Chapter 210

[ 1,073 words ]

Julian’s POV

I could not concentrate.

I had been staring at the same contract clause for forty minutes. The words were there. The meaning was there. My brain had simply decided it had more pressing material to process and was not going to engage with merger documentation until it had finished.

Katia in my bed.

The weight of her. The way she had fitted against me was like she had always been meant to be there. The way she had taken my cock without once asking me to stop and without once pretending it was less than it was. I had held women before — had shared beds before — but there was a difference between sharing a bed and lying next to someone who belonged there.

She belonged there. She was mine.

I had told her as much. I had told her she would be in my bed every night from now on, and she had looked at me with that expression — the one that was trying to be composed and was not quite managing it — and said it would never happen again.

She was wrong.

I had made a decision. Decisions, once made, were not unmade. Not by me.

Zane walked in at ten.

He looked at the desk – at the contract I had not moved and the coffee I had not touched – and sat down across from me without comment. That was the thing about Zane. He knew when to push and when to simply sit down and open his laptop and get on with it.

We worked.

Through lunch, through the afternoon briefings, through the two calls that could not be rescheduled. I functioned. I answered questions and signed documents and made decisions that needed making. But underneath all of it, running at a frequency below the professional surface, was the awareness of where she was and what she was doing and whether she had eaten and whether her legs still hurt.

At 4 PM I picked up the phone.

I called the security team.

“Kensington,” I said. “Katia. Current location p>

They came back to me in four minutes. She was at the IG Technologies office. Still working. Of course she was still working — she was Katia, and Katia worked the way other people breathed, continuously and without much conscious effort.

“Do not lose her,” I said. “New location, you call me. I want to know where she is at eight p>

I put the phone down.

Zane looked at me from across the desk.

“Do not,” I said.

“I was not going to say anything,” he said.

“Good,” I said.

He looked back at his laptop.

We worked until six. I sent Zane home and sat at my desk for another hour going through correspondence that had been waiting three days and could have waited three more. At seven I went home. I showered. I dressed — properly dressed, the kind of dressed that meant I was going somewhere and not simply existing in a house.

My phone rang at eight fourteen.

“She just arrived at the Brooklyn penthouse,” my team told me. “Looks like she is in for the night p>

“Thank you,” I said. “You can stand down p>

I drove to Brooklyn.

The doorman knew me. I had made sure of that — had introduced myself three weeks ago with the quiet, direct manner that made people understand that access was not a question. He nodded when I walked in and did not pick up the phone to announce me.

The elevator was fast. The corridor was quiet.

I had a key. She did not know I had a key — I had arranged it the same way I had arranged the wardrobe full of clothes in her size, the same way I had arranged the security team, and the same way I arranged most things that mattered to me: quietly, thoroughly, before they were needed.

I let myself in.

The penthouse was the way it always was at this hour — clean, ordered, and the particular quiet of a space that belonged to someone who needed things to be in their place. There were papers on the kitchen table. A cup that had been rinsed and left on the rack. The lights in the living room were on but low.

I looked around.

Then I went to the kitchen and made myself coffee.

I stood at her counter and drank it slowly and looked at her city through her windows. Manhattan from Brooklyn — the same city, different angle, the view she had chosen when she came back.

I finished the coffee.

I rinsed the cup and put it on the rack next to hers.

Then I went to the walk-in wardrobe.

I had brought a bag. Not much — enough. A few things that needed to be here now. I moved them into the wardrobe, making space the way you made space when you intended to keep coming back, hanging things where they made sense and putting the rest on the shelf.

Then I turned off the light and went to her bedroom.

She was asleep.

On her side, the way she always slept: the duvet pulled up, her hair loose across the pillow. The room was dark except for the city light coming through the curtains — the same light I had watched from my own bedroom window at six in the morning when I had read her name on a marriage certificate and understood for the first time in seven years where I had been going all along.

I undressed. Why would I sleep with clothes on when I am going to fuck her?

I pulled back the duvet on the other side.

I got in.

She felt it immediately — the shift in the mattress, the presence, the warmth of another body in a space that had been only hers. She came awake with a start, pulling back, and I put my arm around her and held her against me before she could fully process what was happening.

“I told you,” I said quietly. “I sleep where you sleep, Kitten p>

She stilled.

I felt her breathe — one breath, then another, the rhythm of someone deciding something.

She turned.

She faced me in the dark. She looked at me. She opened her mouth to speak and then closed it again.

“Good girl,” I said.

I kissed her. Goodnight.

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