Page 73 of Thorne
He's heavy: a crushing pressure of ceramic plates and redirected rage.
"I'm going to come inside you," he growls against the back of my neck, already pushing in, a blunt force that steals the air from my lungs. "Because I want you to carry me for the rest of the day. Every time you move, every time you look at the guys, you're going to feel me. You're going to remember how the debt is being paid."
He uses me as a vessel, his thrusts deep and rhythmic, anchoring me to the mattress while my fingers curl into the thin sheets. I'm moving against the fabric, my hips rising instinctively to meet him, my forehead pressed into the pillow to stifle the sounds I'm making. He works me with a cruel precision, his hand reaching under me, finding my breast and pinching the nipple hard. The sharp spark of pain acts like a catalyst, a physical shock that sends the heat spiraling through my gut.
He keeps the pressure there, his fingers unyielding, while his other hand stays buried in my hair, pulling my head back so he watches the way my back arches. I'm vibrating under him, mybody winding tight as he forces the pleasure to build alongside the sting.
"You love this," he rasps, his voice a dark vibration in my ear. "You love that I'm forcing you to take it. Don't you, Stratton?"
"Yes," I choke out.
The word is enough. It firmly establishes the floor beneath us. He drives into me harder, faster, his hips a relentless hammer against mine. The waves start to break, jagged and white-hot, pulling a broken sound from my throat that I can't catch. Only then does he let himself go, finishing inside me with a final, lethal intensity.
He pulls away abruptly. I stay face-down on the mattress, my skin humming, the cold air hitting my back where the charcoal gear was just burning. He stands, and for a moment, the only sound is his labored breathing and the rattle of my own lungs.
"I still hate you." Thorne's voice is a cold blade in the quiet. "This changes nothing."
The rustle of fabric, the sound of him fixing his clothes, the clinical click of his belt, the slide of his zipper, mark the return of the soldier.
"Fix yourself." Thorne adjusts his vest, his voice back to that level, operational rasp. "You have two choices after this. One: you say nothing. You accept your punishment. Two: you walk out there and tell the guys I'm forcing you."
He stays by the door, waiting. I sit up, my hair a mess, my skin marked. I reach for the charcoal shirt on the floor and pull it over my head, hiding the evidence.
"Which is it going to be?" Thorne waits, his hand resting on the heavy metal door handle.
I look at him, my eyes steady even as my hands tremble, pulling up my sweats. "They're not a part of this. They don't get to judge my debt. This is between us."
A grim, dark satisfaction flickers in his jaw. Receipt confirmed.
"Good. Then move. The patient list needs to be ready."
He waits by the door, a predator guarding the exit, making sure I walk out first so he can follow me into the light of the kitchen.
He doesn't walk me toward the common area.
He drags me.
The safe house is already awake.
The kitchen smells of coffee and the specific industrial-grade eggs that materialize when Martha is operating at full morning efficiency. The monitors cast blue light across the far end of the long table. Someone, Torque from the size of the shadow, is running a weapons check at the near end. The whole place has a different texture this morning: faster, louder, anticipatory in a way I can't immediately categorize.
Thorne deposits me at the kitchen table with a grip that lands and releases in the same motion. A tablet slides across the surface. My notes from yesterday are still open on it. I orient toward the work because the work is the only correct posture available to me right now, and I begin.
Across the room, Ghost pours coffee into a mug that says World's Okayest Operator in block letters. Someone gave him that, and I want to know who.
"ETA?" Torque doesn't look up from the disassembled components.
"Skye confirmed forty minutes out." Ghost's voice carries its usual flat operational register. "Forest is driving. Which means probably forty-five because he'll stop for gas he doesn't need and deny it."
I write down a number. I cross it out. I write it again.
The ink is thick and dark on the page, the only thing that feels solid in a world that has turned into a blur of gray concreteand white-hot memory. My focus is non-existent, a thin layer of mathematics I'm trying to trowel over the raw, pulsing reality of what just happened.
The friction. The bruising weight of him.
My body is still humming, a low-frequency vibration that starts at the base of my skull and settles deep in my marrow.
Every time I shift in the hard wooden chair, I feel the ghost of his hands, large, calloused, and unyielding, still anchored to my hips. I look at the tablet, but the numbers aren't making sense. All I picture is the moment I looked him in the eye and told him the others weren't a part of this.
