The taste arrived before the thought could.
Dense. Warm. Salt-forward with something underneath it that her tongue didn't have a reference for — not clean, not sour, nothing in the vocabulary of nineteen years of operational living that mapped onto this.
'Strange.'
She filed it automatically, the way she filed everything — texture, temperature, the slow chemical reality of him spreading across the back of her tongue.
She had done this before.
Technically. Operationally. Three separate infiltrations into circles that required a kind of performance she had delivered with the same clean efficiency she delivered everything else — targets neutralized, covers maintained, reports filed by morning. She had never confused the performance with anything personal.
This was not that.
'He is significantly wider than anything I have previously—'
His hand moved in her hair.
