He presses his lips to that scar too, gentle and reverent, and I feel something crack inside my chest.
I push him down onto the cot and settle between his thighs. He opens for me immediately, his legs wrapping around my hips, his hands pulling at my trousers.
“Need you inside me,” he gasps. “Need to feel you.”
“I know.” I fumble with the supplies I brought—I always bring supplies now, always prepared for this. “I know what you need.”
I prepare him slowly, fingers slicked and gentle, watching his face as I work him open. He is beautiful like this—flushed and desperate and completely surrendered. His cock is hard against his stomach, leaking onto the thin fabric beneath us.
“Ready?” I ask.
“I’ve been ready since the first time you touched me without gloves.”
I push inside.
The heat of him is overwhelming. The way his body opens for me, takes me in, clenches around me like it never wants to let go. His moan echoes in the small room, and I swallow the sound with my mouth, kissing him deep as I bottom out.
“Move,” he begs against my lips. “Please, Alexei, I need?—”
I move.
The rhythm builds slowly. Each thrust draws sounds from him that I catalog and treasure—the gasps, the moans, the broken fragments of my name. His nails rake down my back, leaving marks that will last for days. Good. I want evidence. I want proof that this happened.
“I love you,” he says. The words spill out between thrusts, unguarded and raw. “I know it’s insane. I know it’s probably Stockholm syndrome. But I love you. I’ve loved you since you stayed with me through the fever.”
I should say it back. The words are there, somewhere in the chaos of my programming. But I cannot make my mouth form them. The Kennel built walls that even this cannot fully breach.
So I tell him with my body instead. With the way I move inside him, deep and relentless. With the way my hand finds his cock and strokes in time with my thrusts. With the way I bury my face in his neck and breathe his name like a prayer.
I change the angle, pressing deeper, hitting the prostate that I now know the exact location of. He cries out, a sharp, broken sound of pure pleasure.
“Alexei, fuck?—”
I want to hear him beg. I want to hear him come apart. The thought is not clinical. It is possessive.
“I’m close,” he gasps, his hips bucking against mine.
“Don’t hold back.” My voice is wrecked, unrecognizable. “We don’t know what tomorrow brings. Take this. Take everything.”
He arches beneath me, his body bowing off the cot, and then he’s coming—untouched now, my hand having fallen away in the frenzy—his cock pulsing against my stomach, his voice breaking on a sound that isn’t quite a word. The clench of him around me is too much. I thrust once, twice, and then I’m gone, emptying into him with a groan I couldn't have suppressed if I wanted to.
We collapse together, tangled and sweating and breathing hard. I don't pull out immediately. I want to stay inside him as long as possible, stay connected, stay this close. He smells of sex and the clean, metallic scent of his own skin.
“We should go,” I say eventually. My voice sounds wrecked, nothing like the Monster's clinical monotone. “The window is narrowing.”
“I know.” His hand traces my jaw, my cheekbone, the corner of my eye. “But I needed that. I needed something good before we run.”
“Was it good?” The question is genuine. I have no framework for evaluating sexual encounters outside of operational parameters.
He laughs—a broken, beautiful sound. “Yeah, Alexei. It was good. It was... everything.”
I pull out carefully, cleaning us both with supplies from my bag. He watches me with an expression I’m learning to recognize—the look he gives me when he cannot quite believe I am real.
“Ready?” I ask.
He takes a breath. Steadies himself. Nods.
“Ready.”
