The flirtation had become a current, pulling them both in its wake. Words became unnecessary, then impossible. The space between their booth had shrunk to nothing, charged with a tension that had little to do with the hunt and everything to do with the primal need to feel something other than fear.
Anya stubbed out her second cigarette. "This wine is terrible," she said, her voice a low hum.
"The whiskey's worse," Paul replied, his own voice rough.
Her eyes held his. The challenge was silent, but clear. The unspoken question hung between them: What now?
He made the decision, a reckless, dizzying leap. He stood, threw a few bills on the table to cover both their drinks, and offered his hand. Not as a killer, not as a fugitive, but as a man. She hesitated for only a second, a flicker of something unreadable in her hazel eyes—calculation, curiosity, desire—before she slid her hand into his. Her skin was cool, her grip firm.
They didn't speak as they walked the short, grim corridor from the bar to the motel wing. The air was thick with the smell of mildew and stale smoke. Their footsteps were the only sound. His mind, usually screaming with threat assessments and exit strategies, was silent. There was only the feel of her hand in his and the heavy, anticipatory beat of his own heart.
At the door to Room 11, he released her hand to fumble with the key. The large green plastic fob felt absurd in his shaking fingers. He was hyper-aware of her standing behind him, of her quiet breathing, of the heat radiating from her body.
The lock finally clicked. He pushed the door open and stepped aside to let her enter first, a final, ingrained courtesy. She walked past him, her shoulder brushing his chest, and the contact was like a static shock.
He followed her in, closing the door and engaging the lock and the flimsy chain. The room was exactly as he'd left it: bleak, anonymous, a stage set for loneliness. But now, with her in it, the space transformed. It was charged, alive.
She turned to face him, her back to the drawn curtains. The dim light from the bathroom seeped under the door, outlining her form in silver.
"No more stories," she said softly. "No more names."
It was a surrender. An invitation.
He crossed the room in two strides. There was no more pretense, no more Paul, no more Anya. There was only the raw, desperate need to connect, to feel alive in the face of so much death.
He cupped her face in his hands, his touch surprisingly gentle despite the calluses and scars. Her skin was soft. Her eyes fluttered shut as he lowered his mouth to hers.
The first kiss was not gentle. It was a collision—a hungry, searching meeting of lips that tasted of cheap wine and cheaper whiskey and something infinitely more intoxicating. It was a spark thrown into a pool of gasoline.
A low groan escaped him, a sound torn from a place deep inside that he'd thought long dead. Her hands came up, not to push him away, but to clutch at the front of his windbreaker, pulling him closer, her fingers twisting in the fabric.
He walked her backward until her knees hit the edge of the bed, and they tumbled onto the scratchy bedspread in a tangle of limbs. The push dagger in his pocket dug into his thigh, a cold, hard reminder of reality, but he ignored it.
His mouth left hers to trail hot, open-mouthed kisses down the column of her throat. She arched into him, a gasp catching in her throat as he found the sensitive spot just below her ear. Her fingers tangled in his hair, holding him to her.
He was drowning in her. The scent of her perfume, the feel of her body under his, the soft, desperate sounds she made—it was a sensory overload that blotted out everything else. The world outside, the bounty on his head, the ghost of Nightingale… it all receded, burned away by a more immediate, more urgent fire.
For a few stolen moments in a shabby motel room, Karl Vorlender was not a ghost. He was a man. And he was, terrifyingly, alive.