by Helena Maeve
Elijah leafed through the stack. The first handful of photographs were night-time shots of Nate arriving alone. He exchanged a few words with the waitress, then smiled when she returned with an espresso in a small white cup. A man ventured into frame, bearing a briefcase.
Without a time stamp, Elijah couldn’t tell precisely how much time had passed between the two. He guessed that Nate’s companion was somewhere on the far side of forty. His brown hair was fine and his features sallow. A folded newspaper peeked out of his trench coat pocket, the day’s crossword puzzle turned toward the camera.
Nate’s posture changed with his arrival. He sat up straighter. He rested both elbows on the table.
Elijah rifled quickly through the rest of the snapshots, at once curious and wary of what he might find, but the collection ended on a long shot of the two men together at that seaside café, their spines rigid with tension. He sunk back against the edge of the mattress, thwarted in his hopes.
The SVR’s message seemed clear enough, though. They were watching.
Despite himself, Elijah flung a glance at the window. Rain spattered the glass, trickling down in mournful, zigzagging teardrops.
It wasn’t safe to be here, much less in possession of this kind of trivia. Elijah slid the photographs back into the folder, then gathered up the rest of the evidence and restored the lot to the plastic file.
He knew what he needed to do.
Chapter Ten
“One question.”
Nate looked up from his joined hands, shoulders pulling up around his ears.
“The man you met with…” Elijah shifted his weight from foot to foot. “He wasn’t your father, was he?”
“No.”
“Section?”
Nate shook his head. “SVR. Former Directorate S operative. Officially dead these days… Unofficially, the reason your sister’s still alive and kicking.” He rubbed a hand over his nape, sighing. “Or part of it. But back then he was my handler.”
Elijah nodded. “And you didn’t know you had a tail.”
“Evidently, I don’t know everything,” Nate confessed with a rueful smile. It faded from his lips when Elijah advanced into the room.
He witnessed Nate’s hackles rising as if he was a dog being backed into a corner. Elijah wielded no gun. He’d put the incriminating evidence back where he’d found it. Yet even empty-handed, he was still at threat to Nate.
He knew the truth.
“Did you share confidential information with that man?”
Nate scoffed, but tepidly. “What does it matter? My tail painted a very clear picture, don’t you think?”
Undaunted, Elijah cupped the back of Nate’s neck. “Did you?”
“No,” Nate replied. A tremor rushed through him, but he didn’t pull away.
“Then maybe it’s time you started.”
Section and Directorate S would chew Nate up and discard him when they were done. It was in the nature of the trade to turn over untrustworthy agents. And when that happened, Nate would find himself friendless, surrendered to whichever agency needed a scapegoat.
“What is this?” Nate scoffed, his eyes combative as he made to stand. “You think I need permission to betray my country? Where do you get off—?”
“They’re going to kill you, Nate.”
That stopped him in his tracks—not because it was news, Elijah figured, but because this was probably the first time anyone had spoken the words aloud.
Elijah had spent enough time in SHU to know that being alone with one’s thoughts did not lead to enlightenment. He crouched down, steadying himself with one hand on Nate’s knee. “They’re going to kill you. I don’t want that.”
“Don’t see how that matters.”
Elijah hitched up a shoulder. “I have a habit of getting in people’s way. You may have heard.” He was hoping for a smile, maybe a sigh, but any sort of acknowledgment would have sufficed. He refused to examine his sudden need to have Nate reassure him. It wasn’t a rational expectation, particularly of a man who, until an hour ago, had been pointing a loaded gun at him. “What did Jules offer you?” he asked, sliding his palm up Nate’s thigh for better balance.
“Help in exchange for turning traitor on both of my current handlers. She’d run me against Section even as Section thinks they’re running me against the SVR…and vice versa.” Nate caught his hand. “This is all above your pay grade, you know.”
“I’m a hacker. I don’t generally do too well with restrictions.” Nor did Elijah do attachment, but for some reason—whether it was solitude or something more dangerous than that—he couldn’t seem to walk away from this. “Jules owes me a favor. Let me negotiate for you.”
Suspicion slotted into Nate’s eyes. “Why?”
“So you can get a better deal. The only way out of this is through, right?”
Nate stood despite Elijah’s attempts to hold him still, make him listen.
“Why would you even get involved? For God’s sake, Elijah… You don’t know what you’re getting into. My life is—alarmingly precarious. If I stumble, you can be sure I’ll take you down with me. These people don’t fuck around.”
Neither do I.
“Before I came here, I was living on the streets…and before that,” Elijah recalled, voice snagging on the words, “I was in prison, being passed around like currency. Not much lower I can fall.” And there was no one else he could think of wanting to hitch his wagon to.
There was Nate, standing before him in boxers and an unbuttoned dress shirt that still smelled faintly of his cologne. There was this apartment, with its hidden caches and would-be armory.
Hesitantly, Elijah rose and curled his fingers around Nate’s flank, under the folds of the shirt. “Not leaving,” he said, trying out the words to see what they might sound like when spoken aloud.
“Why not?” Nate asked again.
This time, Elijah had no answer for him. He tipped forward and pressed their lips together in a kiss that started out bold and swiftly altered course.
Nate grasped him by the shoulders, fingers so tight that Elijah moaned into his mouth, and pushed Elijah back a pace. Then another.
He didn’t let go. Soon they were stumbling blindly together, the same three inches of breath traded between them until they were both gasping with oxygen-starved lungs.
Elijah struck the wall with his back, a kernel of dormant fear at once sprouting in his chest. Nate was there to banish it with another kiss. He licked into Elijah’s mouth as if tasting him for the first time. He took his time pressing his wrists to the wallpaper and pinning them above Elijah’s head. They weren’t evenly matched. It would’ve been easy for Elijah to shake him off if he put his mind to it.
He didn’t. The shudder that coursed through him was a pure show of barely restrained want. He liked Nate grinding his cotton-covered cock into his hip too much to stop.
Boxers and water-logged sleep pants hit the floor sometime between doing away with sense and Nate palming his ass. They moved together in frantic, misaligned strokes, holding on too tightly and spending too little time on technique.
Elijah nearly forgot to breathe when Nate curled a hand around his neck and forced him back against the wall. His eyes blazed. Stay. It didn’t need saying.
Overwhelmed, Elijah looked on as Nate kissed a path down his chest, over the concave dip of his belly and down the jut of his hip bones.
“Oh God…” Elijah thrust his head back into the plaster, scraping fingernails through Nate’s hair. Though he knew it was coming, he wasn’t remotely prepared for the warm haven of his mouth. Pleasure lashed him from within, an uninterrupted feedback loop of tight suction and talented hands manipulating his balls.
Nate took only a few inches between his lips, but he didn’t need to gag himself on Elijah’s cock to deliver. Swirling his tongue around the sensitive head of his erection was enough to have Elijah quaking with need.
“Jesus…” Savaged by the desire to touch him, Elijah knot
ted his fingers in Nate’s thick chestnut hair, rutting into every slick stroke.
It wasn’t easy. Once Nate found his rhythm, he went at it full throttle. He held Elijah still with one hand across his midriff, the sound of his ministrations loud in the otherwise silent apartment. Lust took over. Sensation was everything, the merest pinprick of tension heightened to a vicious jab. When Nate grazed his inner thigh with sharp teeth, Elijah’s legs all but buckled under him.
“You like that?” Nate purred and did it again. This time it was a proper love bite, the real deal after a playful taunt.
Elijah squeezed his eyes shut in a helpless bid to stave off the orgasm churning in his veins. “Ngh… Stop, stop, I can’t.”
“What can’t you?” The floorboard creaked as Nate drew himself upright. He’d shed his shirt when Elijah wasn’t looking. Having all that golden, warm skin within touching distance rendered thought comically challenging.
Words failed Elijah. In their absence, he made do with kissing Nate wet and rough, eager to taste himself. For a few precious moments, there was nothing in the world beyond Nate’s mouth on his, breath hot on his cheek, hands light on his hips. Then Nate reached down. He palmed Elijah’s cock in a gentle grip, but that did nothing to cut off his startled gasp.
“I’m gonna come,” Elijah panted.
“I know. It’s okay.”
“No—”
Nate pressed their slick lengths together, hissing with the pleasurable friction. “You don’t need my permission.”
A surge of tenderness shot through Elijah. It was sweet—that Nate thought he’d wait for his okay, that he would give it anyway when he could turn power-mad instead. Elijah had anchored both hands at his shoulders and pushed him back a fraction.
“No, I… I want you inside me,” he confessed shakily. “When I come.” He’d lost the habit of making choices for himself. Out of necessity, he had outsourced control over his body to men who didn’t deserve the right.
Nate wasn’t one of them.
He retreated with a sigh, steadying himself with one hand against the wall. Perspiration glistened in that hollow beneath his bottom lip. Elijah wanted nothing more than to lick it off. He refrained. Nate’s posture was fraught with tension. They had left behind the life-and-death realm of international espionage, but he was still balancing on a tripwire. His shoulders tensed.
It should have registered as a trap, but Elijah only curled a fist around his nape and drew him into a chaste, fortifying kiss. “Bed,” he murmured, pulling back. Please.
He wasn’t caged. He pulled away first, Nate quick on his heels.
They landed in an inelegant heap on the bed, Elijah on elbows and knees, Nate half draped over him, already stretching for the condoms and lube in the nightstand.
Elijah fisted the bed sheets with both hands and breathed out on the vaguely seasick feeling that roiled in his gut. He wanted to do this—for Nate, yes, but also for himself. Prison hadn’t changed him. It wasn’t fair to allow that hellhole to control him months later.
“What are you doing?” Nate wondered and laid a warm palm between Elijah’s shoulder blades.
“We can do it like this.”
Nate needed to be in charge. He, too, was fumbling for control. And if Elijah could help with anything, maybe he could help with that.
He didn’t expect to feel Nate slide an arm under his chest and haul him up. “Like this,” he corrected, settling behind Elijah.
It took a little fumbling to find the right angle. Face hot, Elijah wound up with his knees spread around Nate’s, keenly aware of the hard cock digging into the small of his back. He wasn’t pinned down. He wasn’t choking on air. It was a compromise, true, but it was one he could live with.
Nate’s prodding touch further cemented that sentiment.
He breathed out on the first burst of discomfort, eyes drooping shut. With Nate’s lips at his nape and fingers stretching him open, Elijah couldn’t hang on to any one sensation for long. He was still loose from their last fuck and it didn’t take much in the way of prep before he was rocking his hips to take more and more of Nate’s digits inside him.
A sharp bite at the joint of shoulder and neck stopped him complaining too much when Nate freed his hand.
Elijah tried to be patient. He eased forward, onto his hands, so Nate could unroll a condom down his cock. Details grew fuzzy, inconsequential—much like the effort Elijah expended to seat himself back in Nate’s lap, taking him down to the hilt in one smooth glide.
He knew it took effort, because Nate locked both arms around his waist, heart hammering against Elijah’s spine. He couldn’t seem to catch his breath.
Clumsily, Elijah turned at the waist and tried to press their lips together. The angle was all wrong, so he nuzzled into Nate’s sweat-damp hair instead. There was something primal about getting off on a lover’s scent, his musk. He breathed Nate in, wishing for nothing more than to remember this split-second forever. He didn’t question the impulse.
“That’s it, love. That’s fucking… Oh God, I’m so close. Elijah…”
A flood of endorphins galloped through him when he heard Nate gasp his name in that ragged, pleasure-laced voice.
He seized Nate’s hand in larger fist, holding it steady as he worked his hips back and forth in a restless, sloppy rhythm. Perspiration slicked his body, ticklish as it dripped down his chest. A moan caught in his throat when Nate set teeth into his shoulder, biting lightly at feverish, damp skin.
Take me. Fuck, do what you want. Use me, I need it. I love it.
I’m yours.
He bucked his hips in time with Nate’s thrusts, riding him as best he could. The desire to bring Nate off nearly overtook the desperate urge to come.
Mercifully, it didn’t take long for Nate to pass the point of no return. His groans took on a frantic edge. He tried to hold on, to keep tugging Elijah along with him, but his attention had focused inward. Elijah squeezed his fingers around Nate’s, anchoring his hand in place, milking himself with Nate’s fist around him.
So close—
When Nate came, it was with rough, fraught noise, panting for breath as though he’d run a marathon.
Within less than half a dozen strokes of their joined hands over his length, Elijah followed suit, tumbling into ecstasy like a drowning man. White ropes painted his stomach and their wrists, even landed as far up as his chest.
It was the dirtiest, sexiest thing Elijah had done in a long, long time.
He’d never been a great believer in life-affirming sex before prison, but with Nate murmuring sweet nothings in his ear, their bodies slick with sweat and spit and other fluids, Elijah could see himself coming around to the therapeutic benefits of a good lay.
He became aware of Nate whispering soft words against his temple and kissing his ear as the aftershocks receded, but he was too focused on the friction of his spent cock to parse out meaning. Soon even that was lost in the white-hot lethargy of the afterglow.
Nate seemed content to squeeze and stroke at his spent erection long after it was necessary. He slipped out slowly, apologizing as Elijah winced.
Elijah ignored him. “Lie down with me,” he pleaded, too exhausted to care that his voice was as rough as sandpaper. “Please, I need…”
“I should—”
It was Nate’s hesitation that prompted him to hook a hand around his wrist and pull him down to the wrinkled bed sheets.
Nate made a face. “Landed in the wet spot.”
“Deal with it.” Elijah spared a thought for laundry or a late breakfast whenever they wrestled up the energy to move. For now, the most he could do was curl up around Nate’s flank and throw a leg over his. It was clingy and possibly pathetic, but he didn’t care. He needed to keep Nate close.
He needed this to be a beginning.
“You know this isn’t over,” Nate said after a beat, as though mind-reading was among his Section-acquired skills.
“I read the file,” Elijah recalled.
“There’s more.”
“Secrets?”
“Skeletons.” Nate swallowed and the sound echoed through his rib cage into Elijah’s ear. “I’m not the man you think I am. And if you stay, you’ll be exposed.”
Elijah waited for the dismissal he feared, but Nate fell silent after that, the stroke of his fingers through Elijah’s too-long hair slow and rhythmic. It might have been enough to lull him to sleep.
“I’m about to disappoint you,” Elijah confessed.
Nate tightened his grip around his shoulders, clinging to post-orgasmic serenity as though afraid it could slip through their fingers.
* * * *
A flash of movement at the corner of Elijah’s eye was all the warning he had before Jules slid into the booth. She wore a black blazer over a white tank top today, her eyes done up with blue liner under the fringe of a black bob.
Elijah would have recognized her anywhere.
It was the death glares. He’d grown up on the receiving end of those, even learned to enjoy being their target from time to time
“Where is he?” Jules volleyed. She must have staked out the apartment, perhaps even taken a gander inside. Three weeks was a long time for an asset to maintain radio silence. It was even longer for one of dubious allegiance to keep a low profile.
Slowly, Elijah set his second-hand paperback copy of The Magus down on the scratched wooden table. His red vinyl seat squeaked as he tipped forward. “Safe.”
The blonde barista ventured past their table, clearing her throat. Neither Jules nor Elijah glanced up. They were the only two patrons in the restaurant, though, so it wasn’t long before they were left alone again. The vague trill of a fado melody trickled from concealed speakers somewhere high in the ceiling.
Jules scoffed. “He told you.”
Elijah nodded, just the once.
He read the calculation in Jules’ eyes before she committed to it with words.
“Everything?”
“He told me enough so I’d understand,” Elijah answered diplomatically.