Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

This is how it begins.

She knew the legend.

Everyone knew the legend.

John Wick, a man of focus commitment and sheer will. Baba Yaga , the man sent to kill the bogeyman. The most capable assassin to ever emerge from Ruska Roma and one of the most lethal and sought-after professional killers in the world.

They should have added that not only could he kill three people with a pencil, he was also hot as hell.

Like, fuck!

The man may have looked like he hadn't washed his hair in months and was a bit bruised and being hunted like a dog, but fuck. She had seen him, spoken to him once, not even five minutes of conversation, and it had been enough for the image to burrow into her brain like poison, coiling inside her long enough to continue repeating itself even after he had disappeared and left her standing in the middle of the hallway.

He had kind eyes.

Behind the firmness, strength, and anger that overflowed from him, he had kind eyes.

And those eyes followed her, even after he disappeared again, continuing on that path of destruction he had chosen for himself.

In her dreams, haunting her.

Not because he was hot as hell—although he was — and she wanted to jump his bones and find out if he would be as good with those hands touching her as he was with killing — although she really wanted — but because he was a legend.

John Wick was a legend.

And Eve Macarro wanted to be the next.

There was a gulf of distance between their abilities. She was good; she knew that she was good. Still, it didn't take a single look, a single meeting, for it to be obvious what level he was on: one far above hers.

He could have killed her in that godforsaken city, buried her beneath the ice; he could have killed her very easy.

She wasn’t stupid enough, or arrogant enough, to pretend she didn’t know he wasn’t fighting with everything he had. She knew the stories, after all, and he had, whether because he was tired of fighting, of seeing other people heading toward the same fate, or because he remembered the way she’d looked at him before — like a naive, innocent girl wanting to enter a world she didn’t understand — gone easy on her in Hallstatt.

Eve wanted to know why.

And she wanted to know exactly what she needed to do to become as good as him.

She supposed, Eve blinked, ducking under the table, her eyes following the feet of the man who had come to kill her, gun in hand, that a five million contract on her head was a good place to start.

If she could survive long enough to hole up in some backwater where she wouldn't be found, or find some way to get back in the Director's good graces by negotiating that damn contract, Eve supposed she'd have picked up some other skill set somewhere.

She had discovered that being on the other side of the scale was quite exhausting, and being listed as the third-biggest contract in the underworld for the past two months had left her with very little disposition for these little unplanned encounters. Eve had known from the beginning that, as a result of her little fame and initial renown, there would be a good number of assassins following in her footsteps. She was no John Wick, and besides being young and new to the…service platform, she was a woman; the world was, by nature, sexist.

They had discovered very quickly that, just because she was young, it didn't mean she didn't know how to cut.

Deep.

The numbers had decreased considerably, but they had not ceased, as she had expected.

It was the reason why she was currently crouched behind a table, with a gun with one bullet left and a few bodies in the way.

She could hear the killer breathing, ragged and strained—he didn’t know where she was. Good. It was easier to kill that way, and she waited for him to come closer, then pushed herself under the table, driving her feet hard into his shins, wrapping herself around them and pulling him until his body slumped to the floor.

He had almost shot him in the damn ear, but she had still gotten up and blown his brains out.

Well, she blinked, hearing the two approaching, their footsteps echoing down the stairs, at least she had a loaded gun now.

The other two were smarter; faster.

And one of them was carrying a shotgun, which was a big problem.

“Fuck.” She growled, ducking as the gunshot rang out, nearly ripping a chunk of metal off the table and throwing it at him as she ran, spinning to the opposite side, body low to the ground, and pulling out the knife hidden in her ankle — a gift from an old friend that now rested somewhere beneath the concrete of Prague.

She threw her body hard against the wall to gain cover, swallowing a groan of pain, the knife flying and sticking into the assassin's shoulder.

He shouted. She didn't wait.

She advanced.

The other tried to reload — too slow — and she grabbed his wrist, weighted herself down, and spun, throwing him against the wall. The impact cracked the plaster. The second knife came out of the sheath strapped to her back.

Fast. Precise. To the neck.

A red line.

The man with the knife in his shoulder was trying to retrieve the weapon when she flew at him, a kick behind the knee knocking him down, and the knee digging into his chest soon after forcing him down.

He was a brute, and for good measure, she stuck the knife into his knee, twisting his kneecap, before placing the barrel of the pistol against his forehead.

She didn’t ask any questions.

There would be no answer.

Three bodies, Eve blinked.

And the four or five she left along the way.

It could be worse, she blinked, pushing herself up onto her knee, sucking in a deep breath. The bitch who had found her before the others had broken a rib or two, but she was going to live.

She gasped, reloading her gun — the good thing about being chased by professionals was that they always had a clip or two to spare.

The cold wind whipped against her face as she stumbled down the stairs, opening the small door that led to the street, and Eve gasped a little at the sudden pressure, the movement sending a throb of pain down her spine.

She was in the middle of the dark alley when she saw the black shadow waiting at the exit.

Her heart stopped for a second.

This time it was fear and not adrenaline.

He pushed himself off the wall slowly, unconcerned, and Eve wondered if she would acquire that kind of calm with time — with experience — as well. Enough to appear calm while the rest of the world, the whole underworld, tried to kill him, boasting of such a high contract on his head that it had made the others fall considerably in degree of importance and attention.

Well, she sighed, taking a deep breath, some people's misfortune was others' salvation, and while she herself wasn't going to go near that contract with a ten-foot pole, the excitement over the prospect of killing John Wick had made her considerably forgetful, so she was, by all means, not complaining.

He wasn't there to kill her, she knew, or she would already be dead.

Still, she stopped ten feet away from him.

Close enough to hear and see.

Far enough away to be able to react.

His eyes took her in slowly, and they burned more than the stab wound she currently sported in her hip. He let his eyes drop to the blade in her hand, then slowly back up, taking in the blood — and the damage — on her face.

Eve wondered if he would speak.

While he didn't, she let her eyes roam over him in self-assessment.

Wherever he’d been these past few months had been enough to get him back on his feet; he wasn’t hurt, considering the way he stood tall and steady, without that leg-pulling she’d noticed the last time she’d seen him — when he’d saved her life, more than once. Those eyes still held kindness beneath the anger, but the anger was diluted with a weariness even more visible than it had been the first time she’d seen him; Eve understood.

The anger quickly dissipated when you discovered that if you fed it too much, you would end up dead in some alley, caught by a second in which the feeling, the emotion, spoke louder than the training.

Anger was good for killing, Eve knew, but controlled anger was what kept them alive afterward.

He had washed his hair too, which suited him very well, making that dangerous and deadly air that emanated from him even more evident.

Deadly dangerous, Eve blinked, assessing him, her hand tightening on the knife.

And deadly attractive.

“You’re getting better.” He said finally, when the silence began to grow tense.

His voice still had that low, dry timbre; cold. Eve sniffed, spitting blood from her split lip, the cold making her nose slightly red, her gloved hand curled over the still-cool knife.

“I've had some practice lately.”

John nodded slowly; a tiny, almost nonexistent expression passed over his face,

"Eight?"

Eve chose not to ask, or try to find out, how he knew that, and shrugged.

“Nine, if you count the one who fell down the stairs last night.”

She counted. She was pretty sure he did, too. But he didn’t answer, just stood there in the exact same position, those dangerous brown eyes fixed on her, making her all too aware of whom the man across the street was. Eve lifted her chin, refusing to look down, to take her eyes off him; one second of distraction, and those hands might move and blow her damn brains out. But he hadn’t come to kill her.

At least, she didn't think so.

John Wick wasn't exactly the type to waste time talking when he had a job to do.

Eve sighed as he remained silent.

“Look, are you here to kill me or not?!” She muttered to him, resisting the urge to rub her forehead; there was some drying blood and it was starting to bother her. “Because I’m tired, hungry, and have a couple of broken ribs, and if the answer is ‘no,’ I’d really like to get this damn night over with so I can take a shower and drink an entire bottle of bourbon while I sit in the bathroom and lick my goddamn wounds.”

His eyebrow twitched slightly.

Eve wondered if he was surprised by her courage —  boldness — or if he was actually considering to do it.

When he spoke, it wasn't what she expected.

“I have a job for you.”

~

Eve Macarro blinked, once, twice, as she kept her mouth shut and the grunt of pain inside her.

Apparently, doing business with John Wick was always a bad sign.

She wasn't exactly surprised.

It had been risky, and she had ended up with a hole in her shoulder that the man in question was currently stitching up, but it had been good for her.

The Bowery King had looked her up and down as John had shoved her down into the underworld, his brow furrowing slightly in silent appraisal — which had ended very un-silently, with the man pointing out with very little satisfaction that she was bleeding out on his floor; she hadn’t even noticed the wound on her thigh until he’d spoken — before sending a doctor to stitch her up, and though he hadn’t spoken, Eve had seen the question in his eyes perfectly well.

What the hell is John Wick doing with a girl like that?!

She didn't have an answer to the question either, so she had contented herself with observing her surroundings, trying to figure out and find possible exits in case, which seemed very likely to happen, someone decided to kill her and get those five millions. John hadn't made any move to take out the gun she had tucked into her holster, covered by her coat, nor the knife he saw her stick in her boot, so at least, if she was going to die, she would die fighting.

She didn't die.

But she fought.

She fought like hell because the job in question was to put her in the middle of an announced massacre.

A dance, of course.

A damn masquerade ball.

Because even within the murderous underworld, some traditions seemed immortal and they insisted on holding balls in ancient halls, hiding weapons behind every curtain and armed dancers with looks that could kill, — a hunting ground where contracts were made, alliances formed and names crossed off the lists of the living — and John Wick not only could not be seen in any of these places without getting shot in the head, but was also missing the main part needed for that particular job: a vagina.

She had done so, of course.

She was a professional, not a child.

She had snuck into the damn ball, found the lucky lady that the Bowery king wanted dead and that for some reason, John Wick did too, killed her and returned to the hideout, her dress stuck to her body with sweat, blood and dirt and the damn mask still holding on.

And with a hole in the shoulder and a wide cut on the thigh.

Hence, the man standing over her, stitching her shoulder with the gentleness and softness of an elephant. She was not the one who would complain. She knew what he was doing. Why he had found her to do the job, when it was obvious that the Bowery King himself had better options—less sought after and more cheap — to send and considerably disapproved of his choice.

John Wick did indeed have kind eyes.

And he had connections too; much more than she did.

And she needed contacts if she wanted to live.

It was an unspoken kindness he was doing, giving her something to lean on as she tried to figure out how to survive. Two months was a very short time to build a life on her own, and while she was doing a relatively good job of surviving, she needed more.

She needed a plan.

She needed to think, and it was hard to do that with assassins following her around all the time. In their underworld hideout, she had time for that. She was safe enough for that.

I didn't really need to know him— she don’t ; the man is an impenetrable wall of ice and a month with him underground was the same as nothing, and she was still stuck with the knowledge of the legend and nothing more — to know that he would never confirm that that was what he was doing, however, even if she knew and he knew that she knew.

She had wondered, more than once, why he was doing it.

He didn't know her. They were definitely not friends. And she had little, if anything, at least for now, to offer him. She was just an assassin with a million-dollar contract in her name and the graveyard of a damn cult on her back. He didn't need her, and they weren't the only ones who knew that.

Eve blinked again as he pulled on the suture line.

It was cold, and her skin was getting colder by the second in the sports bra and training shorts she had on. The cut on her thigh stung and was still bleeding, but it needed to be stitched up — clean and then stitched it up — and she had swallowed hard when he had abandoned her shoulder to concentrate on the other wound.

Now, as he pulled on the line, one hand wrapped tightly around her thigh to keep her still, she had her lip clamped between her teeth to keep from letting out a hurt moan. He remained focused where he was, even as her leg rose slightly as he pulled on the line too hard, his eyes locked on what he was doing, his hands steady and precise.

“How do you do that gun move?” The question came out before she could think enough to stop herself from asking; it was probably fatigue, she realized belatedly, her body   was starting to get soft. “The one where you use the weapon lying down.”

He paused for a second, his hand still gripping the scissors, and Eve resisted the urge to cough, refusing to back away; she’d already asked, it wasn’t like she could go back in time and erase it.

He continued to sew it before speaking.

“Elbow firm, wrist loose. The movement doesn’t come from the hand. It comes from the shoulder.”

His voice was low, almost impersonal. But he spoke, and she understood. Eve blinked, perhaps for the thousandth time that night, unsure whether it was from surprise or sheer exhaustion. The pain pulsed through her in steady waves, but she frowned, refusing to let the opportunity pass her by.

“Do you spin the gun before shooting?”

“No.” He wiped the blood away with a cloth, then returned to the needle. “The gun spins when it changes axis.”

Eve nodded, though he wasn’t supposed to see it — she wasn’t sure he even cared that she was listening, but she doubted he would waste words on it. John finished the stitches on her thigh slowly, then stepped back, letting her breath. He put away his instruments calmly, she watched, his hands as silent as his footsteps; that was probably how he kept his weapons, the thought flashed by and was gone quickly.

“Still running?” He asked as he turned, those chocolate eyes locking with hers.

Eve took a deep breath, feeling the weight of the answer on her shoulders.

“As long as the contract exists, I have no other choice.”

“You do.” He said, and Eve blinked again, her heart skipping a beat. 

Not because he offered anything, but because he suggested it, calm and cool as everything he did, seeing more than she could see.

“I’m not ready to die.” She said softly. “Not yet.”

The answer came quietly.

Decisive, an end to a quick conversation.

“No one ever is.”

~

She doesn't ask.

He sees the plea in her anyway, and the next time she holds a gun in what is theoretically the Bowery King’s shooting range, he doesn’t say a word, but he reaches for her shoulder — it still hurts, the stitches he sewed pulling every time she extends her shoulder and pulls the trigger — when she’s firing, and then his hand grabs her wrist and turns it so quickly her eyes widen slightly, nudging her trigger finger with his as he does so.

He hits the target, of course.

All four bullets remaining in the cartridge.

This is how it starts.

He doesn't train her; not really. She doesn't need to be trained, already have been, and he has a multitude of problems much bigger than hers to solve. If her contract is a headache, his would be a beheading — which, perhaps not the best way to think, she blinked, since it could very well happen.

The point remains.

She doesn't need to be trained and John Wick doesn't train  anyone, but he has kind brown eyes and a hand that shoots faster than anyone she's ever seen, and he has a couple of moves that don't suit her — fight like a girl — but she finds herself learning to adapt to serve her, one day after the other.

She stays on the floor more than standing, but she learn.

She learns and adapts, and when they end up on the mat, again and again, his hands are steady and don't hesitate toward her, but neither do hers, and if she can't win in strength and skill — she cannot — she will win by stealing. She will win by biting, by kicking, by using his weight against him when possible and when impossible too — she jumps on him once, full body and all, wrapping her arms around his waist, and if it's the surprise that catches him off guard it doesn't matter, because she slams her hands into his ears hard and he stumbles backwards before throwing her across the mat and a win is a win.

He's a wall, a wall of muscle and skill, but he has cracks too, and she learns to look for them and it's a victory when he falls to his knees for the first time, even if it was a move he probably let happen.

He doesn't train her, but he teaches her, silently.

And although no one says a word about it, she feels it.

A change in air pressure. A familiar ache in the back of her neck. Eyes that narrow as John leans behind her to adjust the position of the gun — she keeps forgetting to move her thumb, something he says makes the movement faster, even more accurate — curious and confused.

What the hell is John Wick doing with a girl like that?!

She doesn't have an answer yet.

But she doesn't need one, at least not yet.

Instead, she focuses on planning.

She had to find a way to get the Director to take away his contract. She was twenty-five years old; she wasn’t going to die before she was thirty, and she wasn’t going to live on the run for the rest of her life. She had to become valuable, significant enough that her presence, her  name , was worth more than the lives she had taken.

This is how it begins.

She calls in a few favors, lets people know she's still alive. 

She makes a point of keeping his name out of hers; John Wick is already his own legend, she needs to write her own. That part is easy enough; there's really nothing that ties them together, at least to the world.

Nothing for the world, and two nights for her. One at home, one where her home would be if her father weren't better than the world wanted him to be. Two nights before, and a sequence of work after, which, one way or another, always ends with one of them stitching up wounds and dragging threads across each other's bodies.

She's a ballerina, he reminds her one day, as he sews a series of stitches across her ribs, his cracked nails and tough skin from holding a gun, from fighting and killing, scraping against the warm, considerably smoother skin of her back, as she asks him what he's going to do with the high table, and what she can do to help.

It's no lie.

He is right, and that part of her that had been enchanted by him the first time she'd seen him had expanded a little more by him coming to the same conclusion she'd come to, moments before, when she'd walked in and out of a place she shouldn't have been, doing something she shouldn't have been, for the man she definitely shouldn't have been with — John Wick is a death sentence in more ways than just one.

And while she's sewing the world's most wanted killer, the world's most expensive head is kind of limp in her lap because she needed to find that space below the nape of his neck and he was too tall for her to be able to make a straight line — safe — without risking prodding him further, that she finds out exactly what she will do.

She is a ballerina.

And she will dance.

And dance she dances, slipping in and out of spaces too tight for a killer to enter, touching with fine hands what hands like his cannot, tangling herself in the veins of New York, leaving a bit of herself in every place, every life she takes and every life she protects. With every whisper that slowly begins to spread through the streets of New York, about the ballerina with deadly aim and a sweet voice; about the dancer who serves everyone, and serves no one. About the ballerina who shoots like John Wick does.

If she can't go back to the way she was, Eve decides, then she'll do something better with that huge contract hanging around her head.

She will steal-it.

She will steal her contract, and steal others, again and again, until she is not an abandoned ballerina from Ruska Roma, nor a homeless murderess, but a home herself; until she is whom those with a contract on their head and a bullet in their gun look for.

This is how it begins.

This is how she wins.

The Bowery King doesn't ask when, three months after John Wick brought a doe-eyed assassin with a bloodstain and a pair of broken ribs to his underground hideout, that same assassin drops a coin in his hand, but she knows there's still no answer.

“Thank you.” She murmured to him, her spine straight and her eyes calm. She didn’t need to say why; he knew. “If you need me, call me.”

He raised an eyebrow at her.

“If I need you?”

Eve smiled at him, gripping the handle of her suitcase; the gun is loaded in the holster at her waist, no longer a single-bullet weapon, and the knife in her boot is as sharp as ever. She has a plan now, a place to go, and though it isn't only weapons in the carry-on bag — there's also money and a passport — there's an empty space saved for something else.

Her voice is firm as she answers confidently, and although three months have not been enough to make the man her greatest ally, his eyes hold a gleam she knows well.

It's the look of someone who has found something that might be useful.

What the hell is John Wick doing with a girl like that?!

It's not a lie when she answers.

“You will know.”

~

He's waiting at the door, a direct contrast to any of the other people scattered around the hideout, restrained, dangerous, classy and yet dangerously, terrifyingly attractive.

She wants to ask, but she doesn't. She knows he still has a lot to do. That the answer would be no.

Still, when she says goodbye, she wraps her arms around his neck and pulls him into a hug. She doesn’t care if it looks out of place; if the people scattered around the room will also see her as naïve, like a child stepping into a world she doesn’t know, letting herself be charmed by a man whose days are numbered. She doesn’t care if she still looks like a teenager charmed by an idol, heroizing a man who is anything but a hero; she will keep her sweetness, keep her femininity — a woman, she is, not a man, and she will not stifle her emotions to appear strong, an impenetrable, unfeeling wall, where she is not and it does nothing but pull her back.

Doesn't care if it is John Wick.

It's John Wick, a friend, and she's Eve Macarro and he saved her life — twice — and he has soft eyes, and his skin is warm and firm beneath his suit, and he stiffens against her for two seconds before forcing his body to relax and slowly wrapping an arm around her waist.

She doesn't give him a coin; coins are for business, not for friends.

Instead, she tells him the truth.

“Thank you.” She murmured against his ear, tiptoeing to reach him. “ Thank you. For understanding.” 

His hand tightens a little on her waist, as if he knows what the words mean, too, deep down.

He does, she knows. 

He lost too.

He is also still charging and paying.

The rules and the consequences.

“Bye, John.” She murmurs, and his cheek is cold when she presses her lips against it, a quick, fleeting kiss; he flinches slightly, but doesn’t push her away. Doesn’t pull her close, either. Eve knows exactly what it is, what he is and what they are, the limits, and smiles at him as she pulls away. “I hope you live.”

She thinks she knows he won't.

Still, when he makes a quiet noise, an agreement, or anything else — he's monosyllabic sometimes — she hopes they're both wrong.

~

The Cult takes out her contract one morning, four months after they put it in. Four months after she miraculously managed to stay alive. Two months after she started to be more work than was considered worthwhile, protecting people with a price on their heads for the right amount and being, in some way, useful to the High Table. Killing assassins sent to collect. Dancing between the ropes that are left for her to walk, never straight, nor crooked enough to forget who she is, to lose the dance.

Eve Macarro does not return to Ruska Roma.

John Wick dies on that same day.

She raises her glass to him where she stands, hidden, but not hidden , in the ruins of an old Russian fort that she has been renovating a little more each day, and lets his eyes wander back into her mind.

Brown and strong, kindness hidden beneath the anger.

They still haunt her in her dreams, the same way they did the first time she laid hers on him.

~

This is how it begins: 

John Wick is dead.

Six months after that, Eve Macarro is caught in a very unfavorable situation, with a good number of guys trying to discover a small amount of information, notoriously protected by a basic issue of insurance between client and service provider.

He comes to find her, gun in hands.

Chapter Text

That's how it happens.

She's a little dizzy, having taken quite a blow to the head, but she still hears the words. Somehow they run through her mind, the pain and the exhaustion and the wound in her right side and the fact that she'd just broken her wrist trying to get her wrist through the handcuffs and try to escape, as if everything else is secondary.

Very simple words.

Words very dangerous

“What the hell, that’s fucking John Wick!”

She hears the shots before she sees him, of course, as she always did with him, and adrenaline surges like gasoline on a fire.

She is a dancer.

Eve pulls her wrist out of the handcuffs, slams her head hard against the balls of the idiot in front of her who was too distracted by the hurricane breaking down his doors, and dance.

She dances until she can't dance anymore.

And then Eve Macarro wakes up to Winston Scott staring at her, his face twisted in barely concealed surprise, his brow slightly furrowed in confusion as he glances over her from the foot of the bed.

“Miss Macarro.” He murmurs, in that polite, business-to-business manner; a professional greeting. “We took the liberty of taking this.” He holds out a gold coin into the air and toward her eyes. “Since you were in no condition to deliver it yourself.”

Eve doesn't respond, too caught up in the figure standing behind him, leaning against what she realizes is a small table; a low table in a hotel bedroom. Eve pushes her arms up on the bed and lets the words come out as they please and doesn't give a damn if anyone else would talk to him like that.

“What the fuck are you doing alive?!”

~

The word, she discovers, as it cannot be stopped, travels quickly.

About John Wick coming back from the dead for the Ballerina of Death.

About John Wick entering the Continental — The Continental in New York where she can come in, but never does; where he would supposedly be welcome after fulfilling his bargain with the High Table, if he hadn't fucking died — with a passed out Eve Macarro in his arms, looking like pure murder, his suit stained with blood.

It's impossible to control, but Winston tried anyway.

It's useless. 

He was John Wick, and he still used the same name, still shot the same way, and still carried the same legend. Eve supposed there was no reason for him to do otherwise. To create another identity for himself. He had paid the bill; he had settled the debt. There was no reason to hide from the High Table.

Besides, it's him.

He could hide in a cave and the rocks would recognize that face.

That damn face and those beautiful eyes, Eve blinked, ignoring the way she could feel Winston’s eyes on her as he sewed another line of stitches across her—they always ended like this, she almost laughed, stitching one over the other—across the curve of her waist. The other stitches had been done by the doctor, but apparently she had a tendency to kick even when she was passed out, and Eve supposed it was true that she didn’t like hands on her.

Not his hands.

Never his hands, and she had twisted her body as he had ordered and writhed slightly between his spread legs so that he could find the cut on her side that had stained the expensive sheets at the Continental.

He still has soft fingers.

They trace her skin, when he’s done, one last stitch as neat as all the others, and she pretends she doesn’t shiver at the touch and he pretends he doesn’t feel it. It’s an old pattern. As old as the way he grips her hips tightly when she starts to move, silently ordering her to stay still while he finds other place to sew and she takes a deep breath when her fingers touch too low, another thing they both pretend not to notice.

He knows she's losing patience, knows she wants to ask questions and has words to say, and he does nothing but give her one of those dry, cold looks. She waits until he's gotten the last stitch in before punching him in the face, hard, and she hears Winston stifle a laugh behind her.

His face turned with the impact.

Not much. Just enough.

John didn't move after that.

Not a sound.

Not a sigh.

Just that damn look.

But his hands circled her waist as she hugged him tightly, and Eve took a deep breath—he smelled of whiskey and coffee and gunpowder; she had gotten used to the smell in the three months she had spent with him, and it wasn't until she had it in her nostrils again that she realized she had missed it.

“Son of a bitch.” She murmurs against the curve of his neck, relaxing against him with an ease that betrays so much more than the words she didn’t say then, nor does she say now. She swallows them down once more and chooses to say something else, pulling away from him, swallowing a low sigh as she sits back on the bed. “What the hell are you doing here?”

“Saving your ass.”

“My ass was perfectly fine,” she says, even though ‘fine’ might not be the right word, and ‘perfectly’ is practically nonsense. But she could have done it; she would have done it. Six months wasn’t six days, and she’d learned a lot over time. “Shit, John, you shouldn’t be here. You’re dead; has a damn tomb and everything.”

"I know."

Eve fought the urge to scowl at him, to repeat his words like a child throwing a tantrum. He didn’t look worried—not that she’d ever seen him like that before, damned wall of ice that he was—and considering Winston hadn’t shoved him straight to the dogs, she supposed that whatever the details of the deal he’d made with the High Table wouldn’t be a problem if he suddenly turned up alive.

He was frowning, she noticed.

That same cold, uninterested expression, perfectly impersonal, even when he had come out of his self-imposed retirement to come and rescue her; even when he had risked himself for her.

Ah, shit , she sighed.

Why the hell did she only like the complicated and emotionally unavailable ones?!

Probably because her father had died when she was a teenager and she had developed a variety of problems growing up, Eve sighed and slowly stood up, stretching her body. There were a fair amount of stitches scattered across her body, stitches that dragged with the movement, and she bit her lip to hold back a sigh.

Winston was still watching her, she saw out of the corner of her eye, standing now where John had been, those clever eyes—sometimes too clever—passing over her, once, twice, before shifting to the man still sitting in the chair opposite the bed. 

Questioning, she knew.

It seemed, Eve blinked, that that old question still had no answer.

What the hell is John Wick doing with a girl like that?!

Except now, she is not  just a girl anymore. It was far from what he was, what he is , but Eve Macarro was a name now. Not an empire, not a legend, but a business of her own. Well-known enough that the question woud be no longer about a girl, but about her.

What the hell is John Wick doing with Eve Macarro?!

She knew the question was probably already being asked in droves. Winston had been adamant in warning her that although he had tried to keep the conversation to a minimum, the Continental was relatively busy when John came through the doors, carrying her in his arms, and plucked a gold coin from her clothes—a restraint she carried, just in case — and laid it on the counter and growled very unfriendly for the manager.

Maybe one of them would figure out the answer, Eve sighed.

She herself didn't have it yet.

Her weapons were laid out on the small table beside her bed, and she took them firmly, realizing belatedly that it should have been the first thing she had looked for, not the ghost in the room. It was that sense of safety, she blinked; the one that had slowly begun to develop the more she woke up in an underground lair and found it somewhere, again and again.

When the bogeyman was in the room, the other monsters seemed weak.

The gun made that familiar sound as she tucked it into the waistband of her pants, pulling her tank top down—it was still half-ridden, pushed up where he’d rolled the fabric to sew it—and Eve bit back a low groan as she bent to slide the knife into her boot.

Behind her, his eyes burned into her back.

That familiar burn.

“I have a score to settle.” She murmured, not looking back. She knew he was listening perfectly well. “I’d rather you didn’t interfere,” she said, finally turning to face him. He was handing her the jacket, the fabric crumpled somewhere behind him, and her stupid heart skipped a beat at the way those brown eyes studied her—just for a second, slowly moving down her body before settling on her perfectly clear eyes again. “I can’t have John Wick involved in my business.”

“It might be a little late for that,” Winston murmured, finally speaking, and Eve bit back a low groan as she grabbed her jacket, stretching her arms through the holes, the thick fabric wrapping her thin body like makeshift armor. “The hall’s full.”

John muttered a low “fuck,” and Eve blinked, once or twice.

“Stay,” she decided finally, looking up at him. “If you stay, it’ll just be a coincidence. You found me, you brought me here; you owed me a favor or some shit like that. If you go down with me, there will be questions.” She blinked, once twice. “And neither of us likes to answer.”

He didn't answer, that old dangerous expression on his face, his dark eyes fixed on her.

Eve knows this silence.

She knows this silence and sighs, pressing her fingers against her jacket, feeling the leather beneath her tips.

“Shit, John, I’m not asking.”

“No.”

The word is a clean cut. A knife between the ribs. He always cut deep and fast, all at once, with no intention of hiding the movement, with no intention of letting the enemy escape.

Eve is no enemy, but she already knows that he won't give in, he won't pull the knife.

She doesn't drop her knives either, and her face is a mirror image of his.

Winston interrupts the silent discussion with a raise of his hands.

“Perhaps, my dear, it is best to accept that some battles are not fought alone.”

Eve gritted her teeth, ignoring the brown eyes and the man who was nonchalantly adjusting his suit, holstering his gun.

“It is not  my battle that concerns me. It’s his.” She stopped, pointing with her other knife at the man in question before tucking it into the holster on her leg. “He died . He settled his accounts and paid the damn debt and now he's here, in the middle of the Continental, and if he comes down with me, he'll get another bill. It's a problem.”

“I decide what is a problem.”

She stared at him, her fingers itching to pick up the gun again just to have something to hold. Almost tempted to shoot him to try and get that arrogant, determined expression out of those beautiful eyes.

“Ah, fuck, I forgot how stubborn you are.”

He doesn't deny it.

He just tilts his head at her, waiting for her to say something new.

Winston clears his throat where he stands.

“While you two are deciding who is more stubborn, perhaps we should consider that there are at least half a dozen assassins in the lobby who have heard that John Wick is alive. And, more importantly, that he is here."  

Eve closed her eyes for a second, taking a deep breath.

Shit.

Shit!

He's right, of course.

If word has already spread, and it certainly has, it won't be long before someone decides to test whether Baba Yaga is still as deadly as he once was. For someone to decide to try their luck. And worse, for someone to decide that she is the best way to get to him.

Which is stupid, in a way.

She can take care of herself, and definitely wouldn't be the best way to get to him, even if she couldn't.

But they don't know that, Eve blinks.

All they know is that he was dead, and he dropped the facade to come for her, and she's no dog, but he still left a trail of dead for her.

They don't know why, they don't know how , and they don't know when, but Eve is sure that won't stop them; everyone wants to be a legend, and sometimes killing one makes you an even greater one.

She growled, grabbing the other gun, resting on the other side of the table. John was already moving, easy and unhurried, pulling something from the inside pocket of his jacket—a pistol, she recognized, a custom-modified Glock 34, a match for the gun he had tucked into the holster on his hip.

He checks it with precise, almost mechanical movements before tucking it into the holster under his arm and looking up at her.

She doesn't ask if he's going to stay.

She already know the answer.

She still curses half the world when she goes down the stairs and his shadow follows her.

This is how it starts.

The Bogeyman hovering over a Ballerina.

~

The Director raises her eyebrows to extraordinary heights when Eve Macarro — whom once had her head on under a million-dollar contract, and who, after months and an exorbitant amount of money and two favors, accepted to fullfill a deal of her own on behalf of Ruska Roma — appears in his theater after nearly dying, looking for a name, John Wick by her side.

It's not his undeniable survival that surprises her; she knew better than to think he was dead.

It's the way he hovers over the ballerina she's built that makes her question. It's subtle, of course. There was no one more reserved than John Wick, and he had become even  more reserved over the years.

It's subtle, but she still sees it.

Too much personality for a stoic man.

Importance , in those cold eyes.

It’s not affection, not the ordinary kind; it’s not love either, and she doesn’t even consider the possibility of it. He’s a closed door, a safe, and it would take a lot more noise, a much more drastic explosion, to break that door down. But it’s something. Something subtle and dangerous, and it spreads through his eyes as he follows her body with them, analyzing every entrance and every exit, every possible way someone could touch her.

Instinct, she decides.

That same instinct that had made him who he was; that had created the legend. Instinct uncontrollable and determined, cold and sure, coiling itself, slowly becoming something even more dangerous.

Protection.

Her dancers hover on the stairs, watching them as they ascend. She knows. She always knows. They are always eager to see a legend, dreaming of becoming one themselves. Eve Macarro had done the same, not long ago; stopped an assassin in a hallway to mutter words she hadn’t heard, but he had paused to respond.

He should have stopped her that day, she decides.

When she was brave enough to talk to him, even though she hadn't started dancing properly yet. When she looked John Wick in the eye and planted that seed.

It wasn't love.

But it was instinct, curiosity born from an interaction that was innocent on the outside but hungry on the inside. Hunger , the kind that lurks on the edges, fed a little more each day, with each touch, until it’s too big and eats you whole. He should know better; maybe he wasn’t so good after all, she decided. Maybe John Wick had died and come back a little weaker.

More affectable.

Perhaps, he buried his wife, the husband, in that grave and let the man live.

He still has that same look in his eyes; that look that would come over his face when he found a gun and a life to take.

Possession.

As Eve Macarro leaves, getting what she came for— what was hers for a job well done, even at the cost of being caught and nearly tortured — and John Wick follows her, the Director watches them go and wonders if he can see the same look burning in that ballerina's eyes; if he's already figured out that this girl— half his age and far less experienced than either of them — is going to bring him to his knees.

That he won't kill for a dog from now on.

Probably not, she decides. He would have run if he had. He would have hidden in that grave, in the ring he had finally removed from his finger. He would have ripped it out the seed — her — while he still had the chance.

That's exactly why she trains ballerinas, the Director smiled.

Because they go in softly where a firm fist cannot; poison, diluting in the blood, seeping into the flesh, dancing until the feet are raw, but so deep in the soul, that it is impossible to remove.

That's why she trains ballerinas.

And she wondered, as they climbed the stairs, which of the two shadows the ballerinas on the stairs envied most.

Because he would have run.

Unless he wanted to hunt too.

~

Eve Macarro returns to Russia.

John Wick disappears again.

The whispers about them — about John Wick and Eve Macarro and what he could potentially be doing with a woman like her, what she could have over him enough for him to have come for her, what she could have done for someone like him to owe her a favor — die like him.

Dead, but not exactly.

~

They continue to meet for the rest of the year.

Sometimes he's the one who finds himself in the places she needs to be. Sometimes she's the one who coincidentally bumps into him in some town he's passing through. He no longer works for the High Table; not officially.

Eve suspects that he has money saved around the world so that he doesn't have to complete a single contract and live the rest of his life in perfect tranquility. But the truth is that he likes the thrill, the chase, so sometimes, almost a year after his death, he starts accepting one request or another. Favors, only, only for very specific and very select people.

A legend a step above what he already was; more dangerous, more sought after, more exclusive.

She pretends she doesn't know that he's following her all the time and that's why he knows where she'll be, who she'll be protecting.

He pretends he doesn't know she does the same.

They both pretend they will stop.

~

They don't stop.

The next time they meet, they end up half bruised and he's shot in the leg and she's been cut a lot, and when he stitches her up—another scar for her back—his palm hovers an inch too close, his pinky brushing the curve of her breast, and he pulls his hand away so quickly she'd feel cold if her skin weren't on fire.

Eve holds her breath, and forces herself to remain unmoved.

She lets him finish sewing her up and pretends she can’t feel the way her heart skips a beat every time he breathes against her back, his breath hitting her skin, making her hair stand on end. She pretends he can’t see it; what he does to her. Pretends that she don't feell as those brown eyes—kind eyes, beneath the anger and violence—trace the bare curve of her back as she lies half-slumped over the arm of the couch.

After he’s done, she doesn’t rush, pulling the tank top over her slowly, each seam of the garment catching on her fresh, blade-marked skin, the stitches pulling. He still arranges the tools the same way; as carefully as he does the weapons.

Eve leans back against the back of the couch, breathing deeply, her body still throbbing, pain and adrenaline mixing in her blood, almost making her dizzy. He throws his blazer over his shoulder, the gun evident in the holster, his white shirt half-stained with blood.

She wonders where he is staying.

If he would say no, if she knocked on the door and asked to come in.

“You should stop.”

“I could say the same.”

“You won’t.”

She smiles, small, knowing.

"No. "

Because she knows it won't work, just as much as he does. Silence falls between them again. The kind of silence that screams. The silence that begins to grow between them with each interaction; not tense, but charged.

Expectant.

“Next?”

“Bucharest.”

John nods, slowly putting on his blazer. He walks over to place the knife he took from her at some point next to her on the couch. She already knows the answer, but she asks anyway, because the more the silence between them grows, the more tense it becomes, the less she can control her words.

Less she wants to.

“Should I expect your interference?”

He looks up at her from where he stands, too close, and yet too far away. Eve suppressed the urge to fidget. She let his eyes roam over her, her chest clad in her tank top but her bare legs exposed by her panties, her thigh clean but still slightly marked with blood.

He'd cleaned the blood away, but blood always stains, and it won't come out completely until she's under a hot shower, missing the touch of his fingers, his cool breath against the curve of her neck as he holds her to mend some new wound on her body.

She knows exactly what he's seeing.

A hunger that grows more and more in her eyes, and she tries — she really tries, because it's him, and he's a friend, perhaps the most important one she has, and she knows what it is, what he is, and what they are, and knows the limits — hide, but feels it spreading out over the edges more and more each day.

He does not act on it.

He never acts on it, and she doesn't either, because he is John Wick, and he's an impenetrable wall and she's a brave woman, but she still doesn't have courage enough to swallow that small distance between them—it would be so easy with the way he looms over her, tall and broad and dangerous and just as fucking hot as she remembers him looking on that first date, so long ago—and press her lips to his.

She wants to.

Holy shit, she wants .

Sometimes she thinks he wants her too. When he looks at her like that. Like he's looking at her now. Like she's something he can't touch but wants to keep close. Like he wants to touch her but can't bring himself to lift his hands.

His eyes are a silent fire, melted chocolate.

Eve swallows, leans her hand on the couch to pull herself to her feet—she doesn’t need to; it’s a warning, to let him know exactly what she’s going to do. To let him back off, if he wants to—her chest scraping against him as she does so. He’s tall. Very tall. A head taller than her or more, and he looks her up, his eyes following her movement, lingering on her face when she stops and doesn’t move.

The move is his, they both know it.

Neither of them says, or will say a word, but they both know it is.

It always was.

She will never cross that line without knowing if he is ready for it. She will never dare to try.

He doesn't move.

The silence between them changes shape; she knows this other version too. It’s not new. It’s the kind of silence that holds her breath, almost like the silence that precedes an impossible move in the field, but worse . This one is good. This one makes her toes curl on the soft, plush rug at her feet. It makes the room seem smaller, the air thicker and thicker and so tense that she wants to move.

One centimeter is all that's left.

An imaginary line that they don't cross.

His jaw tightens, but his eyes remain on her.

Her stomach churns, fire spreading like molten lava through her veins. His jaw always tightens when something displeases him; when he wants to do something about some situation. It's not fear that makes it hurts, it's tension. The desire. She stands in front of him, and her body still aches, throbbing from the wounds he closed, but it's that deeper ache, that makes her take a deep breath.

He doesn't move. He doesn't answer her initial question either. His gaze lingers on hers for too long. Always too long when they fall back into that gap where they're friends but also are more, but are not. And then it shifts, just for a second, to her jawline, then her collarbone, to the spot where the bandage he’s put on himself hides beneath the thin strap of her tank top. To the hollow of her neck where he likes to rotate his thumb when he has an excuse to touch her, feeling her pulse rise and fall, increasing and increasing the more he touches her.

“If I say no,” he murmurs, his voice low, rough, “will you believe?”

"No."

A muscle ticked in his neck and he stepped to the side, just enough so that his shoulder brushed hers—not a casual gesture, not with them. Nothing is casual with him and nothing is casual with her; with them. She could turn. She could rest her forehead against his chest. She could make a movement so small, so simple, and set into motion what neither of them recognizes, until it's impossible for them to pretend it's not there. Between them.

But she doesn't.

Neither does he.

Eve takes a half step back, enough to breathe, and he finally moves, taking a step back and away from her.

“You don’t have to follow me, John. I don’t need you.”

It's a lie. And she knows he knows.

She don't need him to do the job, but she does need him. 

She wants him.

He doesn't respond, taking the distance between her and the door.

His hand is wrapped around the doorknob when he speaks. A single word. Monosyllabic, as he is sometimes. He is a man of few words, and she knows that when he says less, it means a lot more than when he says a lot.

An answer she already knew what it would be, but still want to hear.

"Yes."

Chapter Text

That’s how it starts: inch by inch.

In Bucharest, she knocks on the door.

It’s the cold. The cold makes her think of the first time he’d saved her life. When she’d been alone in the middle of nowhere, jumping off rooftops and scuffing in the snow, trying not to die and trying to kill, and they’d sent the biggest wolf of them all to deal with her. The cold makes her think of the way he’d looked at her when he’d told her to go away; kind brown eyes beneath the violence, kind even as he’d pinned her to the ground and held a gun to her head.

The cold makes her think of him alone in bed, wrapped in a comforter as nice as hers, warm but not warm enough.

She knocks on the door.

He lets her in.

He doesn’t ask why. Or what for. He doesn’t smile, he doesn’t speak. He just opens the door. The hotel hallway is empty except for her and him, and yet when Eve lets her eyes drift over him, it feels too full, too heavy. He replaced his suit with a pair of sweatpants that were too low — holy shit, too low and she wants to stick her fingers in there and

She looks away, back at him, watches as his eyes linger a second longer on her face, aware of what she was looking at, that she was looking, before moving down a little further and finally moving away, making room for her to enter.

The click of the door closing sends something down her spine.

She says nothing. Takes off her jacket slowly, her shoulders stiff, her fingers brushing the heavy fabric. His eyes follow the movement. His eyes always follow the movement.

“Complications?”

“A few.” Eve hangs her jacket on the nearest chair, feeling the weight slide off her shoulders; the fabric falls away, trailing down the chair, but she makes no move to pick it up. “A knife where it shouldn’t have been, two shots that missed, and a near miss.”

He watches her, silent. He moves just close enough to get a better look, and the light from the lamp draws his face in harsh lines and deep shadows, still as handsome as she remembers, but even harder. There is a cut on his lower lip. Cracked. Fresh.

She wants to ask if it was today. If it was for her. If he would mind if she sank her teeth into his skin and bit it until he bled, if she kissed him until he was on fire. But she doesn't ask. Neither of them usually does.

“Take off your shirt.”

It's an instruction, an order, but here, in his room, it almost sounds different and she stares at him for a moment, blink, swallows hard and holds his gaze, sees perfectly the moment he understands her reaction, his shoulders straightening slightly. It's not tension, she's learned to read it. It's not stiffness or discomfort.

It is conscience.  

He knows exactly what she's thinking.

Know what she wants.

He likes it.

It's another thing they pretend to not see.

She swallows again and carefully pulls her stained tank top off, turning her back to him; it’s always her back, for some reason. Her skin was once smooth, now, along with the tattoo that covers most of her skin, are a variety of scars.

His hand is much firmer on her now, surer, than it was the first few times they repeated this ritual.

He doesn’t pull his hands away as he finishes cleaning and stitching the wound, standing behind her. His fingers hover over her skin for a second too long. Then two. Eve resists the urge to throw her head back as he moves his hand, palm open, splayed across her back.

Big.

He has big hands.

Big, calloused hands that brush her back and nearly swallow her whole body at once, moving with a slowness that makes her want to grab it herself and bring them down, touch her where she wants — everywhere, anywhere , as long as he's touching her. She doesn't. Instead, she holds her breath as his hand curls around her waist, just below her ribs; this time, he doesn't pull away when his thumb brushes the curve of her breast.

She leans back. Not too far. Just enough to cross the first millimeter.

And wait.

He doesn't move away.

Her back hits his chest — bare and warm and as scarred as hers — and she takes a deep breath, closing her eyes. He’s steady behind her, so steady, and sometimes she misses that. Someone steady to lean on when she’s alone in the middle of a Russian fort, even though there are people surrounding her, working with her, building a story.

None of them are him, and she misses him, even though she know she’ll find him every time she goes out to do a job

She doesn’t realize she’s sighed, soft and ragged, until his hand slides slowly from her waist to the curve of her hip, brushing with a careful care that she knows is also restraint. Eve holds her breath, feeling the heat of his touch seep through her skin, her blood boiling, bubbling, the longer his hand lingers on her.

He doesn't move, doesn't squeeze, doesn't demand more.

He just stands there, wrapped in the silence between them, his fingers pausing, slightly open, spread against her skin. He doesn't move. Doesn't squeeze. Doesn't explore.

Just touch.

But touch is everything.

Touch is a world between them. Touch is an inch that sometimes seems like they will never cross. It is everything they don't say, everything they don't allow, everything that almost — almost — could happen.

And doesn't.

Eve keeps her eyes closed, her breath growing shallower, more and more caught in the back of her throat; she can feel the tension in his body, his chest rising and falling slowly behind her back.

His heat, his muscles, his scars.

The presence.

That fucking presence . 

He's John Wick, and he's a legend, but it's not the assassin that makes her weak in the knees, it's the man. It's the man with kind eyes and hair that looked like it hadn't been washed in days who she met in a theater long ago and who told her she had a choice. It's the man who understood and gave her time to do what she needed to do when she made that choice. It’s the man who took her to an underground hideout and taught her to shoot like him, gave her a chance to survive, stitched up her wounds and lit her skin on fire, one touch at a time.

It's the man, who makes her feel safe.

It's the man she wants.

Time stretches.

It becomes something else.

One second turns into a minute.

One minute becomes a sentence.

His thumb slides a millimeter. A single millimeter. A tiny touch, between her flank and the side of her belly, touching the waistband of her pants, as if he too couldn't contain himself; as if he too wanted to slide his hand down and break that line. A millimeter, but it's enough to make every pore on her skin stand on end. She bites her lip to keep from trembling.

And then his hand comes out.

Slowly.

As if he's not sure what he's doing and wants to go back; as if he wants to give up halfway.

Eve only breathes when he is no longer touching her.

His absence burns more than his touch.

She doesn't turn around. She doesn't look at him. Because if she does, she'll cross the line. And she's already too close to the line, and that line isn't hers. That line isn't hers because he buried a wife and lost a life, and the whole world knows that John Wick destroyed half the world and himself for a memory of her, and Eve isn't going to be the only one who crosses that line and fuck everything up.

That line is his.

For him, and for her.

Behind her, the sound of his breathing changes. 

Longer. 

Deeper.

He doesn’t say a word. He’s a man of few words, but sometimes he’s a man of none, and she’s learned to read him very well. Well enough to understand when she reaches for her tank top and he grabs her wrist tightly, hands her his own shirt, those brown eyes fixed on hers.

I can't.

It’s a silent pledge for her to understand.

She pulls on the shirt, lets the fabric drag over her, lets the cold seep into her skin as he turns off the lamp and pulls her toward the bed.

In Bucharest, she knocks on the door.

In Bucharest, he doesn't let her leave.

It still hurts, even though she does understand.

~

This is how it goes: after Bucharest, she runs.

Self-preservation is a talent, and Eve has enough open wounds to know when one is going to start hurting.

She sews up her own wounds for a while. She stays home, because while the bogeyman was always where she needed him, he was never in the fort she had turned, one contract at a time, into her home. He understands her as well as she understands him; he doesn't come near her until she's ready, until she gives him the signal that he can.

Eve ignores that part of her that just wants to keep going there, further and further with him, ignoring all the rest. 

The consequences.

She knows best.

She wants to, but she has learned to walk in the world, to dance between one rope and another, and she's not willing to sacrifice what she's built, her own story, her legend, to live in his shadow. 

She has work to do. 

Secrets and favors to gain, a name to make.

So she ignores that pang, that urge to call, to go where she knows he is, and just keeps doing what needs to be done. It's hard to run a business alone, but it's even harder to run a protection murderer business alone. It's useful to the High Table, of course, and she knows that's the only reason she can move back and forth, from one contract to another, protecting those who seek her out, without receiving a contract of her own.

She’d expected one to emerge after he’d come for her, but it hadn’t. Whatever deal he’d made, it had seemed in everyone’s best interest for him to remain as dead as possible, and since he hadn’t actively entered the service — well, not officially, anyway; she’d known he’d been in town when she’d gone to find those who’d tried to kidnap her and force secrets from her mouth — it had all fallen into a quiet internal resolution.

If the attempts to attack her lessened after he exposed to the underworld that he knew her and would come for her, Eve really wasn't going to complain.

That's why she doesn't let him know that he can come closer.

Not for a month.

Not for two.

And then, on a cold night in Prague, she's in a dirty building, with blood dripping between her fingers and a dead target at her feet, and a wound that came too close to killing her, and she hasn't seen him in two months and she realizes that she's tired of stitching up her own wounds and she wants to see him.

She decides that if she survives, she will find a way to be ready and she will call.

He crosses the line.

Come before she asks, break that silent agreement to wait until the other is ready and rain bullets on a sequence of people in her name.

His car is parked at the mouth of the alley, silent, headlights off, and he drags her toward it, and she opens the passenger door and climbs in without hesitation; Eve swallows the blood in her mouth, presses her hand to the cut on the side of her torso, and walks toward it without hesitation. His scent is on her before she even gets in — whiskey and gunpowder and coffee — and the leather seat is cool against her back when she leans back, but the air inside the car is warm, muggy, and she closes her eyes for a second before looking at him.

He doesn't turn to face her, his hands firm on the steering wheel, his knuckles white from pressing so hard. He's angry, she knows. Because things went a little wrong, and she didn't call, even though she knew he would come. Even though she knew she could die.

She didn't call because she didn't need him. She doesn’t need him. Not really. It’s her business, her life, and she can deal with it herself. She can sustain herself with her own name. Must. 

He doesn't ask if she's okay.

He already knows the answer.

She also doesn't ask why he's here.

She already knows the answer to that too.

The car starts moving, slowly, as if it's giving her time to decide if she wants to talk, if she wants to scream, if she wants to cry — it's been a long time since she cried; she won't start today.

She doesn't do any of that.

She just breathes.

And he just drives.

His apartment in Prague is small, clean, and impersonal.

Like every other one.

Like all the places he stops but never stays.

He takes her into the bathroom without touching her, opens the medicine cabinet, readies the needle and thread with precise, mechanical, familiar movements, and does not touch her once, not even the shadow of a finger. She sits on the edge of the tub, stares into the steamy mirror, stares at her reflection in it—her hair a mess, her lips swollen, and a wound on her shoulder and another on her chest, dangerously close to her heart.

John kneels in front of her, his hands steady as he grips the hem of her shirt and orders her with one of those wordless growls to raise her arms; the fabric falls to the floor with a soft thud, his fingers brushing the bloodied skin of her shoulders.

He doesn't say anything.

Eve knows as he watches the blood soaking through her bra that he is acutely aware of how close it came to something vital. She presses her shirt against her breasts as he turns to pick up the needle. He doesn’t look once, and that’s not why she hides them; she’s safe with him, she knows. It’s never uncomfortable with him. He never looks when she’s not letting him, when she doesn’t want him to, and though they’ve started out like this and ended up locked in that tension before, this time is different.

Too close to death not to be.

She lets herself watch his face as he sews, his expression impassive, his jaw set, those kind eyes swallowed by anger. He’s too close. Closer than he should be. Closer than he usually is.

The anger in his eyes is too clear and Eve sighs, surrendering.

She blinks, reaching up to touch his face. He pauses for a second, the needle pausing in midair, his dark brown eyes lifting to meet hers. Eve wonders if she’s crossing some other unspoken boundary. If she should drop her hand. She doesn’t. Instead, her fingers slide through his beard, her index finger resting on the scar on his lip — the same one she’d wanted to bite back in Bucharest; still wants to.

For a second she almost dares to close that distance. To do what she knows — she   knows  — that they both want. She almost dares to cross that line; he crossed hers, after all. She almost does. But then he blinks, goes back to sewing, and she lets her hand fall.

When he's finished he grabs her hand again, lifts it to his lips and leaves a kiss on her fingers and any breath she has left leaves her.

Eve sits on the edge of the tub for a long time after he lets her hand fall back where it was, and steps away to gather his supplies, washing his hands at the sink before stepping out, her fingers still warm from where he kissed them, her pulse racing too fast and it's not adrenaline or fear and she knows it, before she ducks into the shower.

He left the door open.

He also left a shirt folded on the sink.

It’s too big for her, and she leaves the top few buttons undone, leaves her pants and underwear folded over the tub. There’s blood on the fabric, from a cut on her hip that’s bled down. His shirt is mostly a dress anyway, and when she comes out of the bathroom, her bare feet scraping against the floor, he’s in the kitchen, his back to her, his shoulders broad beneath his white shirt, his hands braced on the counter as he waits for the water to boil.

She stops in the middle of the hallway and watches.

Can't not watch .

He is definitely the most attractive man she has ever seen. It's not just about looks, although he is gorgeous too. Those eyes can make him look dangerously sweet when he wants to, a mistake, but one she'd easily fall for; and his hair falls over his face in a very charming way, especially when he's just cut it and it frames his face perfectly, soft and beautiful, a perfect match with his beard. And the ass — fuck, that's a very nice ass. But mostly, It's just him. Something about him that draws her in; that makes her tense all the time.

Eve knows very well that he knows she's there; that she's watching him.

Looking at him.

She knows that when she moves, her feet silent on the wooden floor, it's not silent enough that he doesn't know she's moving. Towards him. Towards behind him. Towards his warmth. Towards that space she never occupies, but that always calls to her.

This time, she gives in.

Inch by inch.

Her hand touches the hem of his shirt slowly, fingers calm and light, then slides her palm unhurriedly over his back — over the warm cotton, heat emanating from him — and the muscles beneath her hands twitch, just a little.

It's a breath.

A more tangible statement than words would be.

Proof that she is fine.

That he doesn't have to worry about burying her too, because she's alive.

“I’m fine.” She murmurs, letting her chest press against his back, her arms sliding underneath him, between his tall, broad body and the counter, crossing them over his abdomen. He holds his breath as she presses her lips against his back, and then it returns more slowly; heavy. It's a sigh when she speaks, a whisper. “I'm fine, John.”

He doesn't answer.

He’s always spoken more with his body than with words, and his shoulders relax, the tension slowly draining from his muscles, his head tilting back slightly. She’s too short for him to meet her head with the gesture, but Eve recognizes it all too well for what it is and presses herself closer to him.

She places her face between his shoulder blades, her fingers sliding up his shirt, up until she can feel his chest rise and fall beneath her fingers.

"I know."

Eve understands.

She always understood, as well as he understands her. He knows that she is fine . There’s just a difference between knowing and knowing how to deal with it. It’s the foundation of what’s between them, this uncrossed line that they both know exists. They know it’s real. They know that even though neither of them will say it, there’s a place inside him that she holds. They know he would never allow anyone as close as he allows her. It’s been a year since he came back from his supposed death; a year of planned encounters disguised as something else. A year of pretending they’re not what they are.

They know.

He just can't deal with the fact that he let it happen.

That his wife died, and he closed his heart to everything and everyone, but a ballerina looked into his eyes in a theater and asked for advice on how to enter a life he wanted to leave, and that part of him kept her face and her name and her eyes, and could not kill her the next time they met. That he closed his heart with iron, but he saved her life, one, two times, and that part of him wanted to keep saving, protecting , and she entered him as much as he entered her, entangling herself in him, in his instincts, in his eyes, in everything, and made a hole where there was no space and he let it.

Not that there’s much to ‘let’ in falling in love, but if there’s one thing John Wick is, it’s controlling.

Controlling his life. Controlling his body. Controlling his hands.

Controlling everything, except the heart.

He tries anyway.

He tries really hard, and Eve understands.

She understands, but she still wants to, and she tightens her hold on him a little when he makes no move to pull away. The kettle whistles behind them — he knows she likes tea, even if he drinks only coffee and as strong and black as possible; there is always tea in his houses, another thing they don’t recognize — but neither of them moves, and she decides that if he doesn’t, she won’t.

She is perfectly comfortable where she is.

The sound dies on its own.

He turns after a moment. Not all the way. Enough to almost, almost see her over his shoulder, but he doesn’t look directly. He just lifts his hand and rests it on her arm before he speaks.

“You should rest.” He says, but he’s the one with slightly trembling fingers. “ Eve .”

The way he says her name has nothing to do with her resting. It has everything to do with the way he holds her hand, even after he says the words, keeping her against him.

It's all about that uncrossed line.

“I know.” She replies, quietly.

It has everything to do with the fact that her fingers are scraping against the buttons of his shirt, and it wasn't even on purpose, but they both know that she wants to undo the buttons and that he wants to push her hand in himself, in and down and everywhere.

She pulls away with one last kiss against his back; she can't help it — can't give up the fire that flares inside her as he tenses in response, the muscles in his back contracting before her eyes, wide and spacious and hot.

He lets out a low sigh — almost a muffled growl — as she takes a step back, away from him, her hands falling loosely to her sides as she releases him, and then he turns to face her. Slow, measured. His eyes are soft when they land on her, and it’s worry and a little bit of that something else they don’t acknowledge that is on them, but she sees it exactly the moment it turns into something else, his eyes burning when he takes in the way she looks in the loose shirt she’s wearing.

It's not the first time she's worn one of his shirts.

But they both know there is a difference between the armor and the man, and the black of the social is John Wick where the sweatshirt can't reach.

Something dense.

Flammable.

Hot.

Holy shit, it's hot; he is hot, delicious, and when his eyes flick up and down on her, Eve forgets even the burning in her chest where she's been stabbed nearly to death, and she's a girl in a theater again, enchanted by a man twice her age and twice her size, a tree she wants to climb, more deaths on his back than she can count.

He is so fucking hot and she is so hungry.

He knows. Of course, he knows. He’s always known, and when he takes a step toward her — just one — it feels like so much more than that, those brown eyes holding hers for a little too long before he lets them drop a little.

His gaze drops to the curve of her thigh, slides over the button she forgot to do up — or maybe she didn't, some things just are what they are — and Eve sees the exact moment he forces himself to look away again, his jaw clenching tightly, the way he always does when he wants to do more.

When he wants to touch.

Touch her.

She provokes him with her silence. With her presence. With the fact that he doesn’t send her away. He doesn't even avoid her. He doesn't even try to pretend he doesn't want her. That there is an unspoken line between them, an unspoken, unacknowledged history, but every day, with every encounter, that line becomes thinner and it is so thin now that it could be a thread.

She understands.

Doesn't mean it's good. 

That she's going to stand by and let him drag that line until they're both dead in some ditch, a shot to the chest or the forehead. He's already died once. She has no intention of letting him die again without at least knowing the taste.

Eve slowly crossed her arms, the shirt opening a little more at her chest. It’s deliberate. He knows it is, and she doesn’t hide it. She lets him see what she could have — and what he refuses to take, even though they both know he is starving.

She whispered, low and slow and wanting and familiar.

“John.”  

He closes his eyes.

Just for a second.

And then he moved, slowly, a gliding weight, toward her. Eve sucked in a breath as he did so, his body half pressed against hers, forcing her to lift her head to look at him.

“If I touch… ” He murmured at last, hoarsely, determinedly. “I won’t stop.”

Eve felt her skin crawl at the words, all over, and knew damn well he saw it, his thumb rubbing against her arm where she'd pushed the sleeves of his shirt up, testing the skin, the goosebumps.

It is a whisper, a request and an order at the same time.

“Just once.”

He closes his eyes again, letting his forehead rest against hers, and Eve rises up on her tiptoes without even realizing it, a little noise escaping her lips as his hand wraps around her waist, anchoring her so that her weight isn't on her feet.

She is a ballerina.

She is used to holding the world on her feet.

She lets him hold her anyway.

“I can’t,” he murmured, but his mouth was so close to hers that she would have felt the words even if he hadn’t said them, the air too hot between them. Too full. His thumb brushed beneath her shirt, where one of the buttons had come undone, letting in a gap of air, the fabric rising. “Fuck, I can’t.”

She doesn't move.

Neither does he.

She won't cross the line, Eve reminds herself; she can't cross the line. It has to come from him. She's done too much already. Pushed too much, and only did so because he pushed the line first. It's a boundary game they play, and when one breaks a silent agreement, the other gets a turn.

A gentle brush of her hands over the back of his neck is all she does, a silent affirmation that she understands.

He doesn't let go as she shifts her weight back onto the balls of her feet, and she stares at him in confusion, a gasp escaping her lips as he lifts her up again by the waist, her hand curling around his shoulder on instinct.

His hand is firm on her leg as she wraps her legs around him, holding on as he moves around the apartment, his other hand wrapped around her waist. He's tense, she can feel it in his muscles. It's not the same tension as before, this is the bad one, and she presses her lips against his shoulder, another silent affirmation.

It’s okay.

She still understands.

She is dying of frustration and horny as fuck, but she understands.

The room is dark when they enter; Eve wonders how long he’s been in town. Prague is a favorite of his, the place he spends most of his time, whether for taste, comfort, or practicality, she doesn’t know. The mattress is soft, and he lays her down on the bed with the same care he holds his weapons — his loaded weapons —, with respect and concern and awareness of what will happen, of the damage he will do if he pulls the trigger, if he decides that he wants and put the skills he have to use.

He sits on the edge of the bed, silent, his head down as she sits on the mattress, and he looks so guilty , that she slides her hand down the back of his neck, her fingers brushing the ends of his hair slowly, with no intention other than to let him know that everything is fine.

That she understands. 

His entire body vibrated beneath her touch, and she bit her lip and forced herself not to react as he took a deep, heavy breath, raising those kind, guilt-filled eyes to hers.

“If I cross that line,” he murmured, an answer she already knew, to a question, an explanation, that was not asked for. “I can’t go back.”

She could lie to him.

It would probably be nicer if she did. If she gave him more time to accept the truth. If she pretended a little longer. But she's tired of pretending. Of pretending she doesn't want to. That she's not so fucking alone. That she almost dies more times than not and it was her choice and she stands firm in her decision, but fuck , it's hard work and sometimes she really wishes she didn't have to lie in that part of her life too.

That she doesn’t know the answer to that question now.

What the hell is John Wick doing with Eve Macarro?!

She could lie.

But there are rules, she remembers.

Rules and consequences and although she doesn't mind that he did it, there is a silent agreement broken between them. There are rules and consequences, and when one of them loses its value, the other must emerge, and she almost died, and the truth is that he doesn't want her to lie.

He wants her to throw the truth in his face.

He wants her to say what he doesn't have the courage to say.

He wants her to say it, loud and clear enough that neither of them can pretend otherwise after tonight, because he didn't wait for her to call him to come, and that has nothing to do with him thinking she can't handle it, that she needs help, and everything to do with the words he can't say.

She pulls him down onto the bed before she says, feels the mattress dip between them and his breathing is all she hears, the sound steady and steady as he turns his body, wordlessly, pulling hers with him. His shirt rides up a little on her waist as he slips his arm under it, tucking her against his chest.

Her eyes are open when she speaks, her mouth too close to his to seem innocent; to seem anything but what is between them.

“You already did.”

~

This is how it starts: two months after Prague, someone tries to hire him for a job.

The target is her.

She is in the middle of a meeting with Katia Jovonovich and Winston Scott, discussing the details of a contract, a favor — sometimes, Eve learned very quickly, a favor is worth more than a lot of money; and with people who could really make a difference if she ever ended up with a million-dollar contract on her head again, she tended to negotiate less money and more favors — to be owed by Ruska Roma and the New York Continental when he burst through the doors, gun in hand.

The Continental — the neutral space that she spent months convincing Katia that she would only meet there — is fucking full, and Eve can hear the whispers erupt like wildfire when he walks through the doors, dressed in black and murder and beauty, even though no one says a word, waiting in that old timid tension typical of his presence, waiting for the bomb to drop; everybody knows what happened the last time he walked into the Continental with a gun in his hand.

It's the gleam in his eyes, the anger swallowing up that kindness, the gentleness, that makes her pull her own gun — she really needs to start working on how she reacts to him; it's really hard to pretend there isn't something between them when the Wolf walks into the room and her reaction is to relax instead of grabbing a gun or running — taking a step forward.

“John?” She asked, ignoring the gaze burning into her back.

The leader of the German branch of Ruska Roma was a cold woman, but her eyes burned like the molten iron she used to brand hers.

His eyes flick over her, searching for injuries, she knows, and Eve frowns a little more, returning the gun to its holster, her hand still on it; she doesn't ask why the hell he's come in there when he's kept himself out of the spotlight for over a year, much less what the hell was he thinking , taking a step closer to him and ignoring the laughter that came from the woman behind her.

“Ah,” she hears her mutter anyway. “So that’s how it is.”

“John?” She repeats, more firmly this time, ignoring the words. “What is it?”

He didn't answer, his jaw muscles tensed in that way she knew he was very pissed off, about to go out and blow some heads off; his eyes scan the room once more before landing on her.

“You’re good?” His voice is rough, almost animalistic, but still low enough to be hers and hers alone.

Eve arched an eyebrow.

“I was, until you crashed my meeting.”

He didn't find it funny, taking a step closer, close enough that she could feel the heat emanating from him, that familiar smell of gunpowder and coffee flooding her nostrils. Close enough for her to want to touch.

“Someone’s offered me a contract on your head.” He growled, and Eve stiffened where she stood, her spine stiffening. He saw the question in her eyes. “Ten million.”

“Fuck.” She spat out a curse. “You refused?”

John frowned at her, as if the question offended him.

“Yeah, I fucking refused.”

She tried not to feel that pulse of heat at the way he growled the words — angry and so pissed off — and the way his eyes burned as he spoke, but judging by the way his brow softened for a second, his back straightening in that masculine knowing way she loved, she hadn't done such a good job.

“Who knew you would be here?"

“You.” She answers, not even considering the possibility of not answering, questioning why he wants to know. Ignoring what the words will mean to the variety of people in the lobby if they hear her, paying even more attention now than they had before as she pretended to have a drink with two people far above her pay grade and nothing more.“Few people from my… house.”

She knows exactly what he's thinking.

Few people would be brave enough to offer a contract to John Wick after all he did. He was a level above the level above now. He rarely accepted contracts or favors unless he really wanted them, or it came from someone he wanted to keep a favor or a mark from.

And few, very few people came to him proposing that he do it.

And aparrently one of them knew exactly where she would be, the date and time.

“Fuck. ” Eve growled, yanking her coat from where it was draped over the back of her chair. “New or old.”

“Old.”

Very fucking old, it’s what he really meant, she bet, considering the way his eyes had darkened slightly before he answered.

It was that damn Cult again, she blinked, seeing the answer to her unspoken question in his eyes.

Not officially now, but worse. 

Daniel Pine had left her a warning two months earlier, before disappearing with his daughter to some safe place.

“ Fuck!”

“You can’t stay here. They’re going to circle you up until you’re forced to move.” He ordered, and Eve blinked as he held the gun out to her, confused; she saw the way a few eyes widened behind him with the action, the gasps slamming into their mouths in surprise. John Wick hands over his guns to no one. It's a declaration, in a way. If John Wick were a fan of rolling his eyes, she was sure he would have; he wasn’t, and all he gave her as she stayed there, looking at him like an idiot, was one of those dry, dangerous looks. “Pick up the damn gun, Eve.”

“I have a gun.”

“And I have four.”

She rolled her eyes at him but took the gun anyway, tucking it into the waistband of her pants, trying not to smile, glaring at him as he continued to watch her, his eyes following her movement as she put the gun away.

The word is a frustrated exasperation when she speaks it.

“What?"

He didn’t answer — of course not — but pushed her slightly aside to get past, and Eve cursed, nearly tripping at the movement before she regained her feet, adjusting the hem of her coat over her gun. The damned stares were burning a hole into her back, and Eve wondered what exactly people thought was going on.

It wasn't an official contract or she would have received it too, and John had kept his voice low as he spoke.

That damn question would come back full force now, more close to the truth maybe, she knew, but it wasn't really the most important thing at the moment and Eve was content to go along with him, following the Wolf as he took a step further into the hotel, back to the world where he had come from.

Winston still watches them the same way he had, many, many months ago, when he dragged her to that very spot — wondering what is and was is not, trying to fit her in the man he knows and the legend — when he speaks.

“I need guns.”  He gave her a sideways glance, nudging her forward with the barrel of the gun. Taking up the rear. Making sure no one will jump on her without him seeing. Without having to pass by him first. “Lots of guns.”

That’s how it starts.

That's how she ends up in a safe house in Saint-Moritz, planning a hunt. A hunt with John Wick. That's how she ends up sewing a line of stitches into his belly, three nights later, after they've murdered a pretty large number of people, a wound on her ankle and another in the back of her leg and arm.

He doesn't pull away as she traces the stitches she's carefully sewn herself, her fingers trembling slightly against his skin. This time, it was risky. Too risky, and though neither of them are mortally wounded, Eve knows they could have been. It was quite a job clearing out the array of killers who had come for her, lured very carefully to where they were waiting.

They weren't expecting him.

Not really.

Eve already knows what she's going to hear when she returns to the world outside.

Eve Macarro seems to be under John Wick’s protection.

It won't be the truth.

It won't be a lie either.

It's not protection she wants from him. It comes with the package, she's learned, but that's not why she wants him. That’s not why her fingers tremble lightly over his stomach, over and over again, tracing the cut, the stitches, the skin. 

She had been touching him for a long time. 

Too long, her hand wandering far beyond the wound, almost too low, fingers brushing the skin in what began as a careful caress when she ended stitching him up and slowly became something more. 

His skin crawls where she touches it, the same way hers does when he’s the one touching her, and neither of them says a word as she continues, fingers skimming his abs before moving back down. He’s not ripped, never have been, but he’s not skinny either, somewhere in between, and when her hand brushes a little too low, over that ‘v’ that had made her stare in Bucharest and that he’d caught her staring at, he sucks in a sharp breath.

She holds her breath along with his, a reaction that feels natural, another pattern that repeats itself as they enter — fall — into this little bubble, where a touch is both too much and too little.

He doesn’t tell her to stop.

He doesn’t move.

He doesn’t remove his hand either, which rests open on the back of the couch, right behind her body, touching the back of her neck.

It’s his thumb.

Always his thumb, brushing against the space between her neck and shoulder where he likes to touch — to feel her pulse race — her hair over his fingers. Each time he moves, she breathes a little deeper, and each time he pushes his hand a little further, almost closing it around the back of her neck.

She likes it.

Fuck, she likes it.

It makes her nervous, uneasy, and she likes it, and if she weren’t busy touching his skin she would have found one of those quiet ways to make room for him to touch her without showing — undeniably — that that’s exactly what she’s doing. 

But she is busy, too busy and caught up in the way he reacts to her touch, so instead she sucks in her breath and tries not to shift on the couch every time he touches her, inevitably pulling her closer.

Her fingertips continue their path as if they had a mind of their own — maybe they do — tracing the line of entry to his abdomen with a hesitant, almost innocent glide — almost. It started like that, with him sitting next to her and her perched beside him, stitching him up, and then it kept going because neither of them moved, and slowly became something else, so she focused on what she was doing — or pretended to — and her fingers got back up, passing too slowly along the same path.

He takes another deep breath. Deeper, not as silent as before, and she feels it — she fucking feels it — between her fingers, on her palm, on the tip of her tongue, which she presses against the roof of her mouth to keep from letting out a sound, a name, anything. 

Eve leaned in a little closer. 

There’s no excuse now — the wound is already tended. The stitches are stitched. The blood is no longer running — her hand is not even where he hurt himself, to begin with. 

There haven't been an excuse for the last fifteen minutes, but they pretend that is.

And they still there.

And her hand rests, steady, just above the waistband of his pants, and his remains on the back of her neck — his fingers down on the back of her neck, her back, tucked inside her tank top. 

Still. 

Still, but not idle. Not neutral. It may have stopped moving, but its weight is charged — intentional— and it sits just there, warm and deliberate, and in the silence between them, Eve knows.

It’s not just his breathing.

His body is tightened beneath her palm. That subtle kind of tension that runs deeper than the muscles she’d been touching and that she knows well, after all this time holding that line with him, desperate to cross it. 

It’s not pain — it’s restraint. 

Thrill.

Turned on.

She doesn’t need to look to know. She feels it — hard, unmistakable. The press of him, the stiffness beneath the fabric of his pants, where her hand hovers so close she could close the gap with the smallest move of her fingers. 

One inch.

It's always one inch.

Her throat goes dry like she had been in the fucking desert for months.

Eve doesn’t move her hand. 

But her thumb shifts just slightly, brushing lightly over the line of his waistband, barely a graze. 

Enough.

John exhales like it’s being dragged out of him and her breath is still caught somewhere in the back of her throat when she looks up, tearing her eyes away from his skin, from him, and finds him already looking at her, sitting on the small couch, his legs spread as she sits beside him, both pressed so tightly against the couch that she could be on top of him.

His attention — that fierce stillness, the fury and that hint of coldness that seems coiled around him and that melts when his eyes are upon her — always makes something inside her shiver; that something that goes far beyond attraction. 

That something they’ve both silently agreed not to acknowledge with words.

Prague is a ghost in his eyes, alive and present, even in a small room in Saint-Moritz, blood still drying on the dirty rags on the floor, and Eve catches her breath at the way he looks at her.

Hungry.

So hungry and thirsty, those eyes melting into pure lava, heat that makes her inhale, loud and noticeable, undeniable, and his chest rises when she does, his eyes following the movement as she lets her tongue wet her lips — dry, so dry, holy shit, she wants to drink — and she wants to shift on the couch, wants to rub that heat out of her, but his hand is firm on the back of her neck.

Locked tightly around her neck, all fingers gripping the flesh, holding her neck high, her eyes on him.

Eve gasped as he pushed her forward slightly, his hand on the back of her neck pushing — firmly but not aggressively, in that way that only him can balance; like the kindness and that murderous glint that tangles in his eyes — until she's flush against him, her body pressed against his, her leg half open in a way that her thigh is practically mounted on top of his, raised on the couch.

His words are a whisper.

A hammer in the flesh.

An order.

“Come here .”

Later, Eve can't tell who moved first — which one of them threw itself at the other first — whether it was his hand wrapping around her thigh that made her move, or whether it was her movement climbing onto him that made him touch her thighs, supporting her as she moved.

It doesn't really matter.

Her thighs fit over his easily, and Eve doesn't think much — later, she thinks about it all the fucking time — about the way he pushes his body down — how fast he does it —, to the edge of the couch, so she can actually straddle him, settle herself on his lap, one of those huge hands digging into the skin of her thighs as she does so. 

He lets out a noise when she does, something husky and biting that could be a growl, could be a moan.

Whatever it is, it sets her on fire, and she doesn’t pretend otherwise as she settles herself on top of him, pushing her ass back, and they could pretend it’s the adrenaline, but they both know damn well it’s not when she feels him hard and firm beneath her. She closes her eyes for a second — just a second — but it’s enough for the heat of him to spread, pulsing, throbbing, his hands too big, too warm, moving up her thighs, and she tells herself she won’t, fights back, but when his fingers find the curve of her hip, pulling her closer, against his chest, she gasps.

There is no way to hide it.

She doesn’t try either, leaning in a little closer, testing that boundary that used to be clear between them, but Prague has messed up so bad that now neither of them knows exactly where that line is, and his fingers tighten as her hair falls over his face. There’s a new sound in his throat, a response to the way she sucks in her breath when he squeezes her tighter, swallowing the sound she really wants to make, something even quieter, muffled — she feels it vibrate in his chest.

Vibrates in her , bottom, on the stomach, between the legs.

A hot, throbbing ache, so primal and wild that she can't help herself, pushing against him, thrusting her hips in a movement that draws another sound from him — a muffled curse — his hand gripping her waist so tightly that she knows there will be marks.

And she wants to.

Want his marks.

Wants it all.

He pulls her again, harder, sliding her further onto him, guiding her until she’s actively grinding against him, and his hands burn on her waist, burning into her skin and Eve thanks every god in existence that she’d taken her pants off earlier to look at that damn wound, back to a tank top and a pair of panties, because his hand catches fire on her, pushing beneath the fabric, and she tries not to moan — she bites her lip to stop herself — but it’s not enough to hold back the sound that escapes her throat.

A torn, frustrated, hot sound.

He exhales sharply below her.

Moves his hand beneath the fabric of her tank top, and his hands have always been steady and decisive and calm, deliberately, methodically carrying out what he has planned in detail, but there is no planning or method in the way he pushes the fabric up all at once, fast, wild, hands all over her back, and Eve barely grabs the hem of her tank top herself, reaching up to pull it off herself before his mouth finds her skin and she gasps, loudly this time.

The movement made her stretch toward him, she knows, and the tank top is lost somewhere but she didn’t even know where she throw it.

His mouth is hot, too hot, moist and wild against her, and Eve nearly loses her balance when his teeth graze lightly, followed by his tongue before he closes his mouth on a nipple, and suck, and she arched against him with a choked sound, a husky moan, her fingers tangling in his hair, pulling him closer.

He likes it.

She can feel it in the way he groans against her, a husky sound that vibrates right through her pussy, his hands gripping her hips tightly as he opens his mouth and takes one of her breasts whole in his mouth — she used to think it was boring to have tiny boobs. Now, she decides they're perfect; they fit perfectly in his mouth and the thought makes her even wetter than she already is — his hand still pulling her against the hard pressure of his cock.

She gasped as he pulled her tighter, his fingers digging into her flesh, and she moved without control, grinding against him, seeking the friction that would make her explode, but he didn't let her, one of his hands sliding back, grabbing the curve of her ass and squeezing, pulling her up, away from his lap, and she whining , groans in frustration, but then he drags her back, slowly, bringing her down on him with torturous pressure, and she understands.

She always understands what is not said in words.

And when she leans in closer, lets her face lower over his, their noses almost touching, his breath brushing hers, he pulls her in again, makes her grind against him, slowly and hard — a torture — her mouth open in a soundless moan and it's delicious.

He brushes his lips against hers.

Slowly.

It could almost be nothing, but then he does it again, grabbing her bottom lip between his teeth slowly, those damn eyes fixed on hers, nailed in hers, dark, intense, fierce.

It's a slip.

A slow, unhurried brush; a damned feather. His mouth on hers as if testing, as if torturing. Is a torture, she knows. He tortures himself with the prospect and then tortures himself with the will, with the desire, his upper lip rising and falling over hers, and torture them with the fact that he wants; he can't even pretend he doesn't with a rock hard cock beneath her.

It's cruel.

It's cruel and she lets him know exactly what she thinks of it and the next time he brushes his lips against her, she thrusts her hips against him in remembrance — I know what you are; I can feel what you want — and he responds with a soft, deep growl, and then fits his mouth firmly on hers, and Eve doesn't hold back at all, melting against him, moaning against his tongue, when he invades her, when he really kisses her.

There is a moment in a solo when a ballerina stands in perfect limbo between the ground and the sky; a moment when it almost — almost — seems that she will fly, that the tip of her feet will make her spin a little higher, higher, that she will float.

Eve has the same feeling when she pulls the trigger and hears the shot, sees the bullet go off.

It feels the same when John Wick pushes his mouth against hers urgently, bites her lip hard, his breathing as ragged as hers; when she holds the back of his neck, his hair, pulling him closer, trying to bury herself into him and feels the way he reacts — his whole body beneath hers tensing, his hips thrusting upward, hungry.

She is a ballerina.

She wants to fly.

Eve doesn't hold back as she grinds her hips against him again and again, lets her tongue tangle with his until she's whimpering against him and his hands are everywhere, raw, without any hesitation or control in hers.

He kisses like he kills, in the right measure, at the right time, in the right way, secure and powerful and dirty.  

It is dirty , he bites — her jaw, her mandible, the curve of her neck— and pulls and licks and devours, wet and hot, dangerous, and his hand slides down to her ass again, sinks there, pulls her against him until it feels like he's fucking her, even with both of them still dressed from the waist down and Eve moans so loudly that her face burns and she hides it in his shoulder, bites his shoulder in embarrassment.

He doesn't want her hidden.

Instead, his hand moves up her back, tangling in her hair, pulling her head back in a sudden movement that makes her gasp, and he takes advantage of the access to her throat, biting her neck hard enough to hurt and Eve moans loudly, her fingers digging into his shoulders, feeling the tense muscles beneath the skin.

He is all tense.

All hard.

She wants more.

She wants to feel him tear her apart; she wants to know how tight those hands will hold her when her back is to him and he's inside her, wet and hot and hungry. She wants to know the noise he'll make when he comes.

Want to feel him losing control.

Wants him.

She slides her hand between them with determination, her fingers finding the waistband of his pants, undoing the belt with a snap, and he growls against her skin, but he doesn't stop her. Not when she unbuttons it, not when she reaches inside and finds him hot, throbbing, all hers. He stops breathing, gasps when she squeezes, when she rubs her thumb over his head, feeling the wetness, and then he buries his lips against hers with a hunger that makes her dizzy, his hips thrusting upward, seeking more — she responds in kind, biting, sucking, demanding .

Wants him inside her

It’s only when her hand reaches up a little, to grip that warm skin a little tighter, that she feels her fingers wet and he grunts, his body tensing in a completely different way, his muscles contracting. His body jerks, a handful of air escaping with difficulty from his lungs — a hoarse, choked noise that makes Eve freeze — for an entirely different reason.

He growls, frowning, his eyebrows drawing together in a hard line.

“Fuck.”

Her fingers are still shaking — for an entirely different reason than they were a few minutes ago — as she runs them carefully over the cut on his stomach, the stitches open, blood staining the skin.

“Shit.” She growled, pushing herself back and off his lap, her hands already searching for her shirt, for anything; his shirt was still stained with blood, but she didn’t care as she shoved her arms through it, buttoning all the wrong buttons in her haste. “ Shit! How bad is it?”

“I'll live.”

He leaned against the back of the couch, pushing his body up again, taking a deep breath, his eyes following her as she tried to thread a damn needle with her hands shaking as they were.

He doesn't speak.

Eve doesn't say a word either, other than a string of curses when she finally manages to thread the damn needle and bends down over him, sewing him up again.

His eyes burn into her the entire time she does it.

They both know she's not shaking in fear.

“You’re going to have to stay still for a few days.” She mutters as she makes the last stitch. He mumbles something incomprehensible, but his gaze never leaves hers. It’s that silence again; the one that’s not bad, but heavy. “Someplace quiet.”

That’s how it starts.

That’s how she returns to that starting point, needing to be quiet for a while.

That's how he ends up in Russia with her.

~

That’s how it goes: they think of him as a mentor.

When the story spreads out —  about what Eve Macarro did when a ten-million contract for her head went viral among hand-picked assassins, about how she set a trap and waited for them with lots of guns and John Wick — there’s a quote, a conversation, about how she uses that same consecrated movement of his when shooting.

About how their fighting style is similar, though hers is less violent, more adaptable to a ballerina, and that he might have taught her a thing or two.

They think of him as a mentor.

He is, but he’s not; it’s not the truth, but it’s not a lie either.

They think of him as a mentor.

Some people think of him as something else. Something more dangerous. Closer to the flesh, to the chest. Eve knows — and so does he — that these are whispered, low and secret. No one wants to be the first to say that John Wick has found someone else to care about; last time it was the dog, no one wants to risk offending the wife.

Neither does him, and that's why that line remains there for a little longer.

Eve stays in the fort with him, friends but not really, not something else either, and lets the whispers die down.

A month after he goes to Russia with her, slowly entering the one part of her life he’s never entered, the Bowery King asks for that favor, that coin.

He should stay. 

They both know that if he goes, the whispers will stop being whispers, will start being spoken a little louder; a little clearer, more obvious.

He goes.

He goes everywhere with her after that contract, even if he himself is not fully part of the underworld. Neither of them says a word about it either. He likes knowing she's safe. He's killed a lot of people to make sure she is. She's killed a lot of people for him too.

Eve tries to pretend she doesn’t feel it when, as she plans an escape and a very risky extraction for an unsympathetic colleague with many enemies for the Bowery King, the man in question stands over her, one hand carelessly on the back of the couch where she’s sitting.

She tries not to think about the last time he did that.

She tries not to look — fails — when the Bowery King engages him in a conversation, — they’re old friends, she remember, and he was a dead man for a long time — and says something that makes him laugh — really laugh — and he looks so handsome that her breath catches for a moment.

Eve tries and tries , but still fails.

And she knows he saw her looking, knows everyone saw her looking. 

It’s easier to see now. 

Much easier than it was in those first three months when she still had the excuse of being new to justify her fascination with him. She’s no rookie now, and not everyone gets to die and live again like he did, but there are still plenty of familiar faces scattered around the Bowery King, and she knows they can see perfectly well the way she looks at him.

It’s harder to pretend now.

To hide what he makes her feel.

To pretend she doesn’t know what he looks like when he laughs at something, or what he looks like sitting in a chair in her fort, watching her work, or what he looks like sleeping, or what it feels like to sleep next to him, with him pulling her to his chest and holding her all night. 

What his hands feel like when he’s training with her, showing her something new.

What his hands feel like when they’re touching her. What it feels like to hear him moan. To hear him moan her name.

To pretend she's not in love —

To pretend.

It’s easier to see now, and she knows she'll keep looking and she knows he doesn't care, those brown eyes burning a hole into her every time she turns her back on him, always watching her back, always looking at her.

It’s easier to see that, too.

How his eyes follow her all the time. How he knows where she’s going to be, where she’s going to move, before she moves, how he opens his body for her to pass when she does, and how he stays open, waiting for her to come back and stand close to him — too close. 

How he knows what tea she drinks and what gun she likes the most and that she doesn’t eat peas but likes milk with cinnamon, and drink whiskey like water when she's nervous.

How he knows what she looks like when she’s sleepy — what she looks like when she’s pretending not to be — almost asleep on the old couch in the living room. How she slept on that couch once — because she was tired and he was there so it was safe for her to sleep —, waiting until the Bowery King brought her what she needed, and he took her to bed — she knows he took her, because her clothes still smelled like him, from being pressed against his chest — and how his hand always finds a place on the curve of her back.

The Bowery King watches them leave when the favor is paid.

Eve knows what he sees.

A younger version of them. John Wick walking through his doors with a girl who didn’t yet have a big enough name for him to want to save. A girl who wasn’t important to the underworld; no reason to be to him. John saving her life. John Wick teaching her to shoot like him. John Wick sewing her up on his couch when he had a doctor on hand. John touching her, when a touch wasn't touching.

Eve knows exactly what he sees.

He knows more than anyone, but he still doesn’t know enough. He still doesn’t know why. He still doesn’t know when. He still doesn’t know how.

He still doesn’t know when Eve Macarro met John Wick and how, why, and what could have possibly happened in that encounter to make him come for her.

Eve knows  what he sees, and Eve knows exactly what he wonders, as he watches her walk back to fulfill a favor, the Boogeyman walking beside her, and then walking away after doing so, the Boogeyman still at her side.

Wondering if she might not be the only one. If she wasn't the only one with a hunger in her chest and eyes, in those first three months, and he was just better than her at hiding it. If there was more to John's eyes than just that coldness back then, and he didn't saw it for what it was. If he had missed that. If there was a reason he brought her with him, beyond that misplaced kindness sending him to save a lost girl. If there was the possibility of an interest, of hunger.

If John Wick had took a wolf to his hideout, in the skin of a kitten, and watched her trim her claws knowing they would be used on him.

If John Wick also wanted to hunt, while being hunted by a ballerina with half his experience and some big fucking courage in a small body.

Eve wonders too, sometimes.

If he saw something in her eyes that first time. If that was what made the first line in that chest made of iron of his.

Eve wonders too, sometimes.

It's easier to think that now.

It's easier to see, and it's harder to hide, and they stay in New York much longer than she expected and it's hard to pretend to all the fucking eyes that they're not as used to each other's presence as they really are.

Eve can see perfectly well the way the ballerinas in the theater — those she knows, those who have danced with her, and those who have trained with her — look at her as she seats into the theater again; it seems like a long time since she was a ballerina in this same theater. 

It’s a performance.

It’s an excuse for a meeting of alliances, and there are so many assassins in the theater that her hand itches to reach for the gun hidden in the holster on her thigh, her neck tingling the way it always does when something isn’t safe enough. 

She told him not to come. 

To stay at the Continental, where Winston still looks at them the same way every time they walk through the door, still asking that same silent but ever-deepening question — the Bowery King seems to have found the answer when they left; Eve saw it in the way his eyes had narrowed when they left his chosen hiding place — his methods for doing so were still quite unorthodox — too close to be anything other than what they are, far enough away to not be a certainty, that uneasiness that came from the possibility that he had in fact missed it, going up, before slowing down into something more... affectionate. — but never really asking anything. 

Where he would be safe.

From the whispers and the stares and the targets and the enemies he's accumulated over the years and who might still want to take him from her and the fucking world that he left behind, and she is on, and he keeps putting himself back on it for her.

She whispers when he seats next to her, perfectly calm and unbothered adjusting the suit while sitting, without turning her head, knowing that although there is a performance on stage, there are more eyes on them — on him — than on the ballerina doing a perfect ‘ en pointe’ on the stage.

“You said you were going to stay at the Continental.”

“I lie, sometimes.”

“If no one kills you by the end of the night,” she growls at him. “I will .”

It's a lie, of course.

She's not really mad that he came.

It makes her feel safer that he did. It has nothing to do with the danger, has everything to do with the woman in her. That she's no longer sitting in a theater surrounded by killers in a black dress that leaves her too exposed — the number of other women dressed the same way does nothing to ease the feeling — alone, with a gun on her thigh and two clips under the bench and a lot of people who could try to kill her in one second and no one she trust. That he doesn't care about the whispers, about the information being spread like fucking fire. That he knows that people will talk, that they will say more than what it had been said till now, and still came anyway.

He knows that, too.

That's why he came.

His hand is warm in the gap of her dress — something that left her back bare, the low, round neckline ending at the curve of her ass and that he stared the first time he saw — and she knows that he knows that the more he touches her, caressing her back up and down to the limit, the more goosebumps she gets, wetter she gets, that natural anticipation that always weighs heavily between them, even when it doesn't lead anywhere, but he doesn’t move his hand.

He's a ghost, but he's flesh, warm, familiar flesh, and Eve wants to eat him, wants to press her body to his every time his eyes returns to that vein that goes up and down her neck every time he moves his hand down a little too far and she takes a deep breath.

It's a touch on the skin, but they both know it's more. 

It's that old tension, something that isn't sexual even when it is, that leaves them both tense with the meaning but unable to deny themselves the pleasure.

A touch, even after they — even after, is still a world.

His hand lingers on her back for the rest of the night.

He doesn't come in when the ballerina is forgotten and the real meeting begins, in that very room where she first saw him. It's her business. She doesn't need him, even if he is, in some way, with her. She stands on her own two feet, and it's her name that's been invited to this meeting, not his.

“You brought the wolf.” The Director murmurs to her anyway, her lips parting into that dangerous, knowing smirk.

She shrugs in response.

“He came alone.”

It sounds like a lie, even though it’s true, and Eve hates that it sound like that.   

Because she knows what it means to have him by her side and that while heat flares inside her at the sight of the man , it is the legend, it is the weapon they see and it sounds like a lie not because she does too, but because they — him, and her, and them — are confused and indirect, something that is but is not , and she did not bring him and he did came alone , but she did brought him and he did came with her.

It sounds like a lie, and Eve feels herself tense; it’s not the knowing look in the Director’s eyes that makes her tense, it’s the way she looks unsurprised, as if she’s had seen this — him, them — before it became what it is.

As if she, unlike everyone else, whispering in the theater while he remained perfectly self-assured beside her, knows exactly where that line falls.

Where they fall.

It doesn’t bother her that there’s a line. It never has. She knew the legend, and she had known the man, and she knew there would be a line — she knew who he was, and who they were, and the limits — and that if — if — they ever struck that chord between them, it would take time, and the respect he has for his past only makes her admire him more, but that look bothers her. 

It makes her feel more exposed than the dress.

She stiffens her spine at the words the Director uses when she says goodbye, a done deal and a few million in her account; at the done she uses, approval hiding between the words.

John Wick waits for her at the door.

He knows her well enough to see the tension emanating from her.

He doesn't say a word, following her silently to her room at the Continental, that hand still on her bare back.

He has a room next to hers.

He doesn't go in on it.

Eve slips off her sandals silently, sitting in the soft armchair in front of the bed, undoing the straps that wrapped around her leg, one of them showing through the wide slit of her dress, exposing her leg, the other hidden beneath the dress. It's not until he crouches down in front of her that Eve realizes she's been struggling with the straps of her sandals long enough for him to know, for him to feel, the stress, the unease that simmers inside her, words repeating in her mind, over and over again.

His eyes are fixed on her. 

Those brown eyes, kindness and so much more, roaming over her face, assessing her, and she knows he’s trying to figure out if he needs to grab the gun, if he needs to walk out the door and pull the trigger, and the knowledge that he would do it if she told him ‘yes’ makes her want to cry.

She hasn’t cried in years.

It's the eyes.

It's the eyes and the way he looks at her. It's the fact that he makes her feel safe . It's how handsome he is. It's the way he says her name and the way he touches her and the way he holds her when she needs him and how he always — always — comes for her and those words come back to her, echoing in her head, in her mind, in her stupid heart, the second he opens his mouth to speak. 

Eve doesn’t let him.

Instead, she lifts her arms, wraps them around his neck, and puts her mouth on his. He makes that sound again, something low and husky, but this time it’s laced with surprise. That line is still there, more dangerous now than before, sharper, and neither of them has made a move to cross it since Saint-Moritz and they both know the move is still his. 

Eve lets him know with her lips that she’s not stealing it from him. 

This is not an attempt.

This one has none of the desperation, the violent, insatiable hunger of the last time, when he pulled her on top of him and she pushed herself against him and they ended up crumpling on a couch that was too tight for them. 

This one is soft. 

Slow.

Something sweet, but still too heavy, not with tension and not with that desperate hunger that burns inside her, but heavy with words that neither of them is ready to admit. He doesn't pull away, lets his tongue trace hers as slowly as she started, his hand circling her hip gently, not to pull her, but just to support himself against her, still half-kneeling as he is, his palm open on her bare back.

His lips are warm against hers, softer than she remembered, still perfect, perfect for her, and for a moment, the world narrows to that: the pressure of his mouth, the light scratch of his beard, his breath a little ragged before he exhales, slow and controlled. His hand stays where it is, firm on her back, fingers spread wide, memorizing the shape of her spine beneath his palm, and Eve lets her lips speak for her, a silent confession, soft as the shadow of night outside the window.

She knows he understands.

She can read the answer perfectly in his lips.

When his other hand comes up, fingers brushing her chin, feather-light, before settling at the nape of her neck, his thumb tracing the line of her pulse — the spot he likes — Eve loses her breath a little, a low gasp into his mouth, a quiet whimper he swallows with his lips, the hand on her back rising to trace her spine with a bit more firmness.

She pulled away slowly, tilting her face back slightly, and he bites her lips before she’s out of reach, pulling at the skin, drawing a small moan from her mouth, and Eve doesn’t realize she’s trembling until he starts rubbing her bare back with his hand.

“Sorry.” She murmured to him, her face still pressed close to his. “Sorry, I know—”

“It’s fine.” His fingers moved almost imperceptibly, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear, careful not to break that delicate balance they hold. “It’s fine, Eve.”

Intimate, but not as intimate as they truly are. As they truly want to be. In that part closer to the flesh, closer to the chest. Not as deep as it really is inside them, in that hidden place they’re sometimes afraid to show the world.

Sometimes, Eve blinked, it’s easy to forget the ballerina inside the assassin; easy to forget the woman and think only like the weapon. To be an impenetrable wall herself, unreached, unaffected. 

Sometimes, it’s harder.

“Thank you.” She murmurs, slowly and knowingly. It’s another one of those things they don’t say. He knows she’s grateful. That he’s saved her life more times than she can count right now, and she doesn’t need to thank him, that they are more than that, but Eve still wants to say the words. Eve always wants to say the words.  “For going.”

What she really means is ‘thank you for not leaving me alone.’ It’s too deep, too close to those other words she’s been swallowing for a while, so she swallows it down, even though she knows he knows what words she really has to say. Eve sighs again as his hand moves up her back again, caressing the skin gently.

Reverence.

His own words that he swallows.

Eve catches her breath as he towers over her, presses his lips to her forehead in a tender kiss, too deep for that line not yet drawn, not yet official. His lips linger against her skin for a moment longer than necessary and neither of then desires to move; they never do.

He pulls back slowly, those eyes meeting hers, and Eve feels it, as clear as she always do, see it in his eyes — that quiet intensity, like standing in the middle of a battlefield before the first shot, knowing exactly what you’re, and exactly what you’re willing to risk.

Everything.

They think of him as a mentor.

Some think of him as a resource.

No one thinks of him as he truly is to her.

As she does.

It’s harder to keep it bottled up when he looks at her like that. Like she matters. Like she’s everything . It’s harder to pretend they’re not what they are; that he’s inside her in every way but one, and that there’s a reason he keeps coming for her, always, never leaving her alone, never leaving her behind.

It’s not protection she wants from him.

It’s not mentorship she wants either.

It’s the one thing he’s reluctant to offer, even when she’s already bathed in it. Even when he’s already poured so much of it into her that that barrier feels almost invisible, all the lines blurred, all the boundaries blurred, but one. Even when he’s already given her everything but his body.

She's hungry, Eve blinks, and he's just as hungry as she is, both desperate for the same thing, and he gives so much of it, and he is the most brave and strong man that she knows, but he still doesn't have the courage to admit that he does it.

To cross that line.

To admit that he already crossed that line.

To accept that he didn't forget — and no one ask that from him — but that he did moved on.

That he already is hers in everything, except the body.

Tomorrow, she thinks.

Eventually.

That line will break, and it will be him, and it won’t be her hands itching to rip it out, but his heart.

Tomorrow, Eve thinks as he follows her home, dressed in black and a gun hidden at his waist, eyes following her the entire time. That wound is already safe enough that he doesn't need to go back with her; stay in Russia with her.

They both know he will.

The Director words ring in her ears all the way back home, him at her side.

Happy Wolf hunting, Ballerina.

~

That's how it really happens.

Eve discovers that she really can't have John Wick by her side all the time and keep her eyes to herself.

Each movement of him makes that tension between them — inside her , hot and hungry — grow, stretching what's left of that line until it's an inch from bursting, and every time she comes downstairs from her own fort and finds him sitting on her couch, doing whatever, legs spread and eyes focused on whatever the hell he's doing at the moment, she wants to push him back and straddle those legs, straddle him and feel those hands on her skin again; to pick up right where they left.

He touches her more after that night in the Continental; that kiss.

Nothing obvious, nothing that definitively crosses that line he's already crossed in his head and that they almost crossed definitively in Saint-Moritz and that they pretend to have forgotten, that that's not what they think about every time they see each other — the way he moaned into her mouth and the way she was dripping against him as he did it — but something in between, a fine touch that wants to be more, but isn't yet.

A hand pushing her aside by the waist. A touch on her back when she stands before him. A hand on the back of her neck when they spar, that has nothing to do with movement and everything to do with touching her. A hand on her thigh when he stands to leave the couch they share and go upstairs to his room. A hand pushing her hair back as they're choosing weapons and her hair falls forward, his thumb brushing her neck.

A breath too close as he reads something over her shoulder as she plans what she’ll do to make sure her next deal goes smoothly, his thigh too close to the back of her legs, close enough that she can feel his firm body as he slides his hand between her arms — splayed out over the tablet — to point something out, his hand brushing against her stomach as he pulls it back; his hands — both of them; those fucking huge hands — firmly on her waist as he anchors her — hard — every time she shivers when he does, perfectly aware.

Three months — like those three months he kept her with him in the Bowery King's hideout, when the attraction became something more, when that heat began to spread through her every time he looked at her, touched her, wanting and wanting and never satisfied — and she didn't knock on the door once.

But she wants to.

She really wants to, but won't.

Because that night in Saint-Moritz was good — fuck, it was so damn good — but they’re still them, and even if she wants it, even if they want it, that fine line still exists. 

He came home with her. 

They’re still John Wick and Eve Macarro, and the tension between them is still deep enough that she knows that people who pass by her house are always wondering what they are, always wondering if she’s going to jump him out of nowhere — sometimes, she wonders too — but they understand each other, and they both know that while it was good, it wasn’t a thought-out decision.

Sometimes, they know, emotions escalate too quickly when the adrenaline is high and the desire is even bigger and you do what you want without thinking about the consequences. Like that kiss, when it wasn't lust she felt, but something else; something deeper.

That line between them, it's not an emotion.

It's not an unthought-out decision.

It can't be.

So, instead, she stands on her side of the rope and watches as he moves through what will one day be her empire, her legend. Watches as he enters the kitchen, her kitchen, and cooks dinner for both of them. Watches as he looks at her that way; that way that makes her go limp inside, pathetically wrapped around him, while he pour everything of himself into her, offering everything he can't say in words, with looks. Watches and keep taking some fucking deep breaths every time she sees the desire and the heat and that clenched jaw as he forces himself not to do what he wants to her.

Swallows hard as he moves with that confidence and that imposingness that he carries and tries not to die of lust and horny the more he looks at her, each time she comes down the stairs in a pair of sweatpants and a tank top, a line of skin visible between the two things, the tank top too short and the pants too low on the waist.

She tries not to think about the fact that she knows exactly what he’s looking at.

That he saw, in those first few days, the mark of his hands there, his fingers imprinted on her skin from how tightly he held her, and he still remember it. He almost apologized, she saw, his eyes widening slightly the first time he saw them; she let him see exactly how she felt about them in her eyes, and fire spread in his and no apology came from those lips.

There’s no mark now, but he keeps looking.

And she keeps wanting another ones.

They both know that’s why he anchors her so tightly when he finds a spot behind her and she shivers; a weak, discreet attempt to leave his handprint again, when he's not ready to do what it takes but still wants to see it, to see her tremble in his hands, leave another mark on her skin.

They both pretend not to know.

She keeps stopping in the same position at her desk, hands spread out over her tablet or papers.

He keeps stopping behind her; too close.

Every time.

If she cums in her bedroom and bites her lip to keep his name to herself, it's no one's problem but hers.

That’s how it happens.

Three months with his name on her lips and an emptiness inside her, moaning against the pillow to swallows the sound while he sleeps in the next room.

Three months, and then she comes downstairs, cursing after spend hours tossing and turning in her bed, and finds him sitting on the couch, his legs spread in that positively obscene way and his damn shirt off.

Eve stopped at the door.

She still can feel his eyes burn into her, past the loose shirt she’d worn to bed — one of his, she realizes belatedly —, and she watches silently as his scarred chest — some of which, she remembers, she’d sewn on — rises and falls with a calm she knows is deliberate. 

Absolute control. 

The same control that irritates her. 

The same control that excites her; leaves her wet and horny and desperate for a little — just a little — more.

“You’re okay?”

It's a small, easy question; her voice sounds too husky, too deep to it. 

She already know the answer.

She can tell by the way his eyes were closed when she arrived, before he sensed her presence and opened them; couldn’t sleep either and came downstairs, pretending to himself that he would find what he wanted, what he needed, here , and not somewhere else.

Just like her, longing inside for something he can’t, but can , touch. 

Torturing himself with what's in the next room — who is in the next room — and that he wants in his arms, refusing to leave her behind and go away, but refusing to touch her and relieve the fucking pain either.

“Yeah.” His eyes don't drop to her again, forced to stay on hers. “You?”

The real answer is: I'm horny as fuck, fucking dripping and dying of frustration, and if I see you shirtless one more time, I'm going to fucking jump on you and forget the damn reasons I shouldn't.

Eve doesn't respond with words, nods silently.

She should go upstairs. Grab that glass of water she came to get and hide in her room until she can look at him without worrying about whether she'll be able to respect that line.

She doesn't move for a long time.

She can't bring herself to move, to go upstairs and leave the bogeyman alone with his shadow, too caught up in the way his eyes burn into her, sitting where he is, so tense she can see his muscles stiffening the more the silence falls back into their pattern — charged, tense, and hungry.

When he moves, it's unhurried, lifting his body from the couch, that mountain of muscle and skin visible against the half-light of the lamp, and she holds her breath for a second, feels her chest rise as she inhales sharply, but she doesn't take her eyes off him as he approaches.

She doesn't back away when he stops in front of her. She never backs away. It's part of what he likes. Part of what made that ballerina enter the hole in his chest;courage, boldness and her chin held high and firm, even in the face of danger. Even in the face of the Wolf; specially in the face of the Wolf. The way, even before they became what they had become, when she was still a favor in Hallstatt, he had sent her away, told her to run , and she looked him in the eyes and said ‘ no'; made the choice .

She doesn't back down, doesn't pull away as his heat grips her, surrounding her from every angle, swallowing her long before his body meets hers, but holds her breath when he does.

It's a gentle touch he makes, his hand tangling in the fabric covering her waist.

It's a gentle touch, and then it's a thud when he growls — loud and steady, dangerous — and drops to his knees, and she doesn't flinch, but it's a moan that comes out as his hands wrap around her thighs, lifting her, and her back find the door frame behind her, gasping loudly as he shoves his face between her legs and eat , lifting her leg against his shoulder.

She gasps, something loud and desperate, hot and wet and hungry, her head banging against the wood of the door, a string of curses in her mouth.

He doesn't let himself be shaken in what he's doing.

Warm.

Slow.

Precise.

There is no urgency in what he does, just precision and experience, knowing exactly where to go and how to go, and she had already found the answer to that question from when she was a young ballerina in a theater, but John Wick is, in fact, as good with his tongue and hands as he is with a gun, and she chokes, again and again, her mouth half open, the body bending by reflex, by pure impulse, fingers grabbing that black hair hard and he accepts it too, growling softly inside her and it's so hot that she comes like that, her head thrown back, hitting hard against the wood of the door and the bogeyman on his knees between her legs.

He doesn't stop right after.

He doesn't climb back into his own darkness, doesn't pull away and let her fall back to the ground, he holds her right where she is — a ballerina with her feet up — and his fingers come out of her with a wet squelch and he drags them up her thigh and opens those brown eyes to hers and it's not kindness, not anger, that shines in them, but hunger, and he licks his fingers for her to see and then go back for more.

She's shaking when he stands up, her body limp, her lips red from biting them as he wrung another orgasm from her, fingers and tongue and him, over and over, until she's nearly fallen, her legs too weak, and he had to catch her, putting her other leg over his shoulder.

He rises slowly, lowering her legs carefully, and each movement is tense like a string and guitar about to snap, like a violin in a ballet piece, rising and rising until the ballerina can no longer hear the world and only the music, and Eve blinks, breathing slowly, meets his eyes with hers.

There's a question in his eyes.

Eve lifts her chin to him.

He doesn't cross that fine line.

He breaks it, and she whimpers as he pushes her further against the wall with his body, hard and firm and determined — violent — his mouth finding hers hard, wet and raw, and her legs finding his waist without her having to think, a whole palm gripping her ass and keeping her against him, and she moans into his mouth and he presses her against the door, harder, pushing his body against hers, hot and desperate and Eve can't do anything but whine.

The way he kisses her is possessive.

It's possessive and she swallows it all. 

Swallows him and the way he touches her, firm fingers pressing into her skin so hard she knows he'll leave a mark — finally, finally, finally another mark —, and the way he gasps into her mouth as he kisses her — his lips leaving hers to trace the curve of her neck, half exposed by her half-unbuttoned shirt — and the way he holds her ass against him as she pushes forward, grinding herself against him, one leg wrapping around his leg to pull him closer, to pull him  in.

It's possessive and it's desperate — wild — and he curses as he pulls her shirt hard, popping the buttons, and she lets him see, lets him touch , and moans as he presses his mouth to one breast and sucks, licks, his hand holding her waist to make her arch back and make room for him and is still as good as she remembers and she gasp his name, again, fingers into his front again, tucking into his pants, again .

There's no injury this time, and he growls as she reaches into his pants and pulls him out, hard and hot and heavy, and Eve laughs in satisfaction, his bare chest burning against her, her breasts rubbing against him, and then cries in satisfaction as he growls at her to spread her legs and thrusts himself inside her hard.

He fucks her against the door frame.

She cums with his name in her mouth.

He cums in the crook of her neck, a cry he won't let escape muffled against her skin as his hands hold her around her waist, deep inside her, body within body.

Skin against skin.

No barrier, no control.

No pretend.

That's how it happens.

He takes her to bed.

His .

~

She drools on the sheets as he pushes her face into the mattress and fucks her hard again, the early morning and his breath still hot on her neck even though it’s been a while since he’s woken her, his hand firm between her legs as she bucked against him to feel him hard against her. He grabs her wrists, pushing them back against the mattress, and slides in like he’s coming home — slow, deep; less urgent, more hungry — and Eve moans and muffles the sound into the sheets, and saliva damps the sheets as he gasps above her, his breath catching slightly the wetter she gets, the deeper he goes.

She loves the way he lets go of her wrists to trace his hand down her back. It reminds her of those nights when his hands were soft and warm but he wasn’t really touching, fingers brushing against the skin and curve of her breasts and nothing more.

It's not a problem anymore and he touches it firmly now; he holds it until it scores.

She was right.

In that first cheeky thought that popped into her mind the first time she saw him and then came back again at the most inopportune moment of all — when she jumped on him after he told her to go away and he pressed his hands to her waist and threw her to the floor like a rag doll.

His hands are big enough to encircle her completely.

His hands are big enough to encircle her and he had wrapped them around her waist the night before — when he had pushed her down on all fours on his bed and fucked her again — after he took her to his bed and neither of them said a word, breathing ragging, but said enough with the eyes and the hands and ended up back on top of each other  — until she was limp and nearly passed out — and neither of them acknowledge the fact that he had known she had wanted him to do that for a long time — he had caught her looking at his hands more than once — and that he had wanted to do it for a long time too — she had caught him looking at the curve of her waist as she bends just as much as he had.

It was as erotic as the way he had cupped her breasts with both hands before he had done it, his hands huge on her chest, mouth on her neck.

She likes it.

She likes him .

Likes the way he sees her as she is: a ballerina, soft and feminine, but tough enough, strong enough, to endure everything without asking for mercy, without asking for calm. 

Taking in everything and asking for more.

She likes that he fucks her exactly like that.

He does it too, and he fucks her hard and willing enough for her to bite the pillow to contain a scream — his name, John, in a choking, wet, hungry way; a desperate, begging sound that makes his rhythm sway as she whimpers loud in the pillow — and she knows he likes it when she does it. She knows he likes watching her control slip away; watching what he does to her. She knows he likes the way she melts in his hand, how soft and wet and open and spread she is to him, and when he leans his body over hers, his warm chest pressed against her sweaty back, she also knows exactly what he wants.

She denies it.

For a while.

Lets him hunt a little more.

She gives in the end, of course, surrenders when his hand wraps around her throat, pulling, looks at him over her shoulder as he wants her to do and moans, moans and moans , her eyes locked on his — brown and warm, kindness hidden beneath the anger, beneath the fire — a ballerina on his dick and murder in his heart.

Chapter Text

That's how it happens.

This is how it begins.

John Wick meets a ballerina in a theater.

She has green eyes, and he recognizes the hint of murder in them, a dangerous fury, a desire to walk where she shouldn’t want to, where she should want to stay away from; he had the same desire once. He knows she won’t run in the second he says the words; if she were the type to run, she wouldn’t have had the courage to stop him to ask him for advice.

Eve Macarro.

The ballerina looks into the eyes of the Boogeyman and asks if he remembers her. He does. He remembers very well, and chooses to ignore why; there is work to be done, people to be killed. She does not lower her face to him — doesn’t lower herself to him,  — looks at him head on, dead in the eye and doesn't back down, even though she knows she can't beat him. 

He tells her to run. 

Run away from the job.

From the murder.

From that world.

Run away from him.

From that glow he saw the first time she looked at him, that he recognizes in her eyes every time she does it — hidden beneath the green, staring him straight in the eye; a desire, a hunger when she looks at him, for much more than just violence —, and that will do no good for none of them. 

Eve Macarro doesn't run. 

She is no prey.

She has a hunger in her eyes.

The wolf inside him wants to eat her whole.