The light hums above us. The mattress is too thin and the frame digs into my hip and his zip-tied wrists rest heavy against my stomach. But his body is a wall of warmth at my back, and his breath is a tide against my neck, and for a few seconds—just a few, just enough—the concrete cell and the locked door and the drain in the corner don't exist.
There's just this. His pulse and mine. The slow rise and fall of his chest.
I let myself have it. Ten seconds. Twenty. The luxury of pretending we're somewhere else—a bedroom with actual sheets, a window with actual light, a world where the man holding me didn't walk into a cage to get here.
Then a lock buzzes somewhere down the corridor and reality floods back, cold and flat, and I'm in a trafficking facilityon a prison mattress with bruises on my wrists and the ghost of his knot still aching between my thighs.
I close my eyes. Breathe.
Bane stirs behind me. A slow shift—his arms tightening, his face pressing deeper into my hair, a low sound in his throat that isn't quite a word. He's surfacing from sleep the way someone surfaces from deep water—reluctant, heavy, fighting the current that's dragging him up into the light.
"Hey," I say. Quiet.
His arms tighten. Then loosen. Then his forehead drops against the back of my neck and he exhales—long, shuddering.
"Hey."
We don't move for a while after that.
When we finally untangle—stiff, sore, the thin mattress having done nothing for either of us—neither of us talks about it. Not about last night. Not about the knot or the sounds we made or the way he saidyou're perfectwhile his body was locked inside mine.
Not about the bite he didn't give. Not about what any of it means.
We just don't talk about it.
Bane sits on the edge of the mattress. Scrubs his bound hands over his face. His eyes are glassy—the sedative residue making everything sluggish, his movements lagging a half-beat behind his intentions. He looks worse today. Paler. The shadows under his eyes have deepened from purple to something closer to bruise-black, and when he turns his head too fast, he winces. Squints. Like the fluorescent light is a blade.
"How's your head?" I ask.
"Attached." He tries a smile. It doesn't land. "Barely."
I pull on the scrub top he peeled off me last night. The fabric catches on the welts and I hiss—the skin tight and hotwhere the worst ones split. Bane's eyes track the movement. His jaw tightens.
"Take it off."
"I'm fine—"
"Max. Take it off. Let me see."
His voice is soft but there's no room in it for argument. The sedative has dulled his edges but not this—not the quiet insistence in him.
I pull the top back over my head. Turn around. Feel the air on my bare back and the silence that follows—thick, weighted, the silence of someone looking at something they wish they could unsee.
His fingers find the first welt. Light. Barely a touch—just the pad of his thumb tracing along the raised edge, feeling the heat of it. I flinch. Not from pain. From the tenderness. From how careful he's being.
"This one's healing." He moves lower. Presses gently around the edges of the second mark. "Bruised but closed." Lower. His fingers stop. I feel them hovering. "This one isn't."
The third welt. The deep one. The one that split.
"It's crusted over but the skin around it is hot. Could be infected." His voice has shifted—clinical now, focused, the voice of someone mentally cataloging supplies he doesn't have. "You need antibiotic ointment. Bandages. At minimum."
"I don't think room service covers that."
"It will."
He says it with a certainty that's almost funny given our circumstances—zip-tied, caged, at the mercy of people who put these marks on me in the first place. But his fingers press one more gentle circle around the worst of the welts and then he eases the scrub top back down over my shoulders, his bound hands guiding the fabric so it doesn't drag across the broken skin.
"You can turn around."
