Chapter 8: Power play part 2
The silence after my words stretched, thin and brittle as old glass. Pace’s eyes held mine, that calculated focus dissecting my every micro-expression. The vial. The inhibitor. The blocker. I’d laid my final card on the sweat-damp linen between us.
A slow, terrifying smile spread across his face. It didn’t reach his eyes.
“An insurance policy,” he repeated, his voice a low rumble. He shifted onto his side, propping his head on his hand. The movement was casual, but his gaze was a laser. “And the ten-minute window? What was the extraction plan? One of your… academic friends?”
“I work alone.” The statement was absolute.
He reached out, his fingers tracing the line of my jaw, a touch so at odds with the conversation it made my skin prickle. “Then you planned to walk out of here, past Vito, past my security, after slitting my thigh open with my own letter opener.” His thumb brushed my lower lip. “Bold.”
“Necessary,” I corrected, refusing to flinch.
His hand slid down, over the pulse hammering in my throat, down between my breasts, coming to rest low on my stomach. His palm was searing hot. “And the inhibitor?” he asked, his tone deceptively light. “Just prudent? Or did the thought of carrying my child disgust you?”
The question was a trap. I saw it in his eyes. “It was a variable I couldn’t afford,” I said, my voice clinical. “Emotional and biological leverage. It compromised the mission parameters.”
“Mission parameters,” he echoed, the smile still playing on his lips. His fingers slid lower, through my damp curls, finding the swollen, sensitive flesh beneath. I jerked at the contact. “And now the mission is… complete?” He pushed a thick finger inside me, and I couldn’t suppress a sharp gasp. I was still loose and slick from him, but the intrusion felt different. Probing. “Your brother is still in that black-site lab, Lina. The trade hasn’t been finalized.”
He added a second finger, stretching me, his thumb circling my clit with a precision that was maddening. My hips gave an involuntary buck. “I… re-evaluated the terms,” I managed, my breath hitching.
“Did you.” It wasn’t a question. He was watching my face, studying the physical betrayal of my body as his fingers worked me with ruthless expertise. “On your knees with my cock down your throat, was that a strategic re-evaluation?”
My retort died in my throat as he curled his fingers, hitting a spot that made my vision star. A low moan escaped me. “Fuck you.”
“You have,” he said, his voice dropping to a gravelly whisper. He leaned in, his lips brushing my ear. “Repeatedly. And now you’re going to come on my fingers, and then you’re going to tell me what really happens when your insurance policy fails.”
He was too good. The buildup was too fast, too targeted. My body, already overloaded and sensitized, coiled tight. “Pace…”
“Come on, Kitten.” His breath was hot. “Show me the breakdown of a perfect plan.”
It wasn’t gentle. It was a command. His thumb pressed hard, his fingers thrust deep, and the orgasm ripped through me with shocking violence. My back arched off the bed, a silent scream locked behind my clenched teeth as waves of pulsing pleasure turned my bones to liquid. He held me through it, his hand unrelenting, extracting every last shudder.
As the spasms subsided, leaving me boneless and gasping, he withdrew his fingers. He brought them to his mouth, sucking them clean, his dark eyes locked on mine. The obscenity of the gesture was a claiming far more profound than anything before.
“Now,” he said, lying back and pulling me atop him so I straddled his hips. He was already hard again, his cock pressing insistently against my backside. “The vial. When did you take it?”
The aftermath of the climax had loosened my tongue, blurred the sharp edges of my caution. “Two hours before the meeting,” I mumbled into his chest, the scent of him—sex, sweat, expensive soap—filling my senses.
“And you felt nothing? No dizziness? No muscular weakness?”
I shook my head. “No. I thought… I thought it was a slow-release compound. I was waiting.”
He chuckled, a dark, humorless sound that vibrated through his chest. His hands came to my hips, lifting me easily, positioning the head of his cock at my entrance. “Wait no longer, Doctor.”
He lowered me slowly, making me feel every inch as I sank down onto him. The fullness was breathtaking, a stretched, aching completeness. I braced my hands on his chest.
“Pace… the vial…”
“Is useless,” he grunted, his hands tightening on my hips, guiding me into a slow, deep roll. “My metabolism isn’t… ah, fuck… isn’t standard. Genetic… modifications. Childhood… interventions.” Each phrase was punctuated by a upward thrust of his hips. “Toxins, drugs… they process faster. Need higher doses. Double. Triple.”
The information slammed into me with more force than his physical invasion. Genetic modifications. It connected to a hundred fragmented data points in my mind—his preternatural speed and strength, his rapid healing noted in vague medical reports, the family’s rumored history of radical bio-enhancement. My insurance policy wasn’t just compromised; it was built on faulty intel.
“You knew,” I breathed, rising and falling on him, the rhythm becoming more desperate. “You knew about the vial.”
“Suspected,” he corrected, his eyes blazing up at me. “A woman like you doesn’t walk into the lion’s den without a knife. I just didn’t know where you’d hidden it.” He sat up suddenly, wrapping his arms around me, his mouth finding my breast, sucking hard enough to bruise. The change in angle drove him impossibly deep. “Now I do,” he murmured against my skin before biting down.
I cried out, the pain sharp and bright, melding with the pleasure. My nails dug into his shoulders.
“So your plan…” he said, his voice ragged with the effort of speech, “…your fucking brilliant, ruthless plan… is ashes.” He laid me back down on the bed, following, never leaving my body, covering me completely. His thrusts became punishing, a physical manifestation of his triumph. “No escape. No leverage. Just you. And me. And this.”
He was right. The framework I’d built my courage on was gone. All that remained was the raw, unfiltered reality of him—the weight, the heat, the relentless drive. The feel of him splitting me open, again and again.
“Ah, ah…” I moaned, the sounds torn from me, not as a performance now, but as pure, helpless reaction. I wrapped my legs high around his waist, taking him deeper, meeting his fury with a surrender that felt like its own kind of victory.
“You think your vial would react to someone like me?” he growled, his pace turning brutal, the headboard knocking a steady rhythm against the wall.
“What?!” I gasped, my mind struggling to catch up.
“Lina…” He cupped my face, stilling for a moment to kiss me, a deep, consuming plunder of my mouth. “I was never a normal person.” He broke the kiss, his forehead against mine, his thrusts resuming, somehow even more intense. “You should have doubled the dosage.”
The admission, made here in the throes of animal passion, was the final key. It explained everything. His dominance wasn’t just psychological; it was baked into his very DNA. I was fighting a force of nature, a manufactured king.
The realization unraveled me. My second climax approached not as a wave, but as a detonation. I shattered around him, my body clamping down in a vise-like series of spasms that milked a ragged shout from his throat. His own release followed, hot and endless, pumping into me as he drove home with three final, grinding thrusts that seemed to reach my soul.
We lay entangled, soaked in sweat and spent, the only sound our labored breathing. The world outside the velvet drapes was lightening to a grim dawn.
Then, a single, firm knock sounded at the bedroom door.
Pace went utterly still above me. Not the stillness of satiation, but of a predator alerted.
“It’s Vito,” a voice called through the door, tense and oddly formal. “He’s here. In the east lounge. He says it’s time to talk about his brother.”
Pace’s eyes closed. A shadow passed over his face, darker than any that had been there before. When he opened them, they were the eyes of the figurehead, cold and impenetrable. “Jace,” he breathed, the name a curse.
He withdrew from my body, the loss feeling profound. He swung his legs off the bed, his back to me—a landscape of taut muscle and old scars. He didn’t look back.
“Get dressed,” he said, his voice stripped of all intimacy, a commander issuing an order. “Wear something of mine. Something that smells like me.”
He walked toward his dressing room, his stride regaining its lethal grace with every step. The vulnerability of minutes ago was gone, locked away. The game had changed again.
The rival was at the gate. And I, the failed insurance policy, the compromised asset, was now expected to stand at the king’s side, wearing his scent like a brand.
I touched my stomach, where the useless inhibitor was metabolizing into nothing. Where his release was surely taking root against all my calculated odds. A new variable, terrifying and alive.
Pace emerged moments later, clad in a black sweater and trousers, every inch the dangerous aristocrat. He tossed a soft, charcoal-gray shirt at me. It landed on the bed, smelling unmistakably of him—amber and gunpowder and us.
“Hurry,” he said, his gaze finally meeting mine. It wasn’t a request. It was a summons to a war council.