Chapter 276: Beyond the System.
Venna’s palms found the back of my head. Mine found the back of her neck. And our mouths met somewhere in between.
It started slow.
Neither of us was in a hurry. Hurrying would have meant this was about something, and it wasn’t about anything. It was two people who were stuck in a room as the world outside was ending.
She tasted like the dark room. Dust and cold air and something underneath it that was just her—warm, clean, faintly sweet. My tongue brushed the seam of her lips and she opened for me without hesitation. The kiss deepened by degrees. Soft. Then wetter. Then deliberate.
Her hand slid down from my head to my jaw and held it, turning me the way she wanted me, and I let her have that. The pressure of her fingers was deliberate, almost studying. She kissed the way someone kisses when they have spent their whole life inside other people’s memories and have almost nothing that belongs only to them. Careful at first. Then not careful. The shift happened in the space between one breath and the next.
I felt the exact moment she stopped thinking.
Her fingers tightened hard in my hair and she came up onto her knees properly, higher than me now, and the kiss changed. Deeper. Filthy. Open-mouthed and hungry.
Her breath broke against my mouth and mine broke against hers and neither of us fixed it. The small wet sounds of tongues and teeth stayed between us, private, almost lost in the larger quiet of the building.
My hand moved from her neck to her jaw, thumb along the line of it, feeling the soft give of skin and the hard edge of bone underneath. She made a sound into my mouth that she hadn’t planned to make—low, surprised, completely unguarded—and the vibration of it went straight through me.
She pulled back an inch. Her forehead came down against mine, both of us breathing hard in the dark. The air between us was warmer than the rest of the room, humid with shared breath.
"Hey," I said.
"Don’t." Her hand stayed in my hair, fingers still wound tight. "Don’t ask me if I’m sure. I’m sure, Bram."
[LEWD LEVELING SYSTEM]
[Venna Belmonte. Source. Extraction in progress.]
I closed my eyes and pushed it out of the room.
Not now. Not her. Not tonight.
Because this wasn’t a mission. Not a mark. Not a source. Not a name on a list handed to me by a dead man. Just a woman with blue hair in a small bed in a building full of bodies, holding my face in the dark, asking me not to make it complicated. The system’s words faded. I let them.
"Okay," I said.
She kissed me again before the word was finished, and this one had nothing careful left in it at all. Her hands came down my shoulders, my arms, found my hands and moved them where she wanted them—onto her waist, her hips, the curve of her ass through the thin fabric of her skirt—guiding, certain—and every time I thought she was slowing she wasn’t slowing, she was only breathing. The rhythm of it pulled everything else out of the night and left only this: heat, pressure, the wet slide of mouths, the soft catch of her breath when my teeth grazed her lower lip.
Somewhere far off outside, something screamed and stopped screaming. Neither of us turned toward the window.
Her fingers found the hem of my shirt.
She pulled and I moved with her, lifting my arms, making it easy. The shirt came off and landed somewhere on the floor of a room neither of us was going to remember the shape of. Cool air touched the skin of my back and then her hands were there instead, warm, mapping the lines of muscle and the places the plain had left its marks. Her nails scraped lightly down my spine and I felt every inch of it.
Then she stretched her arms out. A signal. Your turn.
I leaned in and started on her buttons. The fabric was thin. Each button resisted a little, and I felt her breathing change against my hands—ragged with waiting, every button taking longer than the one before because my fingers had stopped being reliable. The small sounds of the fabric giving way were the loudest things in the room.
The shirt came away. Her arms fell with it.
Black bra. Skirt. Nothing else between us but that.
She came into me and started kissing me in small soft presses along my jaw while my hands went around her back searching for the strap and finding nothing, hunting blind in the dark. The skin under my palms was warm, smooth, rising and falling with each breath she took. I could feel the delicate ladder of her spine, the soft give of her sides.
"It’s at the front," she whispered against my skin, and I heard the smile in it—quiet, almost teasing, the first real lightness either of us had carried in hours.
My hands found it. The clasp gave with a soft click. The bra came away.
And then there was nothing between her chest and mine and the temperature of the room changed entirely. Skin to skin. The heat of her against the heat of me. The soft weight of her bare breasts pressing into the hard plane of my torso, the tight points of her nipples dragging across my skin as she shifted closer.
Everything else—the bodies downstairs, the broadcast, the names I couldn’t reach—dropped away for a few seconds and left only the simple, overwhelming fact of contact.
Whatever slowness had been left in me went out of the window. My belt, my pants, both gone somewhere without me deciding. The cool of the air lasted only a moment before her hands found me again—warm fingers wrapping around the hard length of my cock, squeezing once, exploratory, possessive. I hissed through my teeth.
She lay back on the small bed and her skirt rode up as she went, white underneath, her hair loose across the sheet—blue against the pale fabric, catching what little light the window still allowed. The mattress shifted under her weight. The springs made a soft, private sound.
I came down over her and started at her neck—open mouth, tongue, the scrape of teeth just hard enough to make her arch. Then her shoulder. Then lower, and lower again, my mouth taking its time everywhere my hands weren’t—mapping the places the night had left unmarked, the soft underside of her arm, the line of her collarbone, the rise of her ribs. I closed my mouth over one nipple and sucked hard, and the sound she made was low and broken and completely unguarded. My hand covered the other breast, thumb stroking the tight peak while my tongue worked the first one.
I kept going lower. Kissing down the soft plane of her stomach. Feeling the muscles jump under my mouth. Until my fingers reached the waistband of her skirt.
There had been something about this woman since the burial. Something I’d felt standing in the sun beside her grandmother’s grave with a stranger who dreamed about my face, and I hadn’t been able to name it then and couldn’t name it now, and tonight it had me here treating her like something I’d been sent to worship.
And the skirt was in the way of that.
I got my hand under her, lifted her from the small of her back, and she raised herself just enough to help me. The motion was small, cooperative, almost formal in its care. The skirt came down over her legs and off, the fabric whispering against skin and then gone.
Both of us down to the last of it.