She was right. I couldn't say it, not yet, not while she was vibrating with the need to do something that wasn’t just running. But she was right.
I reached for her again, slower this time, and she let me take her hand. Her knuckles were cold and sharp. The baby kicked—she winced, blinked fast, then stared at a point over my shoulder like she could see through the wall.
"It's not a rescue mission," she said, voice quiet. "It's a burn job. I don’t bring them a working protocol. I bring them a bomb."
"You think you can do that?"
She almost smiled. "Ask the Moretti brothers about sabotage."
I squeezed her hand. "We need a plan," I said. "A real one. Not just walking in and hoping you can out-hack the best-funded lab in Canada."
Jade chewed her lip. "Victor's smart, but he's not a scientist. And Heller—she's ambitious, but she's not original. If I slow-play the protocol, I can build in a backdoor, maybe a failsafe. But I needtime, and I need to see how they're actually running the tests. The real tests, not the demo they walked us through today."
“Keep talking science to me,” I said. “But let me take your pants off.”
“What?” she asked.
“I want you to keep talking while I eat your pussy,” I said. “You had a long stressful day and I want to take your mind of it.”
She snorted so hard she almost choked, but the sound was pure relief. “You’re a disaster,” she said, but she let me kneel between her knees, still talking shop as I palmed her hips and eased her jeans down over her thighs.
“Listen,” she said, voice a little tighter now. “If I can get a look at their real data, I can see where they’re cutting corners. Every shortcut leaves a trace—off-target effects, immune markers—there’s no way they’re controlling for—oh, fuck—”
I pressed the flat of my tongue against her, slow and careful, because Jade was always a little glassy right after a panic spike. I wanted her to feel everything, but not tip over into the shakes. Her hands went to my hair, fisted hard, and for a second I could taste the metal arc of adrenaline still running through her.
She inhaled, shuddered, then kept going: “They’re using CRISPR, but with viral vectors. If the payload gets in the wrong tissue, you get cancer, or—Jesus, Dante, is this part of the plan?”
“It’s my only plan,” I said, and she kicked me in the shoulder, then flexed her thigh against my cheek. I didn’t stop, just worked her open with my mouth and then my tongue, slow and greedy,until her voice gave out. She tried to keep talking, but the words fell apart—“homologous recombination, off-target, you asshole, I can’t think—” and then she was clutching the pillow.
“Good,” I said. “That means I’m doing this right.”
I kept going, kept her right at the edge, because I knew the only thing that could steady her was letting go. I wanted her loose, wanted her rattled but not broken, because that was when Jade did her best work—right after the shake, when her brain got stubborn and the world turned into numbers she could bend to her will.
She tasted so fucking good.
I wanted to make her come until everything else receded—until the sound of her own voice was all that mattered, not the cameras in the walls or the threat of Victor’s hand on the doorknob. I wanted to flatten the world down to one sharp point, then push her through it and catch her on the other side.
Jade made it hard to focus, not because she talked too much but because when she stopped talking, her silence was nuclear. She shuddered, her thighs locking around my ears, and for a second she let go of my hair and just gripped the edge of the bed, eyes squeezed shut. I knew that look—like her whole body was a bead of mercury on the verge of splitting, but she didn’t want to give me the satisfaction of seeing it first.
I eased up, just for a second, and she grabbed my wrist with a grip that would’ve broken a lesser man. “Don’t,” she said, voice ragged and half-murderous. “If you stop now I will kill you.”
I grinned, pressing a kiss to the inside of her thigh. “Noted.”
She dug her heel into my back, then flexed her hips up, riding the next pulse while she fought to keep it together. I heard her mutter something about viral load, maybe a dig at the irony, but I let her have the last word and finished what I’d started by licking her clit and pressing a curled finger into her g-spot.
She came with a sound that was half curse, half sob, her nails carving crescents into my shoulder. Then she went limp, so boneless I thought I’d finally scrambled her neurons for good. I lay there, cheek pressed to her thigh, just listening to the way her breath slowed from hurricane to human.
I crawled up beside her, tucked the blanket around her shoulders. For a minute I just watched her face, loose and open in a way I never got to see anymore. She looked younger, and older, too—like right now she was every version of herself I’d ever loved, layered on top of each other, all fighting to stay alive.
“Better?” I said, brushing the hair off her forehead.
She made a noise, equal parts contempt and gratitude. “Did you just try to solve my existential dread with sex?”
“It’s my go-to,” I said. “Works better than liquor, less chance of a hangover.”
She blinked at the ceiling, then rolled her head to look at me. “You’re an idiot.” But she smiled, and it was a real one this time, not just a mask to scare off the world. She reached up and traced the line of my jaw with her finger, soft now, like she’d forgotten for a second that the world was ending.
“I’m going to fuck you now,” I said.
