I wait.
I am already composing the dismissal speech I will give this therapist. I will be polite. Professional. I will explain that her services are not required. I will thank her for her time. I will leave. I will return to Obsidian Aegis and resume the only life I have ever understood: perfect emotional control, perfect discipline, perfect isolation.
I hear footsteps in the hallway.
Someone is approaching.
I brace for disappointment.
The door opens.
And that, for now, is enough.
Chapter 3: Tamsin
The heat hits me first—volcanic, primal, the kind that makes you immediately aware of every layer of clothing clinging to your skin and how desperately you want to shed all of it. I step through the reinforced door and the air wraps around me like a humid, eucalyptus-scented blanket, thick enough to breathe, heavy enough to feel against my exposed skin. My lungs fill with the herbal warmth. My skin prickles with instant sweat. The room smells like sage and mineral stone and something ancient and earthy—like the inside of a cave that hasn't seen sunlight in a thousand years, like standing at the mouth of a geothermal vent where the earth itself exhales heat.
The lighting is dim, recessed into the smooth volcanic stone walls that gleam dark and polished in the orange glow. Oversized heat lamps burn in the corners with a dull, molten light that makes the entire space feel like the inside of a kiln, like I've just stepped into the belly of a forge where something massive and dangerous is being slowly, carefully tempered.
And then I see him.
Oh.
Oh,fuck.
The reinforced massage table is massive—industrial-grade, built to support non-human anatomy—and I thought that meant a really big werewolf, maybe a minotaur, something vaguely humanoid with extra muscle mass and a tendency to shed during full moons.
I was catastrophically wrong.
The thing on the table is a geological event made flesh. He's face-down in the padded cradle, arms hanging at his sides, and he takes up the entire table—not just the length of it, but the entire width, his shoulders so broad they extend past the reinforced edges. His back is a landscape of slate-gray stone, smooth and dense, carved with ridges of muscle that look like they were sculpted by someone with a very specific vision of "intimidating as hell" and "completely untouchable."
And then there are the wings.
Oh, Jesus Christ, thewings.
One is folded against his back, tucked in tight, the leathery membrane draped across his spine like a collapsed parachute made of shadow and bone. The other is extended across the plush furs, stretched out to its full span—easily eight feet from tip to tip, maybe more, the membrane dark and glossy, almost black, with a faint iridescent sheen that catches the dim orange light and throws it back in subtle gradients of charcoal and deep purple. There are sharp bone spurs at the joints—wrist, elbow, shoulder—each one as long as my forearm and wickedly pointed, the kind of natural weaponry that makes you immediately recalibrate your understanding of what "dangerous" actually means.
I stand in the doorway and stare.
This is my client.
This is the thing I'm supposed to massage.
This is what I signed an NDA for.
My brain is doing that thing where it tries to process too much information at once and just sort of... stalls, like a computer that's been asked to run a program it wasn't designed for, like my entire nervous system is buffering while it tries to reconcile "massage therapist" with "geological cryptid with functional wings."
Okay. Okay. This is fine. This is a job. You've worked on weird anatomy before. Remember that guy with the back acne that looked like a topographical map? This is just... bigger. And made of stone. And has wings. And probably weighs more than your car. But it's fine. It's totally fine.
It is not fine.
I take a breath—the air is so thick and warm it feels like I'm inhaling soup, like breathing through a hot towel—and I force my legs to move. One step. Two steps. I walk toward the table, my sneakers silent on the polished stone floor, and as I get closer, I start to notice details that make my professional assessment instincts kick in despite the sheer absurdity of the situation.
His skin isn't just gray. It's slate-gray, with a texture that looks smooth from a distance but up close has a faint grain to it, like polished granite, like someone took a massive slab of volcanic rock and carved it into the shape of a man and then breathed life into it just to see what would happen. There are veins running beneath the surface—not regular veins, but something else entirely, something that glows. Crystalline tracery spreads across his shoulders and spine, pulsing with a dim, unstable light that flickers between soft gold and dark orange, like molten metal cooling unevenly, like his body is barely holding itself together and the light is the only thing keeping him from cracking apart.
The luminous seams are concentrated along his spine, his shoulder blades, the base of his wings, spreading outward indelicate networks that look almost organic, almost beautiful, if you ignore the fact that they're glowing because something is very, very wrong.
I stop at the edge of the table.
