I didn't ask for two

Episode 8 — Version B: Interrupted

Kim

He didn't rush.

That was the thing about it. He took one step, and then another, and there was nothing fast about it — just the steady, deliberate closing of distance between where he was and where I was, which was the edge of the bed, which was also, I was now realising, a corner.

I stood up.

This was tactically useless. Standing put me closer to him, not farther, but my body had decided that being upright was preferable to being cornered sitting down and I hadn't been consulted in time to object.

"Jake—"

"No," he said.

Just that. One word, quiet, and it landed in the space where my next sentence was supposed to go and took up all the room.

He stopped in front of me. Close. The furnace heat of him was immediate — that two-degrees-wrong warmth that my body had been cataloguing and filing and absolutely failing to stop cataloguing since the window, since the bar, since every moment in this building where he'd been near enough to matter.

I opened my mouth.

His hand came up and cupped my jaw.

Not rough. Not yet. Just — present. His thumb at the corner of my mouth, tilting my face up, and his eyes were dark and completely serious in a way I had never seen on him before, not once, not even when Frank had said step back and he hadn't moved immediately.

This was different.

Say something, Voice of Reason said, very far away. Now would be the time—

He kissed me.

* * *

It wasn't like the almost-kiss at the bar. That had been question, proximity, the space between things. This was not a question.

His mouth was hot and certain and he kissed me the way someone kisses when they've been thinking about it and have run out of reasons not to — thorough, unhurried, with the specific attention of a man who had decided this was worth doing correctly.

I grabbed the front of his shirt. To push him back, I told myself.

I did not push him back.

His hand slid from my jaw into my hair, angling my head, taking the kiss deeper, and I forgot about Voice of Reason and I forgot about the door and I forgot about Reid and the envelope and every sensible thought I'd had in the last seventy-two hours, because his mouth was doing something to mine that made sensible thoughts structurally unsound. And then the scent hit me — dark earth, ozone, and that wild, intoxicating musk that bypassed my brain entirely and went straight to my core.

He bit my lower lip.

Not hard. Hard enough. A slow, deliberate pressure and then release, and the sound I made was not a sound I was going to examine.

His other hand found my waist. Slid down. His palm curved around my hip, his large hand spanning the soft swell of it perfectly, gripping it like it was exactly what he had been looking for, and he pulled — one smooth motion — and I was against him.

All of him.

The breath left my body in a way that had nothing to do with breathing.

He was — he wanted — I could feel exactly how much he wanted this, pressed against me, and my brain produced one coherent thought and then stopped producing thoughts entirely.

There was no council. No Panic, no Voice of Reason, no Adventurer taking notes. There was Jake's mouth and Jake's hands and the wall at my back that I didn't remember reaching, and my hands had stopped holding his shirt and started holding his shoulders instead.

He moved us. Slow, inevitable, using his size and weight the way someone uses a tide — not force exactly, just mass, just the physics of the thing, until my shoulders met the wall and his body met mine and there was nothing between us but fabric and the very thin remaining thread of his restraint.

His mouth at my jaw, my throat, and I turned my head because I wanted his mouth back and he gave it to me, and the kiss went somewhere deeper than before, rougher, and I—

I was at the edge of something.

I knew the shape of it. I knew that I was holding his shoulders and he was holding me against the wall and I was making decisions I hadn't made yet, and my body was making them without me.

Don't stop, said something very small and very certain.

I think it was all four of them, finally in agreement.

* * *

The alarm split the air like a blade.

Not a fire alarm — sharper, lower, spreading through the walls of the building the way sound spreads through bone. A frequency designed to travel. A signal, not a warning.

Jake's whole body changed in half a second. The lover vanished; the Alpha took over. Not away from me — he didn't step back. His hands went to the wall on either side of my head, bracketing me, his body still between me and the room while his head came up and turned toward the door with the focused stillness of someone receiving information through channels I didn't have access to.

The alarm cut off.

The silence it left was worse.

Voices somewhere below. Fast, low, the specific cadence of people being given instructions rather than having a conversation. Something heavy moved across a floor.

Jake looked at the door for three more seconds.

Then he looked at me.

His breathing was not steady. His jaw was set. His eyes were still dark and the restraint in them was costing him something visible, something he wasn't bothering to hide.

He raised one hand.

Dragged his thumb — slow, deliberate — across my lower lip. The one he'd bitten. Still warm. The pad of his thumb traced the shape of it like he was finishing something he'd started, like he was putting a marker in a page he intended to come back to.

"That," he said, very low, "was a warning, little one."

His thumb stilled at the corner of my mouth.

"Next time—" He held my gaze. Dark. Entirely serious. The alarm had changed nothing about that. "I won't stop."

He pushed off the wall.

Three steps to the door. He didn't look back.

"Stay in this room," he said. "Whatever you hear."

The door closed behind him.

The building was not quiet.

* * *

I stayed against the wall and listened to things happening that I couldn't see — footsteps, voices, something that might have been furniture or might have been something else — and my mouth was swollen and my hands were shaking and the edge I'd been standing at was still there, still waiting, and I was standing at it alone while somewhere below me Jake was walking toward whatever the alarm had meant.

Whatever you hear, he'd said.

I heard a lot.

The Femme Fatale said nothing.

But she was there — closer to the surface than she usually let herself get, not hiding, not folded away. Just present. Listening to the sounds from below the same way I was.

For once, her silence wasn't about being afraid.