“I wasn’t planning to.”
The rhythm builds.
Our breathing goes ragged.
The bathroom fills with the sounds of skin on skin and broken moans and the wet slide of my cock inside her.
“I’m close,” she gasps.
“Come for me,” I growl.
She shatters around me with a sob, her pussy clenching so hard it almost pulls me over the edge with her.
I thrust deep and come with a broken snarl, spilling into her, my forehead dropping to her shoulder.
We stay like that.
Tangled.
Trembling.
Eventually she slides off my lap and leans into my chest.
CHAPTER 15
KIMBERLY
Morning comes in sideways.
Not with sunrise or warmth or any of the poetic bullshit people like to pretend exists after a night like the one we just had, but with the thin, metallic light of Novaria filtering through a grime-fogged window slit and the low, constant thrum of traffic bleeding through ferrocrete walls like the city itself has insomnia.
The safehouse smells like antiseptic, burned coffee, and sex.
Not fresh sex. Not hot, reckless sex. The quiet, intimate kind that lingers in fabric and skin and the back of your throat like a secret you haven’t decided what to do with yet.
I wake up on my side on the narrow cot in the spare room, my arm draped over an empty patch of mattress that is still faintly warm, and for half a second my brain does that disorienting thing where it doesn’t know where I am or who I am or what just happened to my life.
Then my shoulder aches.
Then my ribs ache.
Then my brain replays Tur’s face in the bathroom mirror last night when he came back into himself and said my name like it meant gravity.
So. Yeah. I’m awake.
I sit up slowly, every muscle protesting like it wants hazard pay, and scrub my face with my hands until my palms come away smelling like cheap soap and the faint ozone tang of his skin.
The danger has not lessened.
Nothing about the city outside sounds calmer or safer or more forgiving than it did yesterday.
The Nine are still hunting me.
The Alliance is still triangulating him.
There is still a buried something under my family’s foundation that powerful people want badly enough to set my entire life on fire over.
I swing my legs off the cot and stand.
