I roll us so I’m on top, settling myself deeper inside her, thrusting hard, and she moans—loud and lovely and utterly unselfconscious.
“You’ve created something powerful, Lyn,” I whisper. “But it’s not a patch. It’s a reprogrammer. A whole-body remapping interface. If we calibrate the dispersal nodes right?—”
“—we can overwrite pain response entirely,” she breathes. “Fuck, Iknewit had to be deeper. Not just a wearable, not just surface level. But an immersive system. Fuck, I’m gonna come?—”
“Do it,” I growl, “but hush…hush…”
I kiss her hard, swallowing her moans as her orgasm hits like a landslide, burying me, consuming me. And in that moment…I know that we are still doing the work, but also that something has changed irrevocably between us.
And that she isstillmy subordinate.
That she is still under the influence of a device that has tricked her into attraction to me.
That my daughter is sleeping in the next room over, and that I promised Shahar I would be honest if I had another adult in this house.
Her breathing slows and she slumps into the mattress, pliant and panting…and that’s when the edge gets sharper. Clarity strikes me like a physical blow, maybe because it’s been hours, maybe because I’ve been lost in pleasure this whole time and I’m finally back on solid ground.
I don’t stop touching her—I won’t. I let my hands keep moving, gently now, dragging sweat-damp curls off her forehead, brushing along the soft arc of her ribs. Her scarf is lost somewhere in my room, tossed away with the rest of her clothes, and she’smine.
And that—that is a problem.
“Lyn.”
She hums, blinking up at me with this heavy-lidded, sex-drunk look that damn near sends me into euphoria again. I barely manage to anchor myself to reality.
“What is it?” she asks.
I smooth a thumb across her cheekbone, and I study the way her body curls around me, one leg hooked over my calf, the other falling open to let me deeper. I think about the lab. The prototype. The look on her face when she came just from my hand on her cheek.
“I shouldn’t have let this happen,” I say. “Not like this. Not while you’re still?—”
“This isn’t just the translator,” she interrupts. She reaches up and touches my face, a tender gesture at odds with all the ways she disregards authority, seriousness. “Ask any of my friends—I’ve been talking abiggame about fucking you for years.”
I let out a surprised, confused laugh. “That is…wildlyinappropriate.”
“That’s kind of my whole thing, right?”
I huff a breath and drop my forehead against hers. “Lyn…”
“What?” she whispers. “You want me to lie and say I haven’t thought about this? Aboutyou?That I didn’t imagine what itwould be like…after a late shift in the lab, or when you laid into me about safety protocols—what it would be like to let you chastise me, then get on my knees and suck your dick?—”
I rock inside her, cutting her off. “You’re filthy.”
“I’m a genius,” she says. “And you like it. Youlike me, Kaelion Rhyss.”
I do like her.
Gods help me, I like her more than I should.
Her wit. Her stubbornness. The way she argues like it’s foreplay and solves problems with the same hands she uses to claw at my back. She’s brilliant, irreverent, impossible—and she’s beneath me now, legs still spread, wrapped around my hips like she belongs there.
“You’re trouble,” I murmur, my mouth brushing the corner of hers.
“And you’re the one who let me in,” she replies, rocking her hips again. “You could’ve kicked me out.”
“I still could.”
She grins. “But you won’t.”
