LOGIN
"You're making this hard for me, Leo…" tears spilled out from Daveson's eyes as he was pressed against the wall with Leonard's tall frame hovering before him.
"...shhhh…it's also difficult for me too, imagine knowing you're a traitor but I feel powerless to do anything. What the fuck have you done to me Dave…." His breath hitched.
Leonard's hands came up to frame Daveson's face, thumbs brushing away the tears with a tenderness that made Daveson's chest ache. "Don't cry," he murmured, his violet eyes dark with desire and something deeper, more dangerous. "I can't think straight when you cry."
"Then don't think," Daveson whispered, his voice breaking. His hands found Leonard's chest, feeling the rapid thundering of his heart beneath the expensive silk shirt. "Just... touch me. Make me forget everything else."
A low groan escaped Leonard's throat. "Dave, if I start, I won't be able to stop."
"Good." Daveson fisted his hands in Leonard's shirt, pulling him closer until their bodies were flush against each other. "I don't want you to stop."
That was all the permission Leonard needed. His mouth crashed down on Daveson's, claiming him with a hunger that stole the breath from his lungs. This wasn't the gentle kiss from earlier—this was raw need, desperation, months of tension finally exploding between them.
Daveson opened for him immediately, their tongues meeting in a dance that was both battle and surrender. Leonard tasted like whiskey and sin, and Daveson couldn't get enough. His fingers tangled in Leonard's yellow hair, tugging at the wavy curls as Leonard pressed him harder against the wall.
"God, Dave," Leonard panted against his lips, his hands sliding down to grip Daveson's hips. "You drive me fucking crazy. Every day watching you, wanting you, knowing I shouldn't..."
"Show me," Daveson demanded, rolling his hips forward. The friction made them both gasp. "Show me how much you want me."
Leonard's eyes blazed. His hands moved to Daveson's thighs, lifting him effortlessly. Daveson wrapped his legs around Leonard's waist instinctively, feeling the solid strength of him, the power barely restrained in his lean muscular frame.
"Feel that?" Leonard ground against him, and Daveson could feel exactly how affected he was, hard and thick and straining against the confines of his tailored slacks. "That's what you do to me. Every fucking day."
Daveson moaned, his head falling back against the wall as pleasure shot through him. "Leo..."
"Say it again." Leonard's mouth found his throat, lips and teeth marking a path down to his collar. "Say my name like that again."
"Leo," Daveson breathed, his hands sliding under Leonard's shirt, desperate to feel skin. "Please..."
Leonard captured his mouth again, swallowing his pleas as his hands roamed everywhere, sliding under Daveson's shirt, mapping the planes of his lean torso, thumbs brushing over sensitive nipples until Daveson was trembling in his arms.
"You're so beautiful," Leonard murmured between kisses, his voice rough with need. "So fucking perfect. I want to memorize every inch of you."
His hand slid lower, palming Daveson through his pants, and Daveson cried out at the contact. The sound echoed in the empty hallway, obscene and desperate.
"Shh," Leonard soothed, though his own breathing was ragged. "Someone might hear."
"I don't care," Daveson gasped, but Leonard's hand covered his mouth gently.
"I do. I'm not letting anyone interrupt this." Leonard's free hand worked at Daveson's belt, his movements practiced despite the urgency. "Not when I finally have you exactly where I want you."
Daveson's hands weren't idle either. He fumbled with Leonard's belt, needing to touch, needing to feel. When his fingers finally wrapped around Leonard's length through the thin fabric of his boxers, Leonard's hips jerked forward involuntarily.
"Fuck," Leonard hissed, his forehead dropping to Daveson's shoulder. "Dave, your hands..."
"You're so hard," Daveson marveled, his fingers exploring the impressive length and thickness of him. "So big, Leo. I can feel how much you want this."
Leonard's breath was coming in harsh pants now. "Want you. Only you. Been going crazy thinking about this."
He shifted their positions, supporting Daveson with one arm while his other hand slipped into Daveson's pants. The first touch of skin on skin made them both groan. Leonard's fingers wrapped around him, stroking slowly, deliberately, watching Daveson's face as pleasure washed over his features.
"Look at me," Leonard commanded softly. When Daveson's brown eyes met his, glazed with lust, Leonard smiled. "There you are. God, you're gorgeous like this. Falling apart for me."
"Only for you," Daveson admitted, the words escaping before he could stop them. His hand worked Leonard in tandem, matching his rhythm. "Only ever for you."
Something shifted in Leonard's expression—the hunger giving way to something softer, more vulnerable. "Dave, I—"
Footsteps. Distant but approaching.
They froze, eyes wide, reality crashing back in. Leonard carefully lowered Daveson to his feet, both of them frantically adjusting their clothes. Daveson's lips were swollen, his hair mussed, and there was a visible mark blooming on his throat where Leonard had sucked too hard.
"Shit," Leonard muttered, trying to smooth down Daveson's collar to hide the evidence. His own hair was a disaster, and his pants were doing a poor job of hiding his arousal. "The library. Now."
He grabbed Daveson's hand, practically dragging him down the hallway and into the massive Heyden library. The moment the heavy door clicked shut behind them, Leonard had Daveson pressed against it, their mouths meeting again with renewed urgency.
"Can't stop," Leonard gasped between kisses. "Can't fucking stop touching you."
"Don't," Daveson urged, his hands sliding down to grip Leonard's ass, pulling their hips together. The friction was exquisite torture. "Don't stop. Not yet."
Leonard walked them backward toward the large leather sofa in the corner, never breaking the kiss. When the back of his knees hit the furniture, he sat down heavily, pulling Daveson to straddle his lap.
This new position put them perfectly aligned, and Daveson couldn't help the moan that escaped as he ground down against Leonard's hardness. Leonard's hands gripped his hips, guiding his movements, creating a rhythm that had them both panting.
"Like this," Leonard encouraged, his voice wrecked. "Just like this, baby. Feel so good against me."
Daveson's hands found their way back under Leonard's shirt, nails raking lightly down his chest. Leonard shuddered beneath him, his hips jerking up to meet each roll of Daveson's body.
"Want to touch you properly," Daveson whispered against Leonard's ear. "Want to feel all of you."
"Yeah?" Leonard's hands moved to Daveson's shirt, unbuttoning it with surprising dexterity given how his fingers were shaking. "Want my hands on you? Want me to make you come apart?"
"Yes," Daveson hissed as Leonard's mouth found his chest, kissing and licking and biting at the sensitive skin. "God, yes."
Grimstone looked at him for a long moment.Then he looked back at the door.They stood.Forty minutes later, Roarke came out of the room.He came out in the specific quality of a person who has said the true thing in the official room where the true thing needed to be said, who has put into the record the account of what actually happened, who has given the shape of it in the language that the record required, and is now in the particular condition of that, which had its own specific weight that was different from the prior weight, that was not lighter but was differently distributed, that was the weight of a thing no longer only inside you.He came out and he stopped in the corridor.He looked at Leonard.He looked at Grimstone.He said nothing.Grimstone looked at him.After a moment, he said: "All right?"Roarke said: "All right."The specific quality of two people using adequacy as the honest answer, not fine, not better, but all right, which was the accurate word, which was the w
Leonard sat at the end of the table and he thought about the letter he had sent three days ago, the communication that had produced the response of three investigators rather than one, that had been carefully worded in the register of a person who understood what they were holding and wanted the institution to understand it before they walked into the room. He thought about the particular care of that letter, what it had required, how it had been revised four times before it said the true thing in the form most likely to produce the right quality of response.He thought about the hour.He thought about what an hour meant in the particular architecture of this situation, what could be set in motion in an hour, what could be contained in an hour and what could not.Harmon arrived seventeen minutes after the investigator had left to find him.He was a man in his fifties who moved through the door with the particular quality of someone who had been briefed in transit, who was catching up
They came in and they introduced themselves and the introductions had the particular quality of introductions in federal rooms, which was the quality of a formality that served a practical function, that established the record of who was present and in what capacity, that said this is now official in the specific register of a thing becoming official.Leonard watched them look at the folders on the table.He watched the assessment run, the specific professional inventory of three people who processed evidence for a living and who were, in the first seconds of being in the room, already running the preliminary assessment of what was in front of them and what it was likely to represent and what the day was going to become.The one who sat at the head of the table was a woman somewhere in her mid-forties who had the specific quality of someone whose attention was comprehensive and whose face had been trained, over a long career, to give very little of that comprehensiveness away. She sat
Grimstone looked at it.He said: "You read it.""Yes," Leonard said."All of it.""Yes."Grimstone looked at the folder on the table. He looked at it with the specific quality of a person looking at something they made, at the years of labor compressed into the particular weight of a document, the specific condition of having made a thing over a very long time and alone and having it now on a table in a federal room about to become something else, about to move out of the category of the thing you carried and into the category of the thing that acted in the world without you.He said: "There's more."Leonard looked at him.Grimstone reached into the bag — the small bag, still too small for the distance he had traveled, still exactly right for what it contained — and he produced a second folder. Thicker than the first. The specific thickness of something that had taken longer.He set it beside the first one.He said: "The first is the financial record. The embezzlement, the shell struc
The room they were given was on the fourteenth floor.It was a federal room, which meant it had the specific quality of a space designed to be neutral in the particular institutional sense of neutrality that was not the absence of character but the deliberate suppression of it, the careful removal of anything that might suggest a perspective or produce a comfort. It had a long table and chairs that were adequate without being more than adequate and windows that looked out over a section of the city that was also adequate, that provided the evidence of a world continuing its business outside the glass without offering anything specific about that world. It had recording equipment that was present and visible, which was its own specific statement, the statement of a room that did not pretend to be other than what it was.Leonard had arrived first.He had come ahead of the others by twenty minutes, in the specific way of someone who needed the room before the room was occupied, who neede
The man said: "Leonard."Not identification. The word doing something larger than identification, the whole weight of the thing he had come here to say compressed into the single available word of a name, because the other words had not been found yet or did not exist or were not adequate to the distance that had produced this moment."Grimstone," Leonard said.He had not known, until the word was already in the air, whether it would be that word or the other one.He heard his own choice in it and held what the choice said without yet having the architecture to fully read it.Grimstone looked at him. The accounting ran in his face, not the managed version, not the version dressed in courtesy or careful distance, but the plain version, the one that was simply the honest receipt of a true thing in the form of a name. He held the silence the way a person held silence when the silence was the more accurate thing, when filling it would be the lesser version of what was true.He said: "You
He thought about Morrison until noon.At noon he ate the second piece of toast that Victoria had left covered on the tray and drank more water and took the medication and looked at the ceiling, which was the plain white of this room's ceiling, and which was, over the course of the first day, becomi
"And when you met me."Daveson said nothing.He said nothing because there was nothing to say that wasn't the truth and the truth was that when he had shaken Leonard Heyden's hand across a table in a corner of Armando's fourteen months ago, he had been in the middle of a mission, and Leonard had be
"Morrison going quiet is the gap." Daveson looked at him. "I don't know what happened with Morrison. I know he stopped answering three weeks ago. I know the documentation he held is not the same as what I hold — we were working from separate copies for security — which means what I have is still in
He came back at two in the afternoon.Daveson knew the time because he'd been watching the light move across the floor since sometime around eleven, tracking the particular slow arc of it the way he'd tracked the IV clock at Dr. Chen's clinic, with the attention of a person who has determined that







