Chapter 707 | Oat Milk, Extra Shot

Chapter 707: 707 | Oat Milk, Extra Shot

Petra’s jaw locked. I watched the war play out behind her eyes, eighteen years of never asking anyone for anything against the plain fact that my mouth was one inch from where she wanted it. Her hips twitched forward and her fingers tightened in my hair. She was breathing like a sprinter, lying perfectly still.

"I do not beg."

I kissed her other thigh, starting at the knee.

"That wasn’t a request." My lips dragged over her skin, and she shuddered from ankle to jaw. "That was a description of what you’re about to do."

"I am Petra Lang."

"You’re Petra Lang in emerald underwear with your legs open on a bed at two in the morning, and in about thirty seconds you’re going to say please in a voice you’ve never used in front of another person."

Her spine arched clean off the mattress. I hadn’t touched her yet. The sentence alone had done it, and she couldn’t override the response. The camisole lost its last point of contact with her shoulders and pooled uselessly around her waist, and her breasts were bare to the lamplight and the cold air from the vent directly over the bed. They were full and pale and rose with every uneven breath she tried to control, her nipples tight and flushed dark from the chill and from the particular frustration of being told what you’ll do by someone you can’t stop wanting to hear it from.

I kissed lower, past the hollow of her hip and across the crease where thigh met pelvis, close enough that my breath landed directly on the emerald lace and her whole body clenched hard. Her heels dug into the mattress and she pushed toward my mouth without thinking, and I pulled back exactly far enough to deny her what she was trying to take.

"Belmont." Something tore in the middle of the syllable. Her voice cracked on it. "Please."

It came out small and wrecked and nothing like her. There was none of the conference room left in it, none of the emerald pen or her posture at the head of a table or the weight she carried when she told someone what was going to happen. That please came from a girl who had spent twenty-two nights conjuring barriers alone in a room this size and finally understood that barriers only kept out what was outside the room. They didn’t stop what was already in here with her, listening.

I rewarded her by pulling the emerald lace down her legs with both hands.

What followed lasted forty-seven minutes.

I know because I counted, and so did she. We were both people who counted things when the alternative was admitting what the numbers meant. She said please fourteen more times in that span, each one in a different register as her vocabulary fell apart in stages. The boardroom voice lasted until the second orgasm. The French arrived during the third. By the fourth she’d given up language for sounds that carried through walls Halloran had reinforced against Aspect discharge and never planned for this particular use.

Somewhere around minute thirty-one, Petra was on my lap with her back to my chest and my hand between her legs, her head thrown back on my shoulder, one long broken moan fogging the window glass. That was when the second heartbeat under my sternum pressed outward with the warmth it gave off when something real was happening. The System had nothing to do with it, and no Gauge was ticking. It felt like something the old gold on a photograph frame might recognize, if someone held it up to the light.

At twenty-six minutes past three, Petra Lang lay face down on her ruined pillowcase with her black hair spread over her bare shoulders and my hand resting on the small of her back, where the cream silk had been hours ago. Her breathing had settled out of the post-climax trembling into a slow rhythm I knew from two months of watching her, the one she fell into when she forgot to hold her posture.

"The query will be ready by Thursday," she said into the pillow.

"I know."

"I am going to run the spectral analysis personally. My mother’s department will not touch it, and neither will my father’s analysts. Only me."

"I know."

"And you are going to bring me the lavender latte from the Spine kiosk at seven forty-five on Thursday morning. Seven forty-five. I will know if it is seven fifty."

"Oat milk. Extra shot."

She turned her head just enough to show one emerald eye over the edge of the pillow. "How do you know my order."

"Ophelia orders the same thing, and she’s yelled it at me eleven times."

Something happened to Petra’s face. The controlled mask dissolved, and what was left looked younger, with the rawness of someone who’d just been taken apart by a boy in borrowed boots and put back together as a version of herself she hadn’t known was there. The eye went glassy, and she pressed her face back into the pillow before I could see the rest.

"Leave before I conjure something and trap you here until December."

I kissed the back of her neck, where her hair parted over the knob of her spine. She shivered once from scalp to tailbone. Then I pulled on my congee-stained jacket, laced up the nephew boots and left Room 301 with a card in my pocket and a query running on infrastructure that cost more than Dralun’s block would earn in a decade.

The third-floor hallway was quiet, with no light under any door and no Maribelle lurking. The only sound was the building settling and the far-off hum of the WARDEN pillars keeping their endless watch.

Through the bond, Sloane was a steady warmth across the distance. She was asleep. She felt like someone dreaming about something good, and the Bond Resonance turned that dream into a pressure on my chest, like a palm laid there by someone counting heartbeats.

My phone lit up. Felicity, awake at half past three in the morning, because some people never learn.

Felicity: did you find what you needed?

Lukas: yeah. i think i did.