He turns his head and presses his lips to my hair. Laying my head back down on his chest, I listen to his heart. Let myself believe, for this one moment, that I know what I’m doing.
We don’t move. He stays inside me, softening but still there, still a part of me, and neither of us reaches for separation. His arms lock tight around my back. One hand splays between my shoulder blades. The other grips my hip like even in sleep he won’t risk me slipping away. His tail loosens from around my hips but doesn’t retreat. It rests heavy across the backs of my thighs, a reminder.
I don’t want him to let go. I press my face into the hollow of his throat and breathe him in. Smoke and cedar and something else now. Something that smells like the two of us combined. My body still hums with the aftershocks of him, little tremors that ripple through my core every time I shift and sense him still there, still within. He’s half-asleep, I think. His breathing has gone slow and deep. His heartbeat has settled into something steady under my ear. I let my eyes close.
Then the doorbell pings. The sound is soft. A chime, melodic and polite. He frowns before his eyes even open, his brow creasing against my hair.
He brings up his wristband. The small screen glows blue in the dim room, showing Resh outside the door.
Zavin’s voice comes out rough and low. “Go away, Resh. Come back later.”
“It’s Tevan, boss.” Resh looks up into the camera mounted above the door.
Zavin tenses, every muscle going rigid. The arm holding me to his chest turns to iron. His heart kicks against my ear, no longer slow and steady but fast, sharp. He goes hard where he’s been soft. Hard jaw. Hard shoulders.
Our soft moment is lost. He eases out of me, careful, but he’s elsewhere in his mind, and then he’s gone, the absence of him inside me colder than it should be.
“Do you have to go?” I know the answer before I’ve asked it.
“This is a loose end I need to handle.”
He’s already dressing. His back is to me and I watch the play of muscles under his scales as he pulls on his trousers, his shirt. The fabric settles over skin that was pressed to mine minutes ago. The shirt stays open when he comes back to me. He kneels beside the bed. His hand finds my jaw and tips my face up to his.
“Stay in my quarters.” His eyes are hard but his thumb strokes my cheekbone, like he can’t stop touching me. “I’ll keep monitoring the doors. You’re safe here.”
“And you?”
“I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
The door slides shut behind him. The lock engages with a soft chime. I lie there in his bed, tangled in sheets that smell like him, the evidence of him still drying on my stomach and the ache of him still throbbing between my legs, and the sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach spreads until it’s all I can feel.
I wonder if he’s going to come back to me alive or dead.
Chapter Fourteen
MIRO
Ilie in the bed, staring at the ceiling, and I draw the sheets around me. I can’t rest. I can’t go to sleep. Not now he’s not here and the threat of the outside world has come back again.
Kazren could get back into this room, and I don’t trust that male as far as I can throw him. I clean up as best I can and dress before I retrieve Percy from his desk, taking him back to the bed where I can still smell both of us on the sheets.
I tap into the door’s access log. If I can layer my own code over the standard interface, I can lock it down so only Zavin’s biometrics and my override get through.
The log populates. My fingers stop. There. A different code.
Not Zavin’s. Someone else. The timestamp lines up when Kazren walked in like he owned the place. I run a report through Percy, filtering for that same signature across a wider date range. The results load fast.
The code appears semi-regularly. Always when Zavin has left his quarters. Always when he’s somewhere else, caught on other feeds. Always when this room should be empty, or when I’m alone in it.
Kazren. It has to be. I quickly layer my own code over the door lock. Two locks now. Mine, and whatever game Kazren is playing. If that code cycles again, I’ll know. If the door opens without me, I’ll know.
Next, I pull up the security architecture. I want to know if Zavin is safe. I want to see where he’s going and what he’s walking into so I can help him if anything goes wrong.
I access the internal feeds and sift through the corridors until I find him moving fast, Resh at his side. I track them through three junctions, through a sub-level I don’t recognize, into a room that doesn’t appear on the standard residential grid. The feed is partial — the deeper I go, the older the architecture gets, hardwired and physical, built before the network I live in and blind to me wherever the old House left it that way. The angle catches only one corner of the open floor: two security officers, a figure on their knees.
The camera angle hides the prisoner’s face. He’s bent over at the waist, arms wrenched behind his back and bound at the wrists. The angle is brutal. His shoulders strain in their sockets. His shirt is torn at the collar. Blood mats his hair and drips onto the floor as he sways on his knees.
Zavin’s face fills the frame as he looks down on the male. He speaks, but there’s no sound. His mouth moves. I don’t need the words. The hard edges I’ve never seen before say enough.
