I don’t stop him.
His lips brush mine and it’s nothing like I imagined. There’s no fire, no clashing of teeth and fury. Just heat. Depth. Want. His breath against my skin is a question and a promise.
“Aria,” he murmurs.
I wake up soaked in sweat, my sheets tangled around my legs, heart pounding so hard I swear I can hear it echo in my skull.
“Fuck,” I whisper, shoving the blankets off.
The room is cold, sterile. My tiny apartment, bare and utilitarian by design, suddenly feels too tight. Too sharp. The dream lingers like a ghost, like vapor clinging to skin after a storm.
I move to the sink, splash water on my face, gripping the edges like they might anchor me to something real.
What the hell is wrong with me?
I’ve chased this man for years. I’ve catalogued his crimes, listened to the wails of his victims’ families, spent endless hours piecing together shredded evidence and testimonies burned into ash by corruption. I know what he is.
And yet, my body aches with something primal.
Not love. Not even lust.
Obsession.
I press my forehead to the mirror. “Get it together, Dawson.”
This can’t happen. Not when the stakes are higher than they’ve ever been, when lives are on the line and he’s become theepicenter of the most dangerous power play this city’s seen in a decade.
My skin remembers the brush of imagined fingers. My mouth remembers the warmth of lips that never touched it.
I slam my palm against the glass.
No.
I won’t be another story whispered in backrooms. Another tragic name attached to the legend of Aebon Rexx. I’m not that weak. I don’t fall. Ifight.
Tomorrow, I confront him. He’ll see what’s behind my eyes, and he’ll know that whatever this thing is between us, it doesn’t make me soft.
It makes me dangerous.
CHAPTER 4
AEBON REXX
The terrace glints like the top of a jeweled chalice—open to the cloud-choked sky, rimmed in chrome and green crystal, every table a throne of polished quartz. Goldwin knows how to put on a show, and I’m the main act this morning.
Brunch at Lirien's Skyplateau is less about food and more about optics. I sip my kaf blend slow—dark roast, notes of acid and smoke, swirled with just enough spice to kick. The zero-g silk dancers twist above, bodies wound in threads of reactive fabric that shimmer in impossible colors, suspended by nothing but anti-grav and grace.
The patrons know me. Or they pretend not to. Either way, they give me distance. Eyes flick toward me and away, breathless, afraid to linger but unable to resist.
I like it that way.
Juno sits to my left, talking, laughing too loud at something a waitress says. I barely listen. My eyes are on the dancers but my senses—those deeper, older senses—are elsewhere.
Something's wrong.
Not the surface tension. That I know. That I command. No, this is something more primal. A vibration in the air beneath thenoise. A wrongness that slithers under the kaf’s bitterness and the morning’s humid perfume.
The moment stretches. Holds.
