Where Sinners Sleep

Friends with benefits

Elijah had never been in an accident.

Not once. Not in eight years of driving for Kit through situations that would have made most people abandon the car and run. Not through police chases or ambushes or roads that were not roads or weather that had no business being driven through. Not once in eight years had Elijah come out the other side of anything with so much as a scratch that was his fault.

And now this.

He sat on the edge of the bed in his room at the penthouse and looked at his hands. His knuckles were wrapped, split from the impact, and there was a bandage above his left temple where the window had caught him when the first car hit. The Vitale's private physician had come and gone with his bag and his discretion and his complete absence of questions, which was exactly what they paid him for.

It was not the injuries that were bothering him.

It was the fact that it had happened at all.

He turned his hands over and looked at them and tried to reconstruct it the way he always reconstructed things, methodically, from the beginning, one detail at a time. He had noticed the tail three streets from the Sonnett house. He had made the decision to lead them away. He had driven that industrial stretch a hundred times, knew every turn, every surface, every variable.

And yet.

There was a gap.

Not a big one. Thirty seconds, maybe forty, somewhere between the second turn and the moment the first car appeared in his mirror at close range. Thirty seconds where his memory did not quite line up with itself, where something felt like it had been edited, where he could not account for what his hands had been doing or why the car had been at the angle it was when the impact came.

Thirty seconds.

He had not told Kit.

He did not know how to tell Kit something he could not explain to himself. He did not know how to say that the best driver he had ever employed could not fully account for what his hands had been doing at the moment everything went wrong.

Something had happened on that road.

He did not know what.

His phone lit up on the bed beside him.

He looked at it.

Three messages, all from the same number, sent across the last two hours.

‘where are you’

‘i have been trying to reach you out for the past 2 days’

‘are you okay’

He looked at those three messages for a long moment.

Then he picked up the phone and called.

She answered on the second ring.

"Eli."

Just his name. The way she always said it, like it meant something she was not supposed to let it mean.

"Same place," he said. "Give me twenty minutes."

---

She was already there when he arrived.

The room was dim, lit only by the lamp on the dressing table, and Aurora Orlean was sitting in front of the mirror with a small jar in her hand, working something carefully into the skin along her cheekbone with the focused unhurried attention of someone who had absolutely not been waiting anxiously and was not going to let on that she had.

She was wearing a silk robe the colour of midnight, loosely tied at the waist, and her dark hair was down around her shoulders in a way that caught the low light of the room, and she was, as she always was without apparently trying, the kind of beautiful that made you forget for a moment what you had walked in to say.

She met his eyes in the mirror.

"You were supposed to be here ten minutes earlier," she said, setting the jar down without turning around.

"Never knew you cared that much about punctuality," he said.

She stood then and turned and crossed the room toward him with that particular way she moved, unhurried and completely certain of herself, and he watched her come and kept his face exactly where he always kept it when it came to Rory.

Carefully nowhere.

She stopped in front of him.

Her eyes moved to his face. The bandage above his temple. The split knuckles. Something shifted in her expression, something real and unguarded that she did not manage to hide quickly enough, and her hand came up slowly, fingers hovering just near the bandage without quite touching it. Then she leaned forward and pressed her lips very carefully to the edge of it. Gentle and deliberate, the kind of care that takes practice to look effortless.

She pulled back and looked him straight in the eyes.

"I know I am not allowed to ask," she started.

"Rory." His voice was flat and immediate, the same voice he used to close doors. "You know the agreement. No personal lives. No crossing into each other's business. That is what we said from the beginning plus you know why I am here ..."

She looked at him for a moment with those eyes that always knew more than she was allowed to say.

Then she laughed.

It was a small sound. Soft at the surface and slightly painful underneath, the kind of laugh that is doing a very specific job and both people in the room know exactly what that job is.

"Because you wanted to see me," she said.

He held her gaze. "I would hate to stop you from believing that. But we both know that is not the whole truth."

Something moved through her expression. Quick and quiet and carefully buried.

Then she tilted her head slightly and looked at him with that smile that he had never fully been able to categorise, the one that sat somewhere between knowing and resigned and something else that neither of them was going to name out loud tonight.

He reached up and took her by the back of the neck, unhurried, and walked her back one step and then two until her shoulders met the wall, and she let him, the way she always let him, because that was what this was and they both understood exactly what it was even on the nights when it felt like something considerably more complicated than that.

He looked at her for one moment in the dim light of that room. The silk robe slipping slightly at the shoulder. Her eyes on his. The small careful distance she was keeping between what she felt and what she was allowed to show.

Then he kissed her.

Not carefully. Not with the measured control he applied to most things. He kissed her the way a man kisses something he has been telling himself he does not need, with his hand in her hair and his other arm pulling her in and all that careful nowhere suddenly somewhere very specific.

She kissed him back immediately and her hands found the front of his shirt and she was breathless almost instantly but she did not stop, would not stop, and when he pulled back just long enough to look at her her eyes were dark and her robe had slipped further off one shoulder revealing the thin strap of what was beneath it.

He picked her up without breaking the kiss and carried her to the bed.

Eli slowly pulled away and kissed Rory’s neck, the vanilla scent filling his nose. He started placing soft, butterfly kisses all over her body, and slowly, there he was…at her breast. It was her sensitive spot, and he knew that. Without removing the cloth, he softly bit her left breast, his teeth puncturing the fabric, leaving his mark and drawing sounds from her mouth.

A smirk formed on his face. He knew exactly what he was doing. He knew the girl in front of him was just seconds away from melting… so he did it again, this time on the right.

Rory moaned a little louder. He pinched her n*****s and snatched the cape away from her. She was nearly naked, but even the tiny piece of lingerie barely covering her upper body was too much. And Eli was losing his mind.

Within seconds, he tore that away too. Aurora stood there with nothing on her body except her thong. Her face was flushed, her n*****s hard, and she was looking everywhere except into his eyes.

Elijah grabbed her face and forced her to look at him.

“Look at me.”

“I want you to look at me when I f**k you, or I won’t be doing that. Do you want that?”

Aurora finally met his eyes.

“Please… I need you,” she stifled.

Eli smirked and slipped his fingers near her p***y. He pushed her in the bed which made her lay down and spread her legs apart.

She was dripping.

He slowly licked all of the wetness away and started giving soft kisses near her p***y lips.

He knew all her sensitive spots and that was his advantage, he knew Aurora Orleans like the back of his hands. So he did exactly that, used his hands. He started sucking her p***y making her lose her mind and with a warning he inserted a finger which made her hiss his name. He soft bit her p***y lips, fingers still stroking her inside and got up from the ground. His fingers are still there. He looked at her and her eyes were closed and that's when he took his fingers out making Aurora open her eyes in disappointment, she clearly wanted more. She looked at him with an expression ‘why did you stop?’.

He got on top of her, grabbed her face again and kissed her. His fingers again finding his way back down there, s******g her straight on her exposed p***y and this time he inserted two fingers at once.

“Eli”, she moaned and he knew this was going to go all night.