Page 63 of Enslak

I didn't remember kissing before. But my body knew what to do. My lips had moved right. My hand had come up to cup her face without thinking, tilting my head to get the angle better.

Maybe it was instinct. Something deeper than memory.

Either way, I wanted to do it again.

I didn't know how to ask. The words for I want to kiss you felt too complicated, too far away. So I waited. Hoped. Tried not to look disappointed when she hugged me instead of pressing her mouth to mine.

Things changed after that kiss, though.

We touched more. Her hand finding mine when we walked. Her leaning against me by the fire. At night she curled into me like we'd always slept this way, and I'd wrap around her and breathe in her scent.

That scent.

It was the third morning after the kiss when it really hit me. She'd just woken up, stretching, and her hair fell across my chest. The smell of her, flowers and something else, something warm and female, went straight through me like lightning.

My cock went hard so fast it hurt.

I froze. Didn't breathe. Tried to think about hunting, about the pit fights, about anything except the way her body felt pressed against mine.

It didn't work.

The Ulkommenian had kept me empty for so long. Over a century of chemicals that killed everything except rage. They'd made me a weapon. Nothing else.

Now those chemicals were gone.

And my body was making up for lost time.

I wanted to roll her under me and stop thinking entirely.

But she was small. Fragile. I could hurt her without meaning to.

That fear almost matched the wanting. Almost.

So I'd stroke her hair instead. Run my fingers through the silky strands. Try not to think about what else I wanted to do with my hands.

My mind got clearer every day. The fog lifting slowly, unevenly, burning off in patches the way it did over the river in the morning. With clarity came awareness, and with awareness came the particular torture of noticing everything. The curve of her waist. The way her hips moved when she walked. The line of her throat when she laughed.

Every single thing about her.

Memories started coming back too. Not all at once, just fragments, pieces surfacing like objects washing up after a flood.

My father teaching me to track. The weight of a bow in my hands, smaller hands, younger hands. The satisfaction of a clean kill.

My brothers.

Charick. Serious. Always carrying too much weight on his shoulders. I could almost see his face clearly. The way his jaw set when he was concentrating on something.

Kavak. We'd competed at everything, training and hunting and whatever else we could turn into a contest, but it was good competition. Brotherly. I remembered laughing with him, genuinely laughing, and the memory felt like sunlight on cold skin.

There were others too. Faces without names. Voices without words attached to them. But they were there, and they were real.

When I tried to remember our home, though, the name of it, the shape of the place, I hit a wall. Not the protective walls I'd built inside my own mind. This was different. This was absence, like someone had reached in and carved that specific piece out cleanly, leaving nothing behind but the shape of where it had been.

It made me want to roar. To tear things apart until the memory came loose.

But Niki would touch my arm. Speak softly. And the frustration would ease back to something manageable.

Her leg healed. The scars from the creature's claws faded to pink lines against her skin. She could walk without limping now.