Not to block. Not to deflect.
He catches my wrist.
My momentum carries me forward, and the world shifts too quickly to track—my feet leave the mat, my back slams down, and air punches out of my lungs in a hard, involuntary sound.
Then he is on top of me.
His weight pins my hips. His hands slam my shoulders down into the mat, hard enough that pain lights up my nerves, then becomes background noise beneath the bigger thing: his face.
His eyes are on fire.
Not controlled. Not flat. Alive in a way that makes my skin tighten.
His chest heaves against mine. I can feel his heart through the thin layers of fabric—heavy and fast. His fingers dig in, brutal enough that tomorrow I'll have bruises in the shape of his grip.
This is him.
This is the thing everyone fears.
This is the man I keep trying to reach.
And he's looking at me like he wants to tear my throat out.
Heat rushes through me, immediate and humiliating and perfect. My body doesn't wait for permission. It reacts—hard, aching, relentless—like the violence between us has flipped a switch I didn't know existed.
"You want to know what I felt?" he rasps.
His voice doesn't sound like a report; it sounds like gravel.
"You want to know what I was thinking when I read your notes?"
My breath catches. He is too close. Too heavy. The air tastes like sweat and cloth and the faint metallic bite of adrenaline.
"Tell me," I breathe.
His eyes search mine, and the rage shifts—cracking open just enough to reveal something underneath that hurts to look at.
"I felt?—"
The word dies.
I see it happen in real time: the shutters come down. Something inside him folds back, fast and practiced. His grip loosens. His weight shifts.
He is about to retreat into that emptiness again.
"No." I grab his wrist before he can pull away. "Don't you dare."
His face goes still.
His voice turns clean again.
"I apologize for the breach of protocol, sir. It will not happen again."
He rises smoothly and offers me his hand as if we are back in training, as if he didn't just have me pinned.
I take it.
He pulls me up.
