What I feel is heat and hunger. What I feel is an ache at the base of my spine that shouldn’t exist after everything I’ve been through.
"Why are you saying all this?" I whisper, even though I already know the answer. "Why me?"
His jaw flexes. His eyes narrow slightly, like he’s fighting a truth too heavy to speak out loud, and then he doesn’t fight it at all.
"Because something in me recognised you," he says simply. "Before I knew your name. Before I knew anything."
Something inside my chest folds in on itself, sharp and trembling. It doesn’t make sense.
He’s a stranger. A powerful, dangerous stranger. And I’m responding to him like he’s oxygen.
Trauma response, my mind insists. Primal survival instinct. Attachment to the person who feels safest in the moment.
But when he looks at me like that, like I’m the first earthquake in his perfect world, something deep and old inside me whispers that this is more than fear scrambling itself into attraction.
It feels like recognition.
My fingers tighten on the knot of my robe. My pulse is a frantic, fluttering thing, tapping against my ribs. His hands are warm even through the fabric.
"If you keep looking at me like that," I breathe, "I won’t know what I’m doing."
His voice dips even lower. "Tell me."
Tell him? God, I can barely tell myself.
"I shouldn’t want you," I say, and the words fracture on their way out. "I barely know you. Everything in my life is chaos. I shouldn’t feel anything other than the instinct to survive."
His eyes soften in a way that destroys me. "Wanting something, someone, isn’t a crime."
"It is when it’s this fast," I say. "When it’s this… intense. It doesn’t feel normal. It feels like—"
I stop because I can’t say it. I can’t tell him that it feels like the universe cracked open in that casino and shoved me onto a path I wasn’t ready for.
He leans in a fraction, just enough that I feel his breath on my cheek.
"—like madness," he finishes quietly.
A shiver rolls down my spine.
"Yes," I whisper.
He still doesn’t move any closer. He’s letting me decide. Me. The girl who hasn’t been given a real choice in months.
And somehow that’s what tips me over the edge.
My heart slams once, hard and decisive, and the world narrows to the line of his mouth. To the warmth of his hands. To the fact that for the first time since everything went to hell, I feel alive in my own skin.
I rise onto my toes before I can overthink it, and before fear can wrench me back or sanity can ruin it.
I close the small distance between us.
My lips press to his in a soft, trembling kiss that feels like stepping off a cliff, terrifying, impossible, and somehow exactly where I’m meant to be.
Adrik
Her lips touch mine, soft and unsure, and the entire world stills around us.
For a second I don’t move. I just feel.
