"Horgox." She holds my gaze, steady. "Do you want to stop?"
The check-in. The terms she set. Offered with the same professional calm she uses for everything, except her pulse is hammering in the hollow of her throat and I can see it.
"No." My voice doesn't sound like mine. "Keep working."
She disconnects the first power node.
The sensation hits without warning. Not pain. Theabsenceof pain, a connection that has carried agony into my neural pathways for decades as property going dark. What replaces it is release so acute that my entire body locks and a sound escapes my throat I couldn't reproduce if I tried.
Her hands still immediately. "Horgox—"
"Don't stop." Barely words. "Please. It's not pain. It's—" I can't articulate what it is. Freedom isn't the right word. Reclamation isn't enough. The pathway is silent for the first time in years of imprisonment, and every nerve ending in the surrounding tissue isawake, reporting sensation it has been blocked from receiving since I was young and strapped to a table in a facility that smelled like antiseptic.
"Tell me," she says. Soft. Not a request.
"Like you're undoing what they did to me. One connection at a time."
Her hands move again. More deliberately now. She understands what this is. Not component extraction. Not repair.
Reclamation.
The second node disconnects, and my forehead drops to her shoulder because I have used up every remaining unit of capacity to hold myself upright. Her scent floods me. Myhands find her waist, gripping carefully, anchoring to her while my nervous system cascades through decades in chains of suppressed sensation hitting all at once.
"Little flare." Against her shoulder. Barely a breath. Not a word I chose; something my body says before my mind can catch it, the way a hand reaches for warmth, the way a chest expands toward air.
I stiffen. The word sits between us. Exposed. Irrevocable.
She doesn't stop working. Doesn't comment. Doesn't repeat it back. Her fingers press fractionally warmer against my skin, and that is all.
"The final connection is deeper." Her voice has cracked. The first break in her composure, and the sound of it sends heat directly to places I am trying very hard not to think about. "I can't reach it from this angle. I need to—"
She shifts position. Rises on her knees. And before I can process what's happening, she's swung one leg over my thigh.
Straddling it.
To reach the deep junction where the chest plate anchors to the spinal connectors, she has to lean forward, pressing her hips against my leg. Her centre settles against the heavy muscle of my thigh as she stretches to reach around my ribs.
The heat of her. Through both our layers, through damp fabric and sweat-slick skin, the heat of her isspecificand unmistakable. Warm and soft and pressed exactly where the captivity years of discipline and a hundred and twenty years of existence have not prepared me for a woman to be.
My hands move to her hips on instinct. Gripping. Steadying her for the work.
Keeping herexactly there.
"There," she breathes, and her voice shakes. "Almost."
She leans forward more to get the angle. Her weight settles fully onto my thigh, and I feel the slight rock of her hips asshe adjusts for stability. The drag of her body against muscle I am failing to keep relaxed. The way her thighs grip my leg for balance.
My thigh twitches involuntarily beneath her, and the sound she makes is small and sharp and does something devastating to whatever was left of my self-control.
"Sorry," I manage. "Muscle reflex."
"It's—" She swallows. "It's fine. Just hold still."
Hold still. While she's straddling my thigh, while every micro-adjustment rocks her against me, while I can feel her heat and her weight and the precise geometry of where her body meets mine. Holdstill.
Decades of captivity of arena discipline. This is harder.
She disconnects the last node.
