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"How?" I pant against his mouth. "How do your hands know⁠—"

"Body memory." He presses harder. "My fingers know you even when my head fails."

I come with my forehead pressed against his, my whole body clenching around him in waves while his name tears out of me in a voice I don't recognize. He follows seconds later with my name breaking between his teeth, his right hand bruising my hip while his left arm stays motionless beside his head, the cannula undisturbed beneath its clear dressing.

I collapse against his chest, careful to land on the side without the drain. His heartbeat slams against my cheek, fast and ragged, and his right hand curls into my hair while his breathing slowly steadies.

Neither of us speaks.

The drain tubing rests cool against my wrist. His fever-warm skin is slick beneath my palm, and the abdominal dressing holds, though a faint pink tinge spreads at one edge.

His hand traces my spine. "Don't move yet."

"I need to examine your dressing."

"Later." His voice is rough gravel. "Stay."

I press my lips to the bruise beneath his collarbone and feel him stiffen again inside me with a slow, thickening pressure that makes my stomach flip and my body clench.

His breath catches. "Again?"

"Your body doesn't ask permission." I roll my hips once, and his fingers dig into my waist. "You did, the first time."

His mouth finds my ear. "What did I do the first time?"

I rise slowly and sink back down, feeling every inch. "You asked before every touch."

"That doesn't sound like me."

"It wasn't." I set a slower rhythm with deep, grinding strokes that press my clit against him with each roll of my hips. "It was the version of you I wanted to keep."

His hand tightens on my hip. "Keep this one."

I don't answer. I press my hands against his chest and ride him with my eyes closed, letting the sensation build like an ache that starts behind my ribs instead of between my legs. His thumb finds my clit again, and his voice comes rough against the dark.

"Look at me."

I open my eyes.

He's watching my face with an expression stripped of everything Bratva, everything clinical, everything controlled. A man lying wounded beneath a woman who should hate him, watching her come apart like it's the only honest thing left in his life.

"There." His thumb circles slowly. "I want to see you."

I shatter around him, my breath stopping entirely while the climax rolls through me in slow, devastating waves. His hips lift once, twice, careful of the drain, careful of the dressing, and he comes with my name pressed between his teeth and both hands holding me like I might disappear.

I fold against his chest. His heartbeat pounds against my cheek, his left arm rests motionless with the cannula taped and still beneath its dressing, and the drain tubing curls along his right side like a second vein feeding something his body refuses to release.

His right hand moves through my hair, slow and shaking.

His voice comes quiet against my temple. "I didn't forget you."

I press my mouth against his skin and say nothing, because believing him would cost more than forgetting did. Four years of carrying this man's face behind my eyelids while his son learned to walk, and now he lies beneath me with tubes in his arm and fluid draining from his chest, and the most dangerous thing isn't the Bratva or the bullets or the contract on that desk but the fact that my body still fits around his like a lock that never found another key.

His hand stills against my back. My eyes close. The unfinished hunger from the gala presses between us. All those years of wanting a ghost, and now the ghost is warm and real and buried inside me, and I want him again.

I tilt my hips, and he draws a breath like it hurts.

"Vera."