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“You’re a liar, and a bad one.” But he turned around, and I looked at the nape of his neck, pale and vulnerable, with the fine chain lying across it, and my hand shook as I touched the clasp. It sat well. He shivered under my fingers.

“Is it comfortable?”

“It’s perfect.” His voice had dropped. “Maksim, about what you wrote. The slip thing. Would you show me?”

I stood very still. “You would need to tell me what you like, because I do not know. I only know that the mechanism is gentle, that it cannot hurt you, and that if you say the word I will stop at once.”

“Icing.”

“Yes.”

“I know.” He tipped his head back against my shoulder. “I want you to try it. Just a little, and I’ll tell you how it feels.”

I slid one hand around the front of his throat, and his pulse jumped against my palm. With the other hand I took the chain at the back of his neck between two fingers and drew it, very slightly, taut.

Lex drew in a slow, shaky breath, and his whole body went slack against mine. His eyes closed. A small sound escaped him, low and almost a moan, and I felt the muscles of his stomach jump beneath the arm I had wrapped around him.

“Is that—”

“Yes,” he said. “God, yes. A little more.”

“Tell me if—”

“I will. I swear I will.” His hand came up and covered mine on his throat. “Don’t let go.”

I did not let go. I held him there in the low light with one arm around his chest and the other at his neck, applying the gentlest pressure I could, and felt him melt into it. It was not power, which was what I had feared it would be. It was trust. It was a man who had spent his whole life braced against the world laying the whole weight of himself in my hands and asking me to be careful with it.

“You okay?” I murmured against his ear.

“I’m so okay.”

“You are shaking.”

“So are you.”

He was right. I loosened the chain, and he turned in my arms and caught my mouth and kissed me hard, and I pulled him against me so that I could feel the heat of his cock through his jeans pressing against my thigh. He groaned into my mouth and ground against me, and his hands dragged down my chest and went to my belt.

“Okay,” he said roughly. “Listen. I need to say something, and I need you not to be smug.”

“I am never smug.”

“You are always smug. Shut up and listen.” He put both palms flat on my chest. “Do you remember what we said in 214, the first night? Item six.”

My heart, which does not beat, gave a small and foolish lurch. “I remember.”

“Next time, we swap. You swore it on your mother’s bread.”

“I did.”

“Well.” He grinned, wide and wicked and shy all at once. “It’s next time.”

I had believed, in my long ignorance, that to be taken was to be diminished. I had believed that to lie on my back on a white hotel bed and let a mortal man settle between my thighs was to surrender something I could never get back. I had held myself apart for a thousand years and called it honor and called it strength. I had not understood that it was only a locked door.

Lex pushed me down onto the mattress and climbed over me, and he kissed me with a hunger that made my whole body arch. His hands went to my shirt and tore it open, and the buttons scattered across the floor, and he swore and laughed and kissed his way down my chest. He licked across my nipple and scraped it gently with his teeth, and I gasped, and he grinned against my skin. He moved lower, over the flat of my stomach and the sharp jut of my hip, and he opened my trousers and dragged them down along with my underwear, and my cock sprang free, hard and heavy and flushed at the tip.

“God,” he said, staring. “I’m never going to get used to this.”

“You do not have to.”