Chapter 547 | A Direct Order

Chapter 547: 547 | A Direct Order

She stared at me for a long moment. Then she pulled her hands out of her pockets, grabbed the front of my jacket, and hauled me down into a kiss so hard my teeth clicked against hers.

This was nothing like the tree line. In the tree line she’d kissed me like she was confessing to a crime. Now she kissed me like she was serving the sentence herself, and she wanted it over fast.

Her fingers twisted in my collar. Her mouth was cold from the sea wind and then hot a second later, and she bit my lower lip right where Belle had split it in the shower, which made me hiss and grab her waist. She shoved me back until my shoulders hit the rock wall of the cliff.

My bad shoulder screamed. I ignored it, because Misato Ayame had her thigh between my legs and her tongue in my mouth and she was making a low furious sound in the back of her throat that I had never heard her make during nine weeks of drill.

When she pulled back, we were both breathing hard. Her lips were swollen. The scrape on her jaw had gone pink.

"Your apartment," she said. "Is Tanaka home?"

"She left the ferry before us. Probably."

"Probably isn’t an answer, Monroe."

"She reads manga in the living room until midnight with tea and glasses on. If she’s home, she’s going to see us walk in."

Misato thought about that for a full three seconds, which for her was an eternity of tactical planning. Then she grabbed my wrist and started walking up the hill again, faster this time.

"Then we walk fast," she said. "And you’re going to open that pocket dimension the second the door closes."

"The Sanctum is spent for today. I burned the Gold window at the party, and it doesn’t reset until midnight."

She stopped. She turned around and looked at me with the specific expression of a woman reconsidering an entire relationship.

"Then we go to my apartment," she said, "because Davenport is at Summit tonight with her phone off and her door locked, and my walls are concrete."

"You’ve checked the walls?"

"I’ve lived next to Blair Davenport for nine years. I’ve checked everything."

Misato’s apartment in Summit House was the opposite of Blair’s side of the building. I’d been inside Blair’s half exactly once, when she’d tried to bribe me in a bathrobe, and it had looked like a hotel that had never been touched by a human being. Misato’s half looked lived in.

There were running shoes lined up by the door in a neat row and a coffee mug on the counter with a chipped handle. Training schedules were taped to the fridge with color codes I recognized from our drills, and a single potted cactus sat on the windowsill with a sticky note that said WATER ON SUNDAYS in her blocky handwriting.

She locked the door behind us and leaned her back against it.

For a second she didn’t do anything. She stood there in the dark with her hand on the deadbolt, breathing, her eyes on the floor.

"I haven’t done this before," she said. "In my own space."

"We can stop here."

"Don’t you dare." She looked up at me, and her chin set. "I’m telling you so you know. I’m going to be bad at the part where I don’t give orders."

"You can give orders."

"I will absolutely give orders," she said, and some of the stiffness went out of her shoulders. "I just wanted you to know I’m going to hate how much I like it when you ignore them."

She unzipped her tactical jacket and dropped it on the floor. It was the first time I’d ever seen her leave clothing anywhere except folded on a chair. Underneath, the black compression top was flattened tight across her chest the way she always wore it, like armor for a body she’d spent years trying to make invisible. She hooked her thumbs under the hem and paused.

"Turn on the lamp," she said.

I found it by the couch and clicked it on. Warm yellow light spilled across the room and caught the wet ends of her ponytail.

Misato pulled the top over her head.

I’d known she was hiding something under the compression gear, because nine weeks of watching someone do burpees teaches you things. Knowing it and seeing it were two different universes. Her breasts were full and heavy, much bigger than her sports gear had ever let on, with dark nipples already tight in the cold air of the apartment.

There were faint red lines under them from the compression fabric pressing into her skin all day. Her stomach was hard and flat with abs that made mine look like a rough draft, and her shoulders were broad and strong from years of carrying everyone else’s mistakes.

She stood there and let me look. Her hands stayed at her sides, but her fingers twitched.

"Well?" she said. Her voice came out rough.

"You’ve been hiding these from me during cardio," I said. "That’s a war crime, Captain."

She laughed. It was a real one, startled out of her, and it shook her whole chest in a way that rearranged several of my priorities. Then she crossed the room in three strides, grabbed my face in both hands, and kissed me again, slower this time, her bare skin pressing against my jacket.

The graft behind my sternum flared so hot I almost staggered. The lime ring burned in my skull like someone had dropped a lit match into a bowl of gasoline.

I got my jacket off one-handed. She helped with my shirt, and she hissed when she saw the fresh bruises spreading purple across my ribs and the sucker mark from the alpha’s tentacle on my hip. She traced it with two fingers.

"Belle’s going to hate that one," she said.

"Belle already tried to beat it with a hickey in the shower."

"I don’t want to hear about the shower." She pushed me down onto her couch, swung one leg over my lap, and settled her weight on my thighs. Her breasts were right at my eye level, close enough that I could feel the heat off her skin. "Not tonight. Tonight you don’t talk about any of them."

"Is that an order?"

"Yes, that’s a direct order from your captain."