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"I can feel that."

"Then stop asking questions you already know the answer to."

He kisses me, but the kiss is just a bridge to the movement. The pace grows harder, deeper. Darius moves with a focused power, protecting the wound on my scalp and keeping me away from the edge of the bench, but his thrusts are uncompromising.

Jalshagar strips everything away. When something feels good, he knows it. When his control slips, I feel the heat of it in my own blood. The feedback loop builds until the ache under my ribs is a shared agony of pleasure.

My eyes close, and his hand immediately finds my cheek. "Claire."

I open them. He is checking my identity, making sure I am still here, still me.

"Still me," I whisper.

"Still you."

We keep looking at each other, an intimacy more frightening than the sex. The door is twenty meters away, the clock is ticking, and four hundred dead names surround us in the dark. But none of that exists. Only the friction of our bodies and the roar of the bond.

The rhythm changes—faster, more desperate. I feel his pleasure as an answering pressure beneath mine. We are no longer two separate experiences; we are one system with two points of origin.

Darius whispers something in Alzohn. I don't know the words, but the bond translates the meaning: Mine. Here. Stay. Love.

I answer with his name, a broken sound that is the only vocabulary we need.

The intensity rises. My fingers lock against his shoulders, his breathing becoming a series of rough gasps. The lines along his arms brighten until the entire waiting room is illuminated by him, the carved names of the dead emerging from the darkness.

"Darius."

"I know."

"No."

He understands. Not the body—the rest. The weight of it all.

Then the bond does something impossible. The structural seam between us disappears. His emotion is no longer coming to me; it is present within me. His intention to move is my own. We are a single, unified consciousness of skin and heat.

"Do you⁠—"

"Yes."

The altered bond makes the final stretch overwhelming. There is no distance left to retreat into. His pleasure is the shape of mine. We move together in perfect, unspoken synchronization.

I hold his face, and he presses his forehead to mine. My body tightens, the pressure building to an unbearable peak.

"Darius!"

"I've got you."

The release hits me like a physical explosion. The platform, the cavern, and the ticking clock vanish. My fingers dig into his shoulders, my body arching as the bond carries the force of the orgasm through both of us at once.

Darius makes a shattered sound, the markings on his skin flaring almost white. His control vanishes completely. We collide in a shared, blinding peak, a psychic and physical white-out that leaves us both trembling and breathless.

The intensity ebbs slowly. Darius doesn't move away, and neither do I. I keep my palm over his chest, feeling the bond settle into its new, permanent shape.

He is still himself. I am still myself. But he is simply there now, a constant presence in my mind and body, as natural as my own heartbeat.

Afterward, we stretch out on the bench. I lie against him, counting his heartbeats while the markings fade by degrees. We do not sleep. The clock forbids it, and neither of us is willing to spend a single second of this remaining time unconscious.

At 19:40 he sits up and finds his coat, I watch him do it. Then I get off the bench and go to the wall.