Then his mouth is on me, devouring—tongue flat and insistent against my folds, lapping at my wetness with greedy strokes, the taste of me mixing with the metallic tang of paint on his lips.
He sucks my clit between his teeth, nipping lightly, then soothing with slow circles, his fingers parting me wider, two plunging deep into my cunt, curling rough and fast, fucking me with them while his mouth works me over, the wet sounds obscene, filling the studio like a filthy symphony.
I writhe against the canvas, paint squelching under my back, streaking my ass and thighs, my hands fisting in his hair, pulling him closer as pleasure builds sharp and unrelenting, my body trembling already.
At one point my heel slides along the canvas and leaves a print that will dry into a kind of fossil and see me tomorrow and remind me that tonight happened—a smeared arc of red from my sole. He asks two questions that don’t deserve to be as beautiful as they are—this? like this?—his voice muffled against my cunt, breath hot on my slick skin, and each time the answer is yes or please or his name dropped like a coin in a fountain, gasped out as he drives me higher.
Finally, he rises over me, his cock hard and straining, pre-cum beading at the tip as he frees himself, paint from his hands smearing along the shaft when he strokes once, rough. He takes me there—rough, passionate, messy—thrusting into me in one brutal stroke, filling my cunt to the hilt, the stretch burning sweet as my walls clench around him, paint-slick bodies slapping together with every snap of his hips.
His hands grip my hips, fingers leaving colorful imprints, pulling me onto him harder, deeper, the floor hard beneath us, canvas bunching and tearing slightly under the force. I rake my nails down his back, drawing red lines through the paint on his skin, our breaths mingling in harsh pants, sweat and pigments mixing into a gritty paste that streaks us both.
He fucks me relentlessly, mouth crashing back to mine, tasting of me, of paint, of us—until the coil snaps, my orgasm ripping through me like a storm, cunt pulsing around his cock, milking him as he follows with a guttural groan, spilling hot and deep inside me, our bodies trembling, streaked with paint from head to toe, a ruined masterpiece on the studio floor.
Somewhere in the city a siren gets itself in a hurry. The building huffs through its vents. We are inside all of that and beneath it, like the lower level of this place that I saw today that turned out to be light and rooms where sound doesn’t hurt and a garden where boys plant basil under fake sky until it grows real. My body learns something tonight I didn’t know it couldlearn: that shaking can be a way out and not a trap; that needing isn’t small when the person you need meets you with their hands clean and then willingly paints them to match yours.
I don’t hear the sound I make at the end so much as feel it leave my throat and land somewhere in him. His mouth is at my jaw, then my cheek, then my ear. When he gives in a breath later, the whole room catches and lets go with him, as if the bulb and the boards and the air have been waiting to exhale.
Silence takes us after, not because there is nothing to say, but because the words inside me are standing still to listen. Cassian rolls to his side and brings me with him so the paint-slick canvas doesn’t glue itself to my back. He doesn’t let me feel the knife next to us where he set it—there’s a soft clatter as he retrieves it and slides it farther out of reach—and then his hands are on my bandaged palm, checking, tightening the wrap, his breath tickling the edges of the gauze. My palm throbs in a way that reads as mine now, not the world’s.
“You’re not broken,” he says, the words not declaration, not argument—observation, as if he is a man trained in trauma and is simply delivering a diagnosis. The steadiness in his tone trips something under my ribs. It’s not a sob. It’s something worse and better.
“You always say that like you’re trying to remind yourself, too,” I manage. My voice sounds used, in the way a room sounds after a party you wanted to go to and did.
He doesn’t pretend he’s not. “Maybe,” he says. “Maybe you’re—”
“Saving you?” I supply, because the sentence has been circling us all day and I want the responsibility of saying it out loud. “I don’t know how to save anyone. I know how to stay. I know how to draw a door where there isn’t one and then keep walking through it until people believe it leads somewhere.”
“That’s more useful than most of what people claim they can do for me,” he says, and there’s a smile in his voice I can feel against my temple even if I can’t see it.
He helps me sit. My back sticks to the canvas and then releases with a shiver like a peeled fruit. He keeps a hand at the base of my neck until I stop swaying. Paint has dried on my shoulder in a swipe shaped like his finger. It flakes faintly when I move. He reaches without thinking and dusts at it with his thumb, then stops, realizing he might be erasing and not soothing. I catch his wrist and press his hand back down. “Leave it,” I say. “I like evidence.”
He huffs a breath that might be laughter. “You always have,” he says, and I realize how many versions of me he’s met in the last weeks: the girl who wouldn’t look up from her sketchbook, the woman in a black dress who said I’m not saying no, the person who sat on a floor this morning and asked him to breathe with her until the stairwell went quiet. Evidence, everywhere. I am messy and he is cataloging, the archivist and the object happily switching places.
He reaches up, finally, and touches my face—one thumb along the cheekbone, light, leaving a crescent of color where his skin meets mine. The mark is accidental and deliberate at once. It looks like war paint. It looks like a child who ran out of paper. It looks like today. The chill that walked through me when the knife kissed my throat returns in a different shape: the cool of being seen.
“Now you’re mine in every color,” he says.
It should sound like a lock, but it feels like a ribbon across the back of my neck that someone finally untied. I could throw the words back at him—I’m not yours, or only if I say so, or you don’t get to claim me in public and then expect me to be grateful in private—but the argument dissolves when I try to picture who I am out there without this room, without what we did here,without him pressing a cloth into my palm like he is reminding both of us that blood is the least interesting thing about what we are.
I bend forward and press my forehead to his sternum.
Chapter 53 – Cassian
The paint leaves me in colors that don’t exist in nature—blue where her breath lived on my wrist, red where the canvas caught her skin, a dark green that never looks like ivy or money until it’s smeared across a body. Hot water hammers my shoulders and turns every shade ordinary before it disappears into the drain. I brace a hand against the tile and watch the swirl pull us both down the throat of the floor.
You’re supposed to heal her, not consume her.
The thought has my voice and my mother’s at once. I shut my eyes and see the studio exactly as I left it: knife glinting harmless as a letter opener; her mouth open on a breath she didn’t apologize for; my hand around her wrist, counting her pulse like a benediction. She reached for the knife first. The honest part of me that doesn’t indulge in moral gloss notes it, files it, and refuses to weaponize it. The darker part of me with the better instincts and the worse intentions stores the sight under the word mine.
I turn the tap hotter. Steam thickens the room until it fogs the mirror and the pane of glass that separates the shower from the lounge beyond. It’s late enough that the Sanctuary has settled into the deep quiet that comes after a day that asked too much of too many people.
Aurora’s paint is under my nails. There’s a streak on my chest where she dragged her hand the first time she pushed me back with laughter still caught in her teeth like she’d stolen it from somewhere unsafe. I scrub until the skin protests and stop before I make penance for the wrong sin. This is not absolution and I am not a priest. I’m a man who built a machine for taking wounded people in and returning them to the world intact, and tonight I let the machine work on me. It is terrifying how quickly I prefer the pain of that to the pain of restraint.
I dry off and dress fast. When I open the bathroom door, Reid is waiting in the small sitting room that adjoins my quarters and the studio wing, knees wide, elbows on them, tablet lit and patient in his hands. He stands like I just came off a surgery he scrubbed me into.
“Sorry to bother you,” he says, smooth as always. “Minor systems lag on the perimeter. The last patch didn’t take on the South grid. Need your biometric to approve a reset.”
He doesn’t look toward the studio. He doesn’t have to. The smell of turpentine and sex is its own weather. I cross to him, take the tablet. The screen shows the standard architecture: a schematic of the south fence, a row of toggles, a pulsing icon over a node that should be green and is politely salmon. In the corner, our vendor’s logo spins like a coin. The request text is boilerplate—temporary bypass to apply patch; administrative override required; security event logging enabled. I’ve read this a hundred times. Tonight I barely skim it.
