“Don’t—” My fingers dig into his shoulders. My hips roll forward without my permission, grinding against the ridge of him, and the friction shocks a moan out of both of us. “Don’t you dare.”
His hands tighten on my thighs. Slide higher. His thumbs brush the crease where my legs meet my hips—close, so close—and then his grip flexes and he pulls me harder against him and rocks forward in a slow, deliberate thrust that makes the world go white at the edges.
I stop thinking. My hands shove under his shirt, finding the markings along his ribs, and the instant my fingers make contact with the ridged patterns, he breaks.
Not gently. The sound he makes is inhuman—a low, wrenched groan that shudders through his whole frame. His markings ignite. Patterns I’ve never seen before race across his skin in rapid succession, flickering and shifting like his entire nervous system is short-circuiting under my hands. The light pulses so bright it casts our shadows sharp against the far wall, and I realize with a lurch of want that this is him barely hanging on. This is what it looks like when a Lividian male’s control genuinely shatters.
“The markings,” he manages, his voice cracked open. “When you touch them it’s—Dove, I can’t—”
I don’t stop. I trace the lines where they fork across his ribs, follow them down toward his hip, and he shudders so hard hisforehead drops against my shoulder. His hips thrust forward—once, hard, involuntary—grinding the full length of those ridges against me through our clothes, and the sensation rips a sound out of my throat that I will absolutely deny later.
I can feel every ridge. The texture of him through fabric—raised nodes catching against the seam of my pants at intervals that seem engineered for maximum effect. Because they are. Because that’s what they’re for. And through two layers of clothing, the pressure and drag hits nerves I didn’t know I had.
“More.” The word escapes before I can catch it. Not a quip. Not banter. A plea, thin and wrecked, from a woman who handles everything alone and is currently coming apart in someone’s arms. “Cetus—”
He kisses me again. No precision this time. Messy, desperate, his teeth catching my lower lip. His hands grip my ass and haul me tight against him, and for a few breathless seconds we stop kissing entirely—just foreheads pressed together, panting, rocking against each other in a rhythm that’s beyond conscious control. His hips rolling. Mine meeting them. The friction building toward something that is definitely, absolutely going to happen on this filing cabinet if neither of us stops.
I don’t want to stop. That’s the terrifying part. Not the collectors, not the debt, not the armed men coming to drag me away. This—the way wanting him this much makes me feel cracked open and defenseless and undone—this scares me more than all of it.
My nails dig into his back. My knees lock around his hips so hard my thighs ache. And I can feel myself shaking—actually trembling—not from fear but from the effort of being this close to something I want this much while every survival instinct I have screams that wanting things is how you lose them.
He pulls back a fraction. Barely. His breathing is ragged, his markings running wild in those erratic patterns, his pupilsnearly swallowing the gold of his irises. His lips move against mine and a word comes out that I don’t understand—guttural, resonant, in a language I’ve never heard him speak. Lividian. The raw sound of it rolls through me like a physical touch.
He catches himself. Switches back to Standard. But his voice is wrecked.
“After this is over.” His hands frame my face. Shaking. His—shaking. “After we survive. I’m not going to be able to—I need—”
“I know.” My voice is barely a whisper. My hands cover his, holding them against my face. “I know. Me too.”
“I want—” he starts.
“PAPA!” Tavia’s voice explodes from the corridor speakers. “Papa, the PDC team! They jumped into the system early! Pickles says they’re six hours out!”
We don’t spring apart. We can’t. My legs are locked around his hips like my body has made a decision my brain hasn’t caught up with, and for three full seconds neither of us moves. Just breathing. Foreheads pressed together. His hands on my face. My hands on his hands. Both of us vibrating with the effort of not ignoring his daughter and finishing what we started.
Then reality floods back like cold water.
“Confirmed,” Pickles says, and if an AI can sound smugly apologetic, he’s nailing it. “The PDC inspection vessel has entered the Kepler system. Revised ETA: six hours, twelve minutes.”
Six hours. Not thirty. Six.
I unlock my legs. He steps back. The loss of his warmth hits me like atmosphere venting—sudden and disorienting and wrong.
We stare at each other across two feet of charged air. His shirt is rucked halfway up his torso where my hands were. My hair is loose and tangled where he pulled the tie out. His markings cycle through those wild patterns, and I can see his chest heaving, and lower—
I look away. My mouth is swollen. My hands are useless. There’s a tenderness at my throat where his teeth grazed that’s going to bruise, and I’m going to press my fingers against it later like the absolute disaster I am.
“That’s—they’re early,” I manage. My voice sounds like I’ve been gargling gravel. “They’re really early.”
“Mother Morrison’s expedited processing appears to have been remarkably effective,” Pickles observes. “I suggest immediate preparation activities, as the station currently achieves sixty-three percent compliance readiness.”
Cetus hasn’t stopped looking at me. His eyes are molten. His hands clenched at his sides like he’s physically restraining himself from crossing those two feet and putting me back on that filing cabinet.
I’m not sure I’d stop him if he did.
We are not putting this back in the box. The thought lands with the force of a hull breach. Whatever we almost did on government paperwork storage—it didn’t scratch an itch. It ripped the lid off. And we both know it.
He runs both hands through his hair. His markings haven’t dimmed—blazing, broadcasting everything—and when he finally meets my eyes again, the look isn’t sheepish or embarrassed. It’s a promise.
