Dark. The couches are shadows. The air hockey table is a shape in the corner. No windows in this room — nothing but the faint orange glow from the emergency strip near the floor.
He's here.
Not chained. Not bolted to the wall. Just — here. Standing in the middle of the room in the dark, facing the door. Facing me. Like he knew I was coming.
They must have moved him. New containment protocol after the yard incident — different room, different restraints. Or he got out the same way I did. Pulled a bolt. Flexed a frame. Followed the thing in his blood that said go to her.
The fever spikes. My vision sharpens — the dark isn't dark anymore. I can see him clearly. The lines of his face. The fall of his hair. His eyes already locked on mine, the irises luminous in the dark, reflecting light that isn't there. Animal and alien and devastating.
He's breathing hard. His chest rises and falls under the thin red shirt and his hands are at his sides and his fingers are flexing — the way a person's hands move when they're trying very hard not to reach for something.
The air between us is charged the way air gets before lightning.
I take a step.
He takes one too. Not toward me — sideways. His weight shifts and his head tilts and the movement is so fluid and so inhuman that my breath catches. He's not walking. He's stalking. The way a predator moves when it's found something it wants and is deciding how to approach.
I should be afraid. A man twice my size is circling me in a dark room and I should be afraid.
My body is so far past afraid. My body is heat and pull and want and every step he takes sends another wave of warmth through me and I am watching him move in the dark and all I can think about is what it would feel like to have that body against mine. The weight of him. The heat of him. Those hands — scarred, shaking, desperate — gripping my hips the way Leo's did except nothing about RJ would be careful and I don't want careful. I want him close. Skin on skin.
"Alex."
I stop breathing.
His voice. I've never heard his voice. In the common room he growled. At the fence he made sounds. But this — this is a word. My name. Spoken through a throat that doesn't use language often and has to work for every syllable. Rough. Low. The consonants are soft and the vowels are long and he says it like he's tasting it. Like he's been holding it in his mouth for days, practicing in the dark, waiting for me to be close enough to hear it.
"Yeah," I say. My voice comes out wrecked. "That's me."
He takes another step. Closer. The heat radiating off him meets the heat radiating off me and where they overlap the air shimmers.
His eyes drop to my left wrist.
I look down. In the dim orange light, the mark has darkened since my room.
RJ sees it. His whole body reacts — a visible shudder that runs from his shoulders to his hands. His lips part. And the sound he makes isn't a growl or a word. It's an exhale that carries everything — recognition, relief, something that sounds terrifyingly close to reverence.
He reaches for me.
His hand comes up. Slow. Shaking. The fingers are long and scarred and they move through the air between us like they're pushing through water. He's fighting himself — I can see it in the tension of his arm, the way his jaw grinds. The human part of him knows he shouldn't touch me. The other part doesn't care.
I don't step back.
His fingertips stop an inch from my wrist. Hovering. I can feel the ghost of his touch without contact. Every nerve in my wrist is screaming and my whole body is leaning toward him, closing the distance by fractions, because the inch between his fingers and my skin is the longest distance I have ever felt.
"RJ." My voice is barely a whisper and his name ends on a sound I've never made before — low, desperate, a whine pulled from somewhere behind my ribs.
My body is shaking. Not fear. Need. The kind that's past want, past decision, past anything my brain has authority over. I need his hands on me. I need the weight of him pressing me into something solid. I need his mouth on my throat and his teeth on my skin and I need to stop thinking and let whatever is between us have what it wants. My thighs are trembling and I'm wet and he hasn't even touched me.
His fingertips touch my skin.
My vision goes blank — pure, searing — and crashes back in overloaded color and I'm gasping and his hand is around my wrist and the mark is screaming under his grip and every nerve in my body fires at once. His touch is a match and I am gasoline and days of wanting him just detonated in my bloodstream.
He feels it. I see it hit him — his pupils blow wide, his breath punches out of him, and the sound he makes is animal. Not a growl. Recognition so raw it barely qualifies as noise. His hand tightens on my wrist and he pulls me into him and the contact — chest to chest, his heat against my heat, every inch of him hard and burning against mine — is so overwhelming my knees give out.
He catches me. Both arms. Locks me against him with a strength that should be terrifying and isn't because my hands are already in his hair and I'm pulling his mouth down to mine.
RJ's mouth finds mine and it's not a question. It's a claim. His lips are rough and his teeth catch my bottom lip and bite down — not gently, not playing, biting — and I moan into his mouth and press my body harder into his because the pain is just another flavor of the want and I need more of it. More of him. More of everything.
