He drags a kiss over my skin, the friction of his breath sparking an ache deep between my hips. “Starlings move in unique patterns,” he says, his voice a low rasp. “If you’ve ever seen them fly above the spires, it’s like watching the sky move. Adjusting direction instantly, one small movement creating a ripple effect that travels through the flock, forming waves of motion.” His eyes flick up, locking with mine behind his glasses. “A fluid, fascinating murmuration.”
My breath shallows as his fingers drift farther up my ribs, his thumb grazing the underswell of my breast where thin scars stitch my skin. His fingertips caress a gentle line across the tube scar along my side.
“Not only breathtaking,” he adds in a soft murmur, “their patterns are evasive, defensive. For survival. Synchronizing to confuse predators, like a thousand individual heartbeats moving as one. Making them unpredictable, and impossible to capture.”
My breath shivers past my lips. “But why do you call me that.”
“Hmm.” He hums as he lifts to pull me farther beneath him. “Because you’re beautiful,” he says, voice rumbling, abraded with need. “Because you have a unique pattern, impossible to predict, evading capture.” His hand finds my wrist, his thumb outlining the inked dots as his tone deepens, reverent. “You’re a star constellation that points an arrow straight toward the most destructive force, little archer.”
My heart flutters wild beneath his touch. “And where’s that?”
His gaze lifts, ensnaring mine with an intensity that steals my next breath entirely. “Right to the fiery heart, the center of everything.” His eyes darken, deep as night. “Right to the heart of me. And when you look at me, that dark void has shape.”
Then he lowers his mouth to mine, kissing me deeply, desperately, attempting to steal every breath as my fingers run over his back, mapping the definition of muscles under the shaded ink. Feeling the scratches I placed there—the evidence of my buried pain turned inside out. One of his hands slides beneath my spine, the other traps my hip, anchoring my body to his.
He tosses his glasses off before his lips brush the hollow of my throat, and then he’s entering me with a careful press of his hips. The kind of restraint that feels like worship and threat in the same stroke. He’s unhurried, unspooling me maddeningly slow with each controlled thrust.
“…I’ll never let you go, starling,” he murmurs into my pulse.
I sink into him. I’m undone by him. In this fervent moment between us, this feral hunger stops being anything but love in its most dangerous form.
The room dissolves into sensation. Concrete offers our desperate movements a shattering reverb, resonating beneath the musicof touch and caressing skin. Orion moves with harnessed control as he rocks into me with a low sound in his throat that sounds like he’s close to losing it.
When I break, it’s a quiet surrender. A blazing light blinking out, a flare consumed in the dark. He swallows my cries, folding around me until we’re a tangle of parts. In the silence between heartbeats, I hold my breath and he compulsively thrums his fingers, both trying to keep the moment unshattered.
Afterward, our truce tries to hold. Orion presses his mouth to the space below my ribs, fingers drifting along my waist. He kisses the sternotomy scar slicing my sternum like a promise.
For as long as I can, I hold the breath—and I could live in this space where heartbeats are counted for me and time is split into notes instead of days. I could forget what awaits us above.
His voice is an arousing scrape against my skin. “You’re mine. My whole universe, angel.”
I rest my hand on his chest, fingers fused to the constellation inked there. “I’ll always be yours.”
He kisses me—deep, fierce, tender—and when he breaks away, I press my lips to his forehead, where the scar slashes his skin, memorizing this one framed heartbeat. For just a little longer, I hold the breath.
And then, inevitably, I let it go.
? | ? φ ?
It’s the scratch of the printer that must stir him awake. At the sound of his groan, my fingers halt over the keyboard. Alarm claws into my chest with one sharp twinge of guilt, before I bury it and abandon the console.
With cautious steps, I cross the dim quarters toward the alcove where Orion’s bed is framed by charts and data readouts. He’s stretched out on his back, the hard planes of him softened by sleep and the sedative I took from his lab.
“So you drugged me.”
His voice is low and gruff, but absent of any resentment. I swallow past the tightness in my sore throat. “Not heavily,” I admit. “I didn’t use nearly as much of the paralytic that you do, but the sedative was necessary.”
A wary edge carves his features, and I sense his rising unease as the guise falls away.
While he was under, I used his belt to restrain his wrists to the wrought iron frame. He makes a groggy, failed attempt to move his arms, tendons flexing against the leather. A stark reminder that, once he regains full use of his muscles, the belt won’t hold him for long—just long enough to offer an escape.
“Restrained by Orion’s belt. Fucking ironic.” His chest rises and falls on a sluggish, resigned breath. “Damn. You are good at keeping secrets.” His gaze pins me. “Did you finally get what you needed from me, then?”
The passive acceptance in his tone punctures my weakened defenses. I resist the urge to touch the ache beneath my left breast. “And then some,” I say, my voice unsteady as the joke falls flat between us. “But it wasn’t easy. Any of it.”
His gaze locked hard on me, I feel the weight of his unspoken demand, and I nod once. “Your biometric lock would’ve been impossible to bypass, except you gave me the code yourself.”
His attention flicks toward the hardware in the corner. Two black racks are stationed there, coax cables woven like veins into a metallic, barrel-shaped cryostat.
