Jade didn’t bother with a comeback. Just grabbed my wrist and yanked me over her, rolling until the weight of her hips pinned me to the mattress. She laughed, low and dangerous, and I felt it all the way through my ribs.
“You sure?” she said, and her voice was different now—hoarse, electric, like every part of her was on the edge of burning out.
“Am I sure I’m going to fuck you? Yes, I’m sure.”
She kissed me, hard, biting at my lower lip and raking her nails down my chest like she wanted to draw a map. I let her. I let her do anything. Her hands weren’t gentle, but they knew what they wanted: buttons undone, zipper down, dick in her hand before I could even remember to breathe.
I’d been hard since the second I’d walked in the room, but the way she looked at me—like she could unspool me with just her eyes—was almost enough to push me over already. She lined us up, slow and deliberate, rocking her hips and watching my face while she took me all the way in.
She was hot, tight, so slick I slid in to the hilt with almost no resistance. Her cunt gripped me like a fist, and she flexed around me until I grayed out for a second. Jade’s hair was a mess, her face flushed and open, not even pretending to hide how much she needed this. She rode me like she was fighting for the last word, clenching and grinding, using the leverage of my hips like she was solving for a variable only she could see.
I wanted to last, to drag it out for her, but she squeezed down and the blood left my brain. I grabbed her ass with both hands, kneading, anchoring, anything to keep from flipping her overand pounding her through the mattress. I was close, so fucking close, and she knew it—she always knew.
She braced a hand on my chest and said, “Don’t you dare come until I say.” Then she started moving faster, clit grinding against my pubic bone, and fuck if I didn’t almost lose it. I held back by biting my own tongue, digging my nails into her thigh, counting down from ten like I was defusing a bomb. The sweat on her skin, the heat of her, the way she locked eyes with me and didn’t look away even as she started to unravel.
She came again, eyes wide and glassy, mouth open in a soundless curse. Her whole body shook, and when it did, I let myself go. I came so hard my vision blacked out for a second, stars crowding the edges. She collapsed over me, hair in my mouth, her heart punching against my chest.
We stayed like that for a long time, the world reduced to sweat and skin and the ticking of the cheap bedside clock. For a while, nothing got in—no Victor, no Caruso, not even the cold logic of science. Just Jade, boneless and breathing, her hand curled over the curve of my ribs.
She was heavy on me, but it felt right. Like gravity. Like the only law of physics I could believe in anymore. I stroked her back until she started making sense again, and when she did, she didn’t move—she just muttered, “Don’t go anywhere,” like she thought maybe I’d disappear if she let go.
I said, “Not a chance,” and meant it.
We lay there, sweat cooling between us, the room gone quiet except for our breathing and, eventually, the soft coughs from the next room. I kissed her temple, then her cheek, then herlips, which tasted like salt and something faintly metallic—panic, maybe. She blinked at me, clear-eyed for the first time all week.
I said, “You still want to do it?”
She nodded. “I have to.” She rolled off me, reached for her bag, and dragged it up onto the bed. She pulled out the burner, flipped it open, and started scrolling through the pictures she’d stolen.
I laughed, no humor in my voice. “Man,” I said. “So much for hiding in Canada.”
Chapter 18: Jade
Ididn’t sleep.
Not because of the sex—though, Jesus, if that didn’t fry my brainstem—but because I couldn’t shut off the calculations. The simulation was running behind my eyes, even with the laptop closed and the burner flipped facedown beside me. I kept replaying the way that woman moved through the lab. The gloved fingers. The way she double-checked the PCR readout and nodded like it matched what she wanted to see.
They weren’t running diagnostics.
They were running confirmation.
I sat at the hotel desk in yesterday’s shirt and a pair of borrowed boxers, the kind that still smelled faintly like Dante. He was in the shower, singing under his breath—something old and off-key. I had the files open again, the stolen photos from theburner, and I was tracing the outline of the fetal monitor when I saw it.
There. Upper left corner. A date stamp that didn’t match the rest.
The image was from a different trial.
Or a different subject.
I zoomed in, heart thudding. The readout was blurry, but I knew the code—knew the shorthand for fetal distress and maternal cytokine crash. Knew what it meant when the data stopped updating midway through the session. This wasn’t a lab rat. This was a woman. The pregnant one. And she hadn’t made it to the end of the protocol.
Wait. This wasn’t the pregnant woman. It was another one.
Somewhere in the jumble of stolen files, I found a second subject. Same protocol, same start date, but the logs split halfway through. The first one—the one they’d shown me—made it to fetal day 110 before being terminated for “ethical reasons.” The second—the one with the misaligned timestamp—never got that far. No cause of death listed. Just a blunt: “Discontinued. Maternal viability compromised.” Underneath, in red font, a single line: “Protocol escalation per D. Smith directive.”
I ran a finger down the touchpad, too hard, and the screen juddered past the end of the report. I almost threw the laptop out the window. Instead, I sat back and listened for the sound of water in the bathroom, the muffled thunk of Dante’s feet on tile.
“Asshole,” I muttered, but I wasn’t sure if I meant Victor, D. Smith, or myself.
