LOGIN“There’s something else,” Ivy said, after we’d both sat with the confession long enough for the tea to go cold. “And I almost didn’t tell you, because I don’t actually have any proof at all, just this feeling I can’t quite shake.”She got up to refill the kettle, giving herself, I suspected, a moment to decide exactly how to phrase what she wanted to say. She turned her back to me at the counter while the tap ran. I watched the tension in her shoulders and realized that whatever she was about to tell me had been weighing on her for longer than she was letting on.“At this point, I’ll take a feeling. Feelings are apparently my entire life now.”A small, tired laugh escaped her, the first real lightness since I’d sat down.“It’s about Marlowe’s source. The one calling hotels.” She hesitated, searching for the right words. “I think it might be Priya. From the events team.”I frowned, trying to remember her. Priya was a quiet, competent woman who had trained alongside me during my first w
Ivy had made tea, which should have been my first warning.I had almost cancelled twice on my way over, sitting in my car outside her building for a full five minutes before finally forcing myself up the stairs. Some cowardly part of me was still clinging to the hope that whatever she thought she had figured out might actually be wrong, that it might be something I could laugh off with enough casual confidence to make the whole conversation evaporate before it properly started. I had used that strategy successfully with Vivian, with Damian, and with everyone else I had spoken to up until that point.“Sit,” she said, nodding at the chair across from her at the tiny kitchen table. Her studio apartment was smaller than mine but somehow warmer, lived in, covered in the specific clutter of someone who had never once worried about what her space said about her. “I’m going to say some things, and I need you to let me get through all of them before you respond. If you interrupt me, I’m going
He called her from the tarmac, standing twenty feet away from me with his back half turned. I made myself busy checking a luggage tag I had already checked twice, giving him whatever privacy that could provide in an open field where there was nowhere else to go.The property manager had seen us off an hour earlier with profuse thanks and a bottle of wine neither of us would be able to explain to anyone waiting for us at home. The three days that had felt endless while we were living through them now seemed impossibly short. They were already slipping into the past, becoming memories we would have to carry with us instead of moments we could keep living.I could not hear what Roman was saying. I could hear the warmth in his voice, the familiar tenderness he used with someone he cared about, and I stood there with my own bag in hand, feeling like a woman eavesdropping on her own execution.“She wants to pick me up from the airport,” he said, rejoining me once the call ended, his express
The launch had gone well, in the end. The investors were charmed, the lighting rig was finally finished with hours to spare, and Roman had done everything expected of him. He had been the competent, unbothered heir apparent, so flawless that nobody watching him work the room that afternoon could have guessed anything was wrong. It was only now, hours later, with the property quiet and the last guest finally gone, that the mask had slipped enough for the weight of the day to settle back onto his shoulders.Roman looked up from the contract he had been pretending to read for the last ten minutes. We sat at opposite ends of his hotel room’s small balcony, with the ocean stretching somewhere beyond the darkness. The waves rolled in and out, indifferent to everything that had happened between us and everything that might happen next.“I told you earlier that someone called the hotel looking for a comment from the staff. Celeste Marlowe’s assistant.” I kept my voice low, even though there w
I woke up before he did, which gave me exactly four minutes of peace before curiosity won out over good sense and I reached across him for the phone still sitting face down on the nightstand.The room looked different in daylight than it had at midnight, ordinary in a way that felt almost offensive given what had happened in it only hours earlier. Sunlight filtered through gauzy curtains, and his shirt still lay crumpled on the floor where he had dropped it. The sheets were tangled around both of us, making the whole scene look, for one disorienting second, like something out of someone else’s life entirely. A life where a woman could wake up tangled in a man like this without an entire family’s collapse waiting on the other side of the door.I should not have looked. I knew that even as I did it, the same way I had known a hundred other things I had done anyway over the last month. Still, I turned the screen toward the gray early light coming through the curtains, and by the time I r
He rose over me slowly while I was still shaking, my thighs trembling, my pussy fluttering, open and soaked, my whole body begging for that release he had just stolen from me.He shed his own clothes with none of the patience he’d shown when he was undressing me. He yanked his shirt over his head and shoved his trousers down his legs, his cock springing free, thick and heavy and already leaking clear precome from the slit. When he finally settled his weight over me, the hot length of his cock dragged through my dripping folds, smearing my wetness all along his shaft from base to tip.“I’m done being gentle,” he said, in his wrecked voice. “I hope you’re ready, because I don’t think I have it in me to hold back anymore tonight.”“I don’t want you to.”He reached down between us, wrapped his fist around his cock, and dragged the swollen, leaking head up and down through my pussy lips, coating himself in the slick mess already dripping out of me. He notched the thick head right against m







