breathing.

"Look at me," he said.

I looked.

He moved, and I held his gaze, and the room was very quiet around us, and outside the compound ran its routines, and the envelope sat on the table three feet away unopened, and none of it existed except this: his eyes on mine, the specific truth of him inside me, the thing between us that had no clean name and had existed longer than either of us had been willing to admit.

I came again before he did. He followed close behind, his grip on my hip tightening, his rhythm finally, finally breaking, his breath against my hair in a long, controlled exhale that undid me more thoroughly than anything else had.

He didn't leave right away.

He stayed, his forehead at my temple, one hand still at my back. The room closed around us. Out of the building, a door was shut somewhere. Ordinary sound.

I picked up my whiskey glass from the table beside me and took a sip.

"The envelope," I said.

"Tomorrow," he said.

For once, I didn't argue.