Page 51 of Power Play

She rides me with a force that strips composure and every careful performance of being fine. Her hips roll deep and grinding, taking me at an angle that makes her breath shorten with every stroke. What's left is raw and unguarded, and the intimacy of it wrecks me more thoroughly than the physical intensity.

Her muscles tighten around me in rhythmic pulses. Her breathing fractures. When the orgasm hits, her body locks around me and the contractions collapse the last of my restraint.

My release follows with an inevitability I can't pace or manage. It empties my lungs and my fists and strips every defense I've spent a career constructing.

There is only the single, obliterating awareness that this woman owns me in a way I don't have vocabulary for. The ownership terrifies me. I don't want it to stop.

The aftermath is quiet. She lies on her back with her forearm across her eyes and her breathing ragged. I'm beside her, staring at the ceiling.

She hasn't moved toward me. She hasn't moved away. The neutral position tells me she's processing, and Meagan Keating processing is more dangerous than most people fighting.

"This didn't change anything," she says. Her voice is raw.

The redirect fires on instinct. The operational framing reaches for me like muscle memory: agree, contain, pivot to next steps. The redirect has worked for years. It's the survival mechanism that got a South Side kid through every room he didn't belong in.

It jams.

The words that come out aren't tactical. "It changed me."

She pulls her arm down. Looks at me. The composure that was rebuilding behind her eyes stops mid-construction. For a long beat, neither of us speaks. What I just said is either the most honest or the most dangerous thing I've offered since Pilsen. The line between those has never been thinner.

"The surveillance team." She sits up. The sheet pools at her waist. She doesn't pull it higher. Her voice shifts into a register I haven't heard from her before: not dismissal, not anger, not the careful neutrality of a woman managing a man she doesn't trust. Something harder and more direct. "You said professional rotation. How long before they escalate from watching to acting?"

"The team is assessment. The next step is intervention. The timeline depends on what they report and who's reading the reports."

"Then you need to make sure they don't report anything useful." She meets my eyes. "I'm walking into Harrow tomorrow. I'm sitting across from Arthur. I'm performing the version of myself he expects, and I can't do that if I'm looking over my shoulder for the team on my building."

"I'll handle the team."

"Don't handle them the way you handled the regulatory filing. Don't manage the problem and then tell me about it afterward." She leans forward. "Tell me what you're going to do, and then do it."

She hasn't forgiven me. She hasn't taken me back. She did something more dangerous than either: she stopped shutting me out. The door she's been holding closed since the night she dismantled me in this kitchen just opened a crack, and the conditions she attached to the opening are transparency and honesty.

The two things I'm worst at. The two things I'm about to fail at again before the sun comes up.

I get dressed in the dark. The jeans and boots go on. The shirt goes over the bite mark. She walks me to the door barefoot with her arms crossed, and the echo of every time she's stood in this doorway watching me leave is loud enough to fill the hallway.

"Kincaid." Her voice catches me at the threshold. I turn. "Don't become him. Whatever you do to the people watching my building, don't become Arthur. The moment your methods become indistinguishable from his, you've lost the only argument you have left."

I nod. She closes the door. The deadbolt engages.

I stand in the hallway and hear the warning she just gave me, and I know with absolute certainty that I'm going to violate it before sunrise.

The truck idles on Halsted while I work the problem the clean way first. I call the two contacts who handle legitimate security referrals. Neither picks up. I run the scenario where I go through proper channels: report the surveillance to the police, file for a protective order, involve the firm's security infrastructure.

Every path leads through Arthur's territory. He controls the firm's security. He has relationships with the regulatory bodies. Every legitimate channel I could use to protect her runs through systems he built or influenced. The clean solution doesn't exist for a woman being watched by the people her employer sent to watch her.

I sit with that for a long time.

Then I call McDermott.

He picks up on the third ring, which means he was working.

"I need financial leverage on two individuals," I say. "Professional histories, asset structures, anything that creates pressure."

"Kincaid." Luke McDermott has the voice of a man who finds numbers more interesting than people, the flat precision of someone who can read a balance sheet the way Meagan reads a room. "It's past one in the morning."

"The individuals are consortium-adjacent operatives who manufactured a public hit on a financial analyst. Her name is in a FinanceWire piece that dropped this week. I need the leverage by dawn."