Page 63 of Power Play

"My body doesn't get a vote until my brain finishes the audit."

"Then finish it." He strips me naked with an efficiency that borders on impatient, his fingers hooking the waistband and pulling down in a single motion that leaves me bare against the rough denim of his jeans. The texture is a shock against sensitive skin, and the tactical asymmetry is deliberate: he is still half-dressed and I’m not, a power play he deployed on instinct.

I press him flat onto the mattress and take the rest of his clothes off myself. The correction is deliberate: my hands, my pace, my terms. He lets me, his eyes tracking every move I make with a focused intensity that says he is memorizing this in case it is the last time. The hunger underneath is so close to the surface that what holds it back is trembling.

I straddle him again. The first press of his cock between my thighs, slick skin against slick skin, drags a sound from both of us that belongs to no version of this encounter except the real one. My hand finds him, positions him, and when I sink onto him in one slow, deliberate stroke his face strips open in a way I’ve never seen on Evan Kincaid.

The stretch fills me completely. I hold there, seated to the hilt, letting my body adjust to the thickness of him while his hands grip my hips with a pressure that walks the line between firm and bruising.

His jaw is locked. The veins in his neck stand out like cables. He is holding perfectly still beneath me because I set the terms and the terms say I lead. The strain of not thrusting up into me is written across every rigid muscle in his body.

I roll my hips. The motion is slow, grinding, taking him deep on the downstroke and nearly losing him on the upstroke before sinking back down. His fingers flex on my hips. The noise he makes is raw, bitten off, wrenched from someone whose self-command is being systematically dismantled by a woman who takes him apart the same way she takes apart a balance sheet: methodically, with attention to every line.

"Stop making me do all the work," I tell him.

He doesn't need to be told twice. His hips drive up into me on the next downstroke and the depth of the thrust pulls a sound from my throat that I did not authorize. The rhythm we find is contested territory, both of us pushing the pace. The negotiation is the most honest conversation we have had in weeks.

His thumb finds my clit, pressing with the exact calibration he learned the first night. The touch is so specifically tuned to what my body needs that the intimacy of his remembering it hits harder than the sensation itself.

"Don't hold that back," he says, his voice rough gravel. "Whatever sound you just killed, let me have it."

"Earn it."

His thumb adjusts. The pressure sharpens. His hips find an angle that puts the base of his cock grinding against me on every upstroke while his thumb holds steady. The dual sensation builds something low in my belly, tightening with a precision that tells me exactly how close I am and exactly who is responsible.

I brace my hands on his chest and ride him with the full weight of everything this encounter is: a test and a negotiation, a woman deciding whether the man inside her is worth the risk of letting him stay.

The answer is in his body underneath mine. In the way his hands grip my thighs. In the way his eyes hold mine while his hips drive into me with relentless focus. He isn’t performing tenderness or restraint. He is performing honesty, the one thing his training never prepared him for, and it is stripping him to the wiring while I watch.

The orgasm builds in layers. His thumb holds steady. His hips match my rhythm and then exceed it, pushing the pace when my breathing shortens. When it breaks, the release moves through me in deep, clenching pulses that lock my body around him, and the sound that leaves me is stripped of every analytical frequency I carry. I’m not reading the room or verifying the data. I’m held open by a man whose eyes haven’t left mine.

His control fails. His hips slam upward, hard, burying himself to the hilt, and the shudder that follows runs the full length of him as he comes inside me with a force that I feel through my whole body. The noise he buries against my stomach where his forehead has dropped is quiet, almost private, and the rawness of it is more devastating than anything louder would have been.

I stay where I am. His hands are still on my thighs, grip loosening by degrees as the aftershock runs its course. When he lifts his head, his expression isn’t soft. It belongs to a man who just lost every argument he was having with himself, and the answer has wrecked his entire position.

We shift to lying, and the heaviness of him against me feels like relief rather than pressure. My hand rests on the back of his neck where the short hair meets warm skin, and his breathing slows against my collarbone in a rhythm that is gradually matching mine.

"McDermott could accelerate the evidence packaging," Kincaid says. "The forensic work he did on the operatives' financial exposure gave him a window into the routing structures. If we bring him in on the Connors shell entities, his analysis would map the capitalization patterns across the Beaumont and Prescott timelines. Combined with your Veridian data and Sophia's records, the regulatory filing builds itself."

The filing has to be surgical.

"We expose the full operation," I say into the silence. The operational register comes back naturally, the way professional focus returns after a circuit breaker has been reset. "Not the intermediaries. Not the shell entities. Arthur. Every engineered collapse traced to his authorization. Every routing structure connected to his personal signatures. The filing goes to the SEC enforcement division with a criminal referral to the U.S. Attorney's office."

Kincaid lifts his head. The professional sharpness returns to his eyes, layered over the rawness that is still visible underneath. "Not a regulatory complaint."

"A prosecution package. McDermott's forensic analysis maps the routing structures through the authorization signatures Arthur put his name on. He signed the engagement letters. He signed the routing approvals. His name sits at every load-bearing joint of the operation, and the evidence that proves it comes from three independent sources he never anticipated would converge."

"You're not looking to wound the infrastructure."

"I'm looking to end him." The precision of the sentence carries the weight of every hour I spent mapping the collapse pattern from my kitchen floor while my coffee went cold and the man who trained me slept soundly on the other side of the city. "McDermott's forensic work traces the money through Arthur's personal authorizations. Not through intermediaries. Through him. The shell entities are documented. The routing is documented. Every acquisition vehicle that bought the wreckage of the companies my analyses helped destroy connects back to Arthur Harrow through signatures he can’t disavow."

"He'll see the regulatory inquiry coming. He always does."

"That's why the criminal referral runs on a separate track. The SEC filing creates the noise. The U.S. Attorney's office delivers the consequence. By the time Arthur finishes preparing his defense against the enforcement division, the FBI will already be in the lobby."

"And you."

"I stay at the firm long enough to make sure the trap closes. Once the filing is submitted and the enforcement action triggered, I walk out. Days, not months." I hold his stare. "I perform the Veridian progress report, deliver the Oleander follow-up, and sit across from Arthur with the right expression on my face until the doors open and the people I've handed the evidence to walk through them."