The Morning After the War

 A Hostile Intent bonus scene — Dominic’s point of view

Kira Deveraux · The Power Play Series · reader-magnet bonus (~1,500 words)

I woke before her, which never happens, and lay still so it would keep not happening for as long as possible.

Six weeks since the vote. Five since I’d stopped pretending the second toothbrush in her bathroom was a logistical accident. The light through Lena’s bedroom windows came in low and gold over the river, that early hour when the city hasn’t decided to be cruel yet, and she was asleep on her stomach with one arm flung across my chest like she’d reached for something in the night and found it and held on without waking. Her hair was a mess. There was a crease on her cheek from the pillow. The most formidable strategist I have ever met across a table, and here she was, drooling very slightly on a man she’d spent six weeks being certain would betray her.

I had spent twenty years pricing things. I could not have told you the value of this if you’d put a gun to my head. That was the entire point. I’d finally found the one asset that doesn’t trade.

She stirred. I felt the exact moment she surfaced, because her body did the thing it always did first — went still, alert, taking inventory of the room before she let on she was awake. Old habit. The wall checking its own perimeter. I’d learned not to take it personally. I do the same thing; I just hide it better.

“You’re watching me,” she said into the pillow, not opening her eyes. “It’s unnerving. You only do it when you’ve figured something out.”

“I figured out you snore.”

“I do not snore.” One eye opened. Gray as a winter sea and already, at six in the morning, calculating. “That’s slander. I’ll have Devorah draft a denial.”

“It’s not a deposition, Lena. Nobody needs a denial.”

“Everything’s a deposition. You taught me that.” She rolled toward me, unhurried, the sheet sliding, and propped her head on one hand. The cold one — the boardroom face — wasn’t anywhere in the room. It hadn’t been, mornings, for weeks now. That was the thing I kept not getting used to: that she gave me the version of herself the glass tower never got to see, and gave it freely, and had stopped flinching every time she did.

“I have the Meridian integration call at nine,” she said. “Hale’s going to be insufferable. He won the bet about the West Coast facilities and he’s the kind of man who collects.”

“He’s a builder. Let him build. You hired a white knight; you don’t get to be surprised he wants to wear the armor to brunch.”

“I didn’t hire him. I made a smart bet next to him.” A pause. The corner of her mouth moved, the almost-smile that, six weeks in, finished itself more often than not. “I’m told that’s different.”

“It’s completely different,” I agreed, and kissed the crease on her cheek, and she let me, which still felt like getting away with something.

We stayed there longer than two people with her calendar had any right to. The light climbed the wall. Somewhere below, the city started its engine. And I thought, the way I’d been thinking at odd hours since the morning she let me hand her the drive, about the strangeness of waking up on the inside of a life instead of pricing one from the curb.

“You’re doing it again,” she said. “The figuring-out face.”

“I’m not figuring anything out. There’s nothing left to figure out. That’s what’s unnerving me.”

She understood that. Of course she did; she was the only person alive who’d understand it exactly. She didn’t reach for a joke or a deflection. She just looked at me for a long moment with the gray eyes gone soft at the edges, and then she said, quietly, “It doesn’t feel safe. I keep waiting for it to feel safe.”

“It won’t.” I pushed a piece of hair off her face. “Safe was the old thing. The wall. This is the other thing.”

“The terrifying thing.”

“The alive thing.” I let my hand settle at the curve of her waist, where it had learned to live. “You can have one or the other, Lena. You spent forty-one years choosing the first one. I’d just like it on the record that you chose me second, on purpose, with your eyes open, knowing exactly the price.”

“For the record.” Her hand flattened on my chest, over the place my heart was doing something undignified. “I’d assume you’ve betrayed me roughly twice a year for the rest of our lives.”

“At least once a year. We agreed.”

“Twice. You’re very handsome and I don’t trust handsome.” But she was smiling now, the whole thing, unguarded, and she leaned in and kissed me like she meant to make me late for nothing in particular, and the nine o’clock call drifted somewhere far down the list of things either of us cared about.

When she finally pulled back, breathless, her forehead against mine, she said, “I have to shower. I have a company to run.”

“You have a company to run,” I agreed, and didn’t let go of her waist.

“You’re not helping.”

“I’m aware. It’s the first job I’ve ever been bad at.” I kissed the corner of her jaw, the soft spot below her ear that undid her every single time and that she pretended, every single time, it didn’t. “Take the later call. Hale can wait. Let him collect his bet from your voicemail.”

“That’s appalling advice.”

“I’m an appalling man. You picked me anyway. On purpose. With your—”

“If you say eyes open one more time I’m having you escorted out of the building.”

“You don’t have security clearance to escort me anywhere. I checked. I’m on your access list now. Permanently. There was a form.” I’d actually filled it out. She’d watched me do it with an expression I’d never seen on her, somewhere between terror and the thing under the terror, and she’d signed as the sponsoring executive without a word, and neither of us had mentioned it since.

“There was a form,” she repeated, softer.

“There was a form.”

She didn’t shower for another forty minutes. Hale collected his bet from her voicemail. And I lay in the gold light afterward with the most dangerous woman in Manhattan asleep again on my chest, and I did the only honest arithmetic I had left:

Everything I’d ever owned, I’d been able to walk away from whole.

This one would take the whole building down with it if it went.

I’d never been so glad to be unable to price a thing in my life.

Want to know what Sloane’s really been doing inside the Halcyon Group all this time? The Power Play Series continues in Book Two — Controlled Damage. Sign up at kiradeveraux.com.