“Did you like it, Khar?”
“Yes,” he said hoarsely. “You know I fucking liked it.”
She smiled and traced the corner of her mouth with the tip of her tongue. Khar scooped her up, leaned back, and settled her against his chest.
“I think that was one of the greatest challenges of my life,” he admitted. “Holding myself back.”
She smacked his chest lightly. “I knew you were close.”
“Ah-ah,” he murmured. “A wager is a wager. And now we begin repayment.”
Khar, it turned out, was a very strict collector.
Chapter 19
Confessions of the Past
Lily
“Cami, you were right.
It is the abs.”
Lily laughed under her breath, but the sound faded quickly.
She would have given every credit she owned for one more afternoon on Earth with Camille—binge-watching their favorite trash fantasy show, Game of Thorns and Roses, and confessing everything about Khar.
It had been three years.
She hoped her sister was safe. She missed her more than she allowed herself to think about.
The next morning they went back to work on Vitro, and for once there was a message from Vegrun waiting for them: an urgent matter had come up, and they would not be flying for at least a few chrono-cycles.
Their employer was never this considerate.
“He must be grateful,” Lily said, as if it were obvious. “We helped him finally lock down his romance with Silomarila.”
Khar snorted. “Or he’s about to dump another job on us.”
With Vitro sealed and running decontamination programs, their workload was light. Restock supplies. Run system checks. Verify that the new camouflage layers and sensors were reporting clean.
Lily had been nervous about what would happen to them once work started again, as if duty might crack the blissful little world they had built inside Helios. But the fear turned out to be pointless.
Khar kept his word.
He did not initiate anything during shift. Not once.
That did not mean he behaved like a stranger.
He took every excuse to touch her anyway. A brush of fingers at her lower back as he passed behind her. A brief press of his palm against her hip as he leaned over the same console. A glancing stroke along her wrist when she handed him a tool. He was careful, disciplined, maddeningly restrained.
She’d thought the sheer volume of sex would sate her; instead, it made her greedy.
Spending the whole cycle together only sharpened the hunger, so that by evening they collided like two starving creatures and tore the rest of the world away. And somewhere along the second chrono-cycle, Lily discovered a new, wicked pleasure: teasing Khar as cruelly as possible while wearing the face of perfect innocence.
If they were not working, and not shamelessly flirting in that quiet, stolen way, they talked.
Everyday topics bled into personal ones, and Lily did not notice the shift until it was already happening. One afternoon she heard herself speaking about her family and her friends, names she had refused to say aloud for the last two chrono-years. It had been too painful. Like pressing a bruise just to prove it still existed.
