Chapter 7: Breakfast and Deflection
The smell hit him first. Not the usual safe house odors of gun oil and stale coffee, but something that punched through the fog of his sleepless night: butter, vanilla, the warm, cakey scent of browning flour. It was so mundane it felt like a violation.
Edward had spent the night on the couch, listening to the house breathe, to the soft, infuriating sounds of Consuelo’s sleep—or her wakefulness—through the door. He’d finally drifted into a thin, angry doze near dawn, only to be pulled awake by the sizzle and the smell.
He stood in the hallway entrance to the kitchen, his body a knot of stiff muscles and coiled tension.
Consuelo stood at the stove, her back to him. She wore a pair of Jimmy’s sweatpants, rolled at the ankles, and one of Edward’s own old undershirts, the white cotton stretched thin across her shoulders. Her hair was damp, pulled into a messy bun, little curls escaping to cling to her golden neck. She was flipping a pancake with a casual flick of her wrist, the disc of batter soaring, turning, landing back in the skillet with a perfect, soft slap.
And she was singing.
It was a low, wandering hum, a tune he didn’t recognize. Spanish, maybe. It was utterly, devastatingly normal.
Aris was already at the small table, a chipped plate in front of him, shoveling food in with focused efficiency. He glanced up, saw Edward, and gave a curt nod, his mouth full. Jimmy hovered by the counter, clutching a mug of coffee like a shield, looking between Edward and Consuelo with nervous eyes.
“You’re cooking,” Edward said. His voice was gravel, unused.
Consuelo’s humming stopped. She didn’t turn. “The pantry was stocked. Flour, baking powder. A miracle.” She slid the finished pancake onto a growing stack on a warmed plate. “Hungry?”
The casual question, the domestic scene, it was a stage play. After the torn clothes, the lock clicking shut, the green gunk Jimmy had washed from her harness. After two days of radio silence. Edward felt the anger, banked all night, flare white-hot.
“Where were you?” The words weren’t loud, but they cut through the kitchen’s soft sounds, sharp and cold.
She lifted another ladle of batter. It hissed as it hit the hot butter. “Out.”
“Out.” He took a step into the room. The linoleum was sticky under his bare feet. “You smell like a chemical fire and a landfill. Your clothes were shredded. You walked in here looking like you’d fought a war, you locked yourself away, and now you’re making pancakes? ‘Out’ isn’t an answer.”
“It’s the one you’re getting right now.” Her voice was calm, a flat lake surface over unknown depths.
He was across the kitchen in three strides, his presence looming behind her. He didn’t touch her, but he could feel the heat coming off her skin, could see the tiny, impossible scars from the cryo-tubes, like fine silver threads, just below the hairline at the back of her neck. “You will look at me and you will tell me what happened.”
Aris put his fork down. “Prescott.”
“Shut up.” Edward didn’t take his eyes off her. “You don’t disappear on a team. You don’t put everyone at risk. You don’t get to do that.”
Finally, she turned. Not with a jerk, but slowly, as if moving through deep water. She looked up at him. Her black eyes were clear, rested, and utterly empty of the rage he was throwing at her. That emptiness was worse than any fury. She held his gaze for a long, silent moment, then turned back to the stove, killed the burner, and picked up the plate of pancakes.
She walked past him, her shoulder brushing his arm. A static charge, a hundred years old, jumped between them. She set the plate on the table, next to Aris. Then she went to the dented percolator, poured a mug of black coffee, and placed it carefully on the counter in front of the empty space beside Jimmy.
“Sit,” she said, not looking at Edward. “Eat.”
“I don’t want your damn pancakes.”
“You’re hungry,” she said, and it was simply a fact. “Your stomach has been growling since you woke up. The couch is uncomfortable. You didn’t sleep. You need food before you try to have this conversation.” She finally met his eyes again. “Or you’ll just be a hungrier, tireder asshole, and we’ll get nowhere. Sit. Eat. Then we’ll talk.”
The sheer, reasonable practicality of it disarmed him. It was a move from a different playbook, one she’d used a lifetime ago when he’d come home from a mission buzzing with violent energy. Eat first, Eduardo. Then be angry. It had driven him mad then, too.
Jimmy sidled into a chair. Aris resumed eating, watching the standoff with clinical interest.
Edward stood there, his fists clenched, the invitation feeling like a trap. The aroma of the food was suddenly overwhelming, a visceral pull. He was starving. He was exhausted. She saw it all, and she was using it against him by offering exactly what he needed.
With a sound of disgust, he yanked the remaining chair out and dropped into it. He stared at the empty space in front of him.
Consuelo took the skillet, walked over, and slid two golden-brown pancakes onto the scratched laminate tabletop in front of him. She set a pat of butter on the edge of the plate, a bottle of generic syrup. Then she returned to lean against the counter, her own mug in her hands, watching him.
The silence was thick, broken only by the sounds of chewing. Edward picked up his fork, stabbed a pancake, brought a piece to his mouth. It was perfect. Light, fluffy, with crispy edges. It tasted like a memory he’d tried to burn. He ate mechanically, the sweetness clashing with the acid in his throat.
When he was halfway through, he put his fork down. “Now.”
Consuelo took a slow sip of coffee. “I went to see what they do now.”
“Who?”
“The ones like us. The ones who don’t wear the shiny suits.” She nodded towards a newspaper clipping on the wall, a blurry photo of a ‘rogue meta’ incident from years ago. “The ones the system spits out. The failures.”
Aris stopped eating. “Where?”
“A place in the docks. An old fish-packing plant.” Her voice was detached, a mission report. “They call it the Pit. It’s a fight club. For powered people. No rules. Just crowds, and money, and someone walking out.”
Edward stared. “You went to a meta brawl.”
“I needed to see it.” Her eyes finally held a flicker of something—not anger, but a cold, distant horror. “They were children, Edward. Kids who got a bad batch of D4, or who manifested something useless for selling soda. Burn-outs from Charles’s academy. They fight until someone’s broken enough to stop. For cash. For the attention of scouts from the Corporation. For a chance to be something other than garbage.”
She looked down into her mug. “The green slime. That was a boy. Couldn’t have been more than nineteen. His power was… he secreted a corrosive adhesive. A biological glue. He was covered in it. He was terrified. They put him in against a woman who could vibrate her fists. She pulverized his ribs through his own coating.” Consuelo’s knuckles were white around the ceramic. “I pulled him out. Took him to a free clinic that asks no questions. The smell… it was his panic. His body eating itself.”
The kitchen was dead quiet. Jimmy looked ill.
“That’s where you were for two days?” Edward’s voice was quieter now, but no less intense. “Playing nurse?”
Her head snapped up, the detachment shattered. “I was seeing!” The words crackled. “I spent two days in the rust and the rot you built! This is your world, Edward! The clean, official superhero, the Patriot. You helped make this system. You benefited from it. You got the pure Daisy because of your name and your money. What do you think happens to the leftovers? To the mistakes? They go to the Pit. They fight in the dark for scraps. And the Corporation films it. They study it. They use it.”
She pushed off the counter, setting her mug down with a sharp click. “You asked me why I left. I went to remember who I was before you. Before the wedding ring, before the house, before they took me because I was carrying your child.” Her eyes were black fire now, fixed on him. “I was the Terror of the Sky. And out there, in that stinking place, I was more myself than I have been since I woke up in that tube.”
Edward stood, his chair scraping. “So what? You’re back now. You proved your point. You scared the kids. What does that change?”
“It changes me.” She took a step toward him, into his space. The scent of vanilla and soap was gone, replaced by the ghost of that chemical stink. “I am not your housewife. I am not a weapon for your revenge. I am not a mystery for you to solve by yelling at a locked door. I am Consuelo Pérez. And I am angry. Not your kind of angry. Not loud and hot. My anger is cold, and it is old, and it is finally awake.”
She looked past him, to Aris. “The files we took. The payroll. It’s not enough. We need the footage. The Pit is a black site, but it’s a revenue stream. There will be financial trails, security logs. We find who runs it, who banks it, we find another thread leading back to Charles. To the board.”
Aris nodded slowly, a smile playing on his lips. “Now you’re talking.”
Edward felt the conversation slipping away from him, the focus shifting to tactics, to the mission. He was being sidelined in his own kitchen. “We? You just said you’re not a weapon for my revenge.”
“It’s not your revenge,” she said, her gaze slicing back to him. “It’s mine. They took my life. They took my child. They froze me for sixty years. Charles’s system created the Pit. It’s all the same machine.” She picked up the skillet, carried it to the sink, began to run water. The domestic act was now an dismissal. “You can help me break it. Or you can stand in my way. But you don’t get to own it.”
The water steamed. Edward watched the muscles move in her back under the thin cotton of his shirt. The woman humming over pancakes was gone, folded away. The soldier was back, but she was fiercer, more focused, more terrifying than he’d ever known. She had walked into the heart of the world’s ugliness and come back with a colder flame.
“You should have taken me with you,” he said, the fight gone out of his voice, leaving something raw.
She didn’t turn off the water. “You wouldn’t have understood what you were looking
She didn’t turn off the water. “You wouldn’t have understood what you were looking at.”
The dismissal was absolute. She scrubbed the skillet, her back a wall of finality. Aris pushed his empty plate away, the screech of ceramic on laminate a period to the conversation. “We’ll map the financials from the Pit tonight. Jimmy, you’re with me.”
Jimmy nodded, eyes wide, still caught in the horror of the story. The kitchen felt airless, charged with the things she had said and the colder things she hadn’t.
Edward watched the water sluice over her hands, over the curve of her spine under the stolen shirt. That old shirt, thin from a hundred washes, clinging to the sweat at the small of her back from the stove’s heat. A possessive fury, quiet and deep, uncoiled in his gut. She walked into hell for two days and came back with a blueprint for war, but she wouldn’t give him a single word in the dark. She would talk to Aris about tactics. She would let Jimmy clean the gore from her harness. For him, there was only the locked door and the scent of pancakes.
She finished, set the skillet on the drainboard with a definitive clang, and dried her hands on a ragged towel. Without a glance at any of them, she walked out of the kitchen and down the short hall toward the bedroom.
He moved.
His chair scraped violently. Aris said something sharp, but the words were just noise. Edward was already in the hallway, his steps silent on the worn boards, a predator’s gait. She reached for the doorknob. He was a shadow at her back.
Consuelo pushed the door open and stepped across the threshold. He entered right behind her, his body crowding her into the dim room, and kicked the door shut. The click of the lock engaging was louder this time, a sound that sealed them in a pressure chamber.
She spun around, surprised, but her expression hardened in an instant. Her black eyes flashed in the grey light filtering through the dirty window. “Get out. You think locking us in changes anything? You won’t manage to intimidate me, Edward. Not anymore.”
He didn’t say a word.
His hand shot out, not to hit, but to claim. His fingers closed around the column of her throat, not squeezing to hurt, but anchoring. He pulled her against him in one violent motion, eliminating the space she kept so carefully between them. His other hand cradled the back of her head, fingers tangling in the damp curls of her bun, and he kissed her.
It wasn’t a kiss of love or reconciliation. It was a colonization. His mouth covered hers, hot and demanding, his tongue forcing its way past her lips. He tasted the coffee, the faint vanilla, and underneath it, the steel-cold rage that was her core. She struggled against him, her hands coming up to push at his chest, but his invulnerable body was a wall. A muffled sound of fury vibrated in her throat against his palm.
With a brutal, lateral wrench, he ripped the old undershirt open. Buttons pinged against the wall. The thin cotton tore apart, exposing her bare breasts to the cool, dusty air.
She gasped into his mouth, a shock of cold and violation. He broke the kiss just enough to look down, his green eyes dark and hungry. He palmed one breast roughly, his calloused thumb scraping over her nipple, feeling it peak instantly under his touch. He squeezed, the pressure just shy of pain, possessiveness in the curl of his fingers. A low, unwilling moan escaped her, trapped between their mouths as he kissed her again, deeper, swallowing the sound.
He held her by the neck, not choking, but steering. He walked her backward toward the narrow bed, his grip unyielding. When her calves hit the mattress, he twisted her with a fluid, practiced motion and pushed. She fell forward onto the thin quilt, the breath leaving her in a whoosh.
She shoved herself up on her elbows, anger blazing. “You bastard—!”
He didn’t let her finish. He grabbed the waistband of the sweatpants and yanked, the cheap material tearing apart at the seams. He pulled them down her legs in one rough motion and threw the rag aside. She was naked now, exposed, golden skin stark against the faded bedding. He dropped to his knees behind her, his hands spreading her thighs.
He didn’t tease. He buried his face between her legs, his tongue finding her clit with ruthless, experienced precision. She jolted, a ragged shout tearing from her. “Stop—!” But her body betrayed her, arching back against his mouth, her own moisture already blooming under his fierce, unrelenting strokes. He fucked her with his tongue, deep and filthy, then sucked her clit hard, using the coarse pressure of his beard against her sensitive skin. She moaned, loud and raw, one fist clenching in the quilt, the other flying back to try and grasp his hair. He pinned her wrist to the small of her back, holding her there, captive to his mouth.
He worked her until her moans were continuous, until her hips were grinding back against his face, until she was trembling and soaking wet, her slickness coating his chin. Only then did he stop.
He stood up, the old floorboards creaking. His own jeans were already open, his cock hard and jutting out, flushed and eager. He grabbed her by the hips, his fingers digging into her flesh, and pulled her toward the edge of the mattress. He left her face pressed into the quilt, her ass raised high in the air, open and glistening for him.
He ran a hand over one perfect, rounded cheek, feeling the muscle tense. Then he gave it a hard, open-palmed slap. The sound cracked through the room. A red handprint bloomed on her golden skin. She cried out, a mix of shock and sharp sensation.
He positioned himself, the broad head of his cock nudging against her entrance. He didn’t ask. He didn’t slowly enter. He slammed into her in one deep, brutal thrust, sheathing himself to the hilt in her tight, wet heat.
She whimpered, a high, broken sound, her back arching beautifully. She pushed back instinctively, trying to take him even deeper, to control the rhythm. He slapped her ass again, the same spot, sharper now. “Still,” he growled, the first word he’d spoken.
With one hand, he grabbed the hair at her nape, twisting it into a makeshift ponytail. He pulled firmly, tilting her head back, stretching her throat, asserting his dominance in every point of contact. Then he began to fuck her. Hard. No gentle rhythm, just deep, pounding drives of his hips, each thrust punching a choked gasp from her lungs. The bedframe slammed against the wall with a rhythmic, pounding beat that echoed the one in his veins. He watched himself disappear into her, over and over, her body gripping him like a vise made of memory and fury.
“You’re mine,” he grunted, the words ripped from him, each drive emphasizing the claim. “You walk into any hell you want. But you come back to this. You come back to me.”
She couldn’t answer. Her world had narrowed to the slap of skin, the burn of his grip in her hair, the overwhelming fullness as he split her open. Her moans were continuous now, raw and obscene, each drive wringing them from her. The anger was still there, a live wire under her skin, but it was fused with a need so deep and dark it scared her. This was the language they’d always spoken best, the violent truth their polite marriage had never contained.
He fucked her like he was trying to reach her past, to fuck the cryo-sleep and the experiments and the sixty lost years right out of her. To brand himself back into her cells. The pace was punishing, relentless. Sweat dripped from his brow onto the small of her back. Her fingers clawed at the quilt, tearing the fabric.
He felt the tension coiling at the base of his spine, the inevitable fall. His pulls on her hair grew sharper, his thrusts more ragged. “Come for me,” he commanded, his voice ragged. “Now. Let me feel it.”
As if his words were a trigger, her whole body tightened. A broken, screaming cry was torn from her as her climax hit, her inner muscles clamping around him in fierce, rippling waves. The intensity of her surrender, the sheer physical proof of it, pushed him over the edge. With a final, savage thrust, he buried himself as deep as he could go and came, roaring his release, filling her with a hot, claiming rush.
He collapsed over her, his body weighing her down into the mattress, both of them slick with sweat and spent. The only sounds were their ragged, gulping breaths and the distant hum of the city. He still held her hair. She still trembled beneath him.
The silence that followed was not peace. It was the aftermath of a detonation, littered with the shrapnel of everything they had just said and done. The lock on the door held the world out, but it couldn’t contain the fallout now suspended in the dust motes between them.
The lock on the door held the world out, but it couldn’t contain the fallout now suspended in the dust motes between them. Their breathing slowly synced, a reluctant tide pulling back from a ravaged shore. Edward’s weight was a furnace against her back, his softening length still nestled inside her, a tangible reminder of the bridge he’d tried to burn his way across.
He shifted first, the movement causing her to suck in a sharp breath. He didn’t pull away. Instead, he rolled them both slowly onto their sides, his front to her back, his arm a heavy band across her waist. His lips found the sweat-damp skin where her shoulder met her neck.
“Talk to me,” he murmured, the words a vibration against her spine. “I can’t stand it when you shut me out.”
Consuelo, still catching her breath, let the silence stretch until it was thin and taut. “I just want you to listen to me.” Her voice was hoarse, stripped raw.
Edward, still buried inside her, wrapped his arms around her and pulled her with him as he sat up, settling her on his lap. The shift was intimate, overwhelming. She was cradled in the cage of his limbs, their bodies still joined. The grey light from the window cut across their tangled forms.
Consuelo turned to face him. His expression was unguarded, the anger spent, leaving something desperate and open in his green eyes. She placed her palms on his chest, over the old scars and the steady, rapid beat of his heart. The smell of sex and sweat and his familiar skin was a time capsule.
“I can’t ignore how rotten the system is,” she said, her gaze unwavering. “Even if you lead it and I guide you, there will still be a system that protects people who kill for fun, rape, torture, or harass others. We have to destroy it—whether to make it cease to exist or to start over from zero.”
He sighed, his hands stroking up her bare back. “It’s a system that has always existed and will always exist. Someone new will just come along and guide it differently.”
“You?” Her laugh was a bitter puff of air. “Look at what happened in the ’80s. You laid the foundation for what it is today. You already led it once and you ruined it.”
Edward frowned, his fingers tracing the notches of her spine. “I was a broken man. I was angry at the world because I thought you had abandoned me… that you had rejected me.”
“But there were things that were wrong long before that, my husband.” She used the title like a scalpel. “You’re spoiled, temperamental, and capricious.”
“I’m not that bad.” It was a petulant grumble, a boyish protest that didn’t fit the century-old man or the scene.
“Let me remind you that you only became the leader of the super team because your father bought the position for you.” Her words were calm, precise, surgical. “Everyone ignored you. The only time you were happy was when the soldiers followed your orders.”
He was quiet for a long moment, his eyes searching her face. “Things aren’t like that anymore.”
“You’re drawn to me because I try to be a good person.” She leaned closer, her voice dropping. “You even cornered me to make me yours. But you never tried. Even now, you’re only trying to do good so you can gain more power.”
Edward grabbed her chin, his touch firm but not painful. “And yet…” he said, a slow, reluctant smile touching his lips. “You still fell in love with me.”
Consuelo turned her face away, blushing, the heat rising from her chest to her cheeks. “Who said I was in love?”
“It’s written all over your face.” His smile widened, transforming his features, chasing the shadows from his eyes for a second. “The way it lights up when I do something right… and the way it hurts when I show you my true intentions.”
She had no rebuttal. He’d named the secret she’d carried since the war, the one that had survived the wedding, the kidnapping, the ice. It hung in the air, fragile and terrifying. A heavy fist pounded on the bedroom door, shattering the moment.
“You two done making up or whatever?” Aris’s voice was a bored bark through the wood. “We’ve got a location. The Pit’s bank. Jimmy pulled the records. We move in an hour. Try to put some pants on.”
The real world crashed back in, cold and demanding. Edward’s arms tightened around her, a final, fierce clutch of possession, before he let her go.