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She's moving me because staying means the room wins.

She's running. From a room she built to hold me that ended up holding her.

I stand and the world goes sideways.

My legs have been folded into that chair for days. The tremor starts at my knees and rolls upward into my hips. My vision swims. The concussion is old news. This is simpler. Meaner. Days of sitting in my own damage while my mind ran full throttle on a body she fed water and protein bars and nothing else.

My knees lock. Buckle. Lock again. Every nerve below my waist is screaming the same word: down.

I don't go down.

She moves to my left. The injured side — wrenched shoulder, cracked ribs, the side she mapped with those trained hands while my cock stirred against the cold and we both pretended it didn't happen.

Her arm goes around my waist.

My arm goes across her shoulders.

And the room I've been chained in for four days stops mattering because I am pressed against Isadora from hip to shoulder and every thought I've had about this woman since she sat down eight feet away and watched me bleed is confirmed by the reality of her body against mine.

She is warm. The warmth transfers through fabric into the fracture line where my ribs crack their protest at the pressure. She chose this side deliberately — my injured side — because supporting me from the right would require her strong arm and even now, even bracing my weight, even with her fingers gripping the fabric at my opposite hip hard enough that I feel her knuckles through the cloth, her strong arm stays free.

Twenty years of training. Still running. Even when her body is pressed against mine and her breathing has gone faster than it should be.

I'm taller than I estimated from the chair. She's shorter — the boots adding the inch I overestimated. The height puts her head level with my jaw. Her hair smells like the basil I caught on her skin during the examination and something underneath. Soap. Plain. The kind a woman buys when she isn't performing for anyone.

She isn't performing now.

Her breathing is faster than baseline. I can feel the rhythm against my ribs — each inhale pressing her torso into my fracture, each exhale releasing, the cycle creating a pulse between our bodies that feels like the closest thing to a shared heartbeat I've experienced since Romeo's hand on my shoulder the night I chose his smile over my own safety.

Her hand adjusts at my hip. The fingers slide lower, grip harder, pull me tighter. The movement is functional — keep me upright. Maintain the angle.

The movement is also her palm against my lower abdomen and her knuckles grazing the line where muscle meets waistband and my cock responds with the blunt, honest insistence of a body that doesn't care about protocol.

I'm hard. Against her side. The angle makes it impossible she doesn't feel it.

She doesn't adjust her grip. Doesn't move her hand.

We walk.

A corridor. Rougher concrete than the first room — older, the pour lines visible where the forms were stripped before the surface cured. She found this space. She didn't build it.

Her hip brushes mine with every stride. Lateral, then rotational, and I lose my train of thought for a full second while my body processes the movement of her against me through thin fabric that's doing nothing to stop me from feeling every inch of her.

A steel door. She palms the lock without releasing my waist, her fingers spread against the pad, and the door opens and the air that comes through is different. Colder. Wetter. The kind of cold that seeps from earth pressing against unfinished walls.

She guides me through. Her grip tightens at my hip for the threshold — a brace, functional, her body absorbing the shift in my weight as I step across. Then we're inside.

The room is wider. Lower ceiling. A cot against the far wall with actual bedding — sheets, a blanket, the ordinary architecture of a place where a body is expected to lie down instead of sit upright in a steel chair. Utility sink in the corner, mineral stains mapping the basin. Fluorescent overhead — harsh, flat white.

She didn't design this room for me.

The difference hits between my ribs. The first room was built to my specifications — chain gauge calculated from my weight, every bolt and bracket reverse-engineered from surveillance photographs of a body she studied for three years before she put it in a chair. That room was personal. Dangerous in its precision. The kind of cage a woman builds when the thing she's caging matters enough to measure.

This room could hold anyone.

She's trying to reclassify me. Move me from specific to general. From the man whose pulse she let me count beneath her wrist to a body in a holding space the handler will never question.

She's trying to make me ordinary again.