Chapter 9: Spy

Juno's POV

Dee left at a quarter past eleven that Tuesday night, after making me promise three times that I wouldn't open the door for anyone.

Before I had put the chain back on, my phone buzzed on the bed. A text from Agnes Moran. In all my years in that house, she had never once messaged me.

Agnes: Mrs. Ellison, it is Agnes. Miss Sloane came into the kitchen on Monday and asked about your old silver laptop. How long you had it, and if you ever left it at home. I said I did not know. Please be careful. Please do not tell anyone I wrote to you.

Agnes had not broken one of Margaret's rules in twenty years. I thought about Friday night, when the diamonds hit my plate and she looked at Sloane before she looked at the floor.

I typed Thank you and nothing more, so that nothing I wrote could cost her the job.

At half past eleven a fist hit the door. It kept hitting, loud enough to wake the whole floor.

I grabbed the desk lamp by its neck and looked through the peephole.

Ronan. Hair wet from the rain, jacket dark across the shoulders, phone in his hand.

I set the lamp down, slid off the chain, and opened up. "Do you know what time it is?"

He walked past me into the room and held his phone in front of my face.

A gossip site. Big red letters. POLICE AT THE MARLOWE FOR GRANT ELLISON'S EX-WIFE. SOURCES SAY: STOLEN FILES. Under it, a blurry photo of the hotel doors, time-stamped 11:04 p.m.

"Somebody tipped them off," I said. "The police left an hour ago. They didn't even come in."

"Stolen files." He tossed the phone onto the desk. It skidded and stopped against the lamp. "Stolen Ellison files, the day after you hand me the one thing that beats Ellison."

"I didn't steal a goddamn thing."

"Then why were the police at your door?"

"Because Grant's sister filed a fake complaint."

He wasn't listening. He paced three steps to the window and three back, because the room wasn't big enough for more.

"Here's what I see. Grant Ellison's wife walks into my building with a secret weapon. Friday, I use it in front of the whole city. Next week Ellison Group sues me for using stolen files, and I lose Harbor Point and everything I've built since Calder Street. Again."

"That isn't what this is."

"Or it's simpler. You're his spy and the union rule is bait. We walk into that hearing, Grant has an answer ready, and I look like an idiot in front of the whole city."

I laughed. It came out ugly. "You think Grant sent me? Grant wouldn't trust me to order his lunch. He treated me like a lamp."

"Then how did you know about page nine?"

"I told you."

"You told me a story." He stepped toward me. "What's in the bag, Juno?"

Before I could stop myself, I moved between him and the armchair.

It was a mistake. I knew it the moment I made it. His eyes went to the bag behind me and came back to my face.

"Get out."

"Answer the question."

"Touch that bag and I'll give you a matching scar on the other eyebrow."

His eyebrows rose for half a second before his hands curled into fists at his sides.

"Fuck," he said. "Every time I think I've got you figured out, you do that."

"You came to my room at midnight to call me a liar!" I was shouting, and I didn't care who heard. "Friday, you didn't even want my name. Now you want my whole damn life?"

"I want the truth!"

"You want Ledger. That's all you've ever wanted. I'm just the road you think leads there."

He flinched. It was small, but I saw it.

The heater clanked under the window.

"That's not all I want," he said.

We stood a foot apart. I could hear him breathing, fast and rough, and I could hear myself doing the same.

"Tell me to go," he said, low. "I'll go."

"I already told you twice."

"Say it like you mean it."

I said nothing. I took a fistful of his wet shirt and pulled his mouth down to mine.

He kissed me hard. His teeth caught my lower lip, and one hand fisted in my hair to hold my head where he wanted it. I bit him back, hard enough that he hissed. He tasted of rain and coffee.

He walked me backward until my shoulders hit the door. The chain rattled beside my ear. I shoved the wet jacket off his shoulders and it landed on the carpet with a slap.

He pulled back an inch, chest heaving. "Yes?"

"Yes. And don't you dare be gentle."

"You sure?"

I hooked my fingers in his belt and pulled him against me. "Ronan. I'm sure."

He wasn't gentle.

He dragged my old gray T-shirt over my head in one move and threw it behind him. It hit the desk and knocked the lamp crooked, and the light jumped across the ceiling. I wasn't wearing a bra. For a second he just looked at me, breathing hard.

On Friday, my arms had come up to cover myself. Tonight they stayed at my sides. I let him look.

"Fuck," he said quietly, like a prayer.

He put his mouth on my neck, and then his teeth, just hard enough that I gasped. He kissed his way down to my breasts and sucked one nipple into his mouth while his hands held my hips flat against the door. The wood was cold on my back. The chain kept rattling. He hooked his thumbs into my sweatpants and dragged them down with my underwear, and he went down with them, onto his knees on the carpet. He lifted one of my legs over his shoulder. His mouth found me between my legs, slow at first, then harder, his fingers digging into my thighs to keep me pinned to the door. My knees started to shake. I had to grab the doorframe to stay standing.

I said his name again. I couldn't help it.

He stood up slowly. I went for his shirt, and my fingers were shaking too much for the wet buttons, so I pulled. Two of them popped off and bounced across the carpet.

"That's two shirts you owe me," he said against my mouth.

"Send me the bill."

He pulled the shirt off his arms. Under the rocking lamp I could see all of him: the wide chest, the dark hair on it, the white scar across his knuckles, and the long pale scar across his ribs. I put my palm flat on the rib scar. He let me keep it there.

I didn't ask about it. He didn't tell me. I moved my hand to his belt instead, and I felt him breathe out.

I undid the buckle, and he pushed his jeans and shorts down together and kicked them away. I looked at him then, all of him, and my mouth went dry. He was big and hard, and he watched me look, and he didn't rush me. With Grant, I had always closed my eyes and waited for things to be over. I couldn't stop staring. He caught me under the thighs and lifted me clean off the floor, and I wrapped my legs around his waist. He carried me three steps and hit the corner of the desk on the way. The lamp rocked on its base. Neither of us cared.

He laid me down on the bed, on top of the Harbor Point pages. They crackled under my back. The plate of fries tipped off the edge and hit the floor, and I laughed, and he kissed the laugh right out of my mouth.

"Wallet," I said.

"Shit. Hang on." He leaned off the bed and dug through his jeans on the floor. He came back with a condom, tore it open with his teeth the same way he had on Friday, and rolled it on, watching me the whole time.

He braced himself over me, one forearm on either side of my head, and stopped.

He held there, not moving, with his forehead almost touching mine. The heater clanked. Rain ran down the window. I could feel his heart hammering against my chest, and his arms were trembling on either side of my head from holding still.

"Say it," he said.

"Say what?"

"My name. You said it this morning to stop me hitting him." His voice was rough. "Say it for me."

I looked right into his eyes and said it softly. "Ronan."

He let out a breath and pushed inside me, hard and deep in one stroke, and I gasped against his mouth. On Friday he had been slow. Tonight he wasn't. He held there, buried all the way, letting me feel every inch of him, his jaw clenched with the effort of staying still. I dug my heels into the backs of his legs, and he stopped holding back. He pulled almost all the way out and slammed back into me, again and again, fucking me hard enough that the old iron bed frame banged against the wall with every thrust. He was fast and then faster. I held on to the headboard with one hand and his back with the other, my nails in his skin, lifting my hips to meet him. Somebody in the next room banged on the wall. I laughed, breathless, and he drove into me harder.

This was the man who had spent three years hunting Ledger. Hunting me. I knew exactly who he was tonight, and he knew who I was, or thought he did, and I held on to him anyway.

Halfway through, I pushed at his shoulder and rolled us over. He let me. I pinned his wrists to the mattress, just as he had held mine on Friday, sank all the way down onto him, and rode him hard, taking him deep with every roll of my hips. He watched me like he couldn't believe I was real.

"Juno," he said. "Jesus, Juno."

He broke my grip on his wrists, grabbed my hips, and thrust up into me, matching my pace until I couldn't hold on to a single thought. When I came, it ripped through me so hard that my whole body clenched around him, and I cried out loud enough for the whole ninth floor. I didn't care. He rolled me under him again, drove into me three more times, hard and deep, and came with a groan, his face pressed into my neck and my name in his mouth.

We lay there without moving. The lamp had stopped rocking. The pages under us were ruined.

It was louder and harder and nothing like Friday.

Afterward we lay in the dark on a bed full of crumpled paper. His heart still pounded under my cheek.

"I still don't trust you," he said.

"Good. I don't trust you either."

"Then what the hell was that?"

"A bad decision."

I felt him laugh, a low rumble under my ear.

"Second best bad decision," he said. "Friday was the first."

His arm lay heavy across my waist. A few minutes later his breathing slowed and his hand went slack on my hip.

He didn't leave this time. He fell asleep in my bed as though he'd forgotten he was supposed to be afraid of me.

I didn't sleep. For years, three in the morning had been my working hour, and my body didn't know how to rest through it.

At ten to two I slid out from under his arm and went to the desk for water. The carpet was cold. Pages crackled wherever I stepped.

His phone lay face-up beside the lamp where he'd thrown it.

As I reached for the glass, the screen lit up. The preview shone in the dark room.

Marcus: Found a lead on Ledger. Ex-Ellison finance guy sold me Grant's private payments. One name: Northline Advisory.