The years collapse—not poetically, or even gently. They cave in all at once.
His kiss hits me like impact, memory, and grief with teeth. There’s nothing tentative about it; no testing or uncertain rediscovery. He kisses me like a man confirming the shape of a loaded gun he once held against his own heart and has finally found it after years of being told it never existed.
My body remembers before my mind can fail us, and I kiss him back with the same terrible fluency.
That’s the part that nearly unmakes me—the familiarity of it. Nothing about this feels rusty. His lower lip caught exactly where I always used to bite it. The angle of his head, the pressurehe likes when he wants dominance, and the softer drag when he wants me to answer honestly.
My hand goes to the back of his neck on pure reflex, and his entire body jerks at the contact as if I’ve struck a live wire.
We move through time without leaving the mat. Our beds at Vintermoor, the supply closet in the locker room, sneaking through corridors we knew would be empty. The shape of his mouth is older now, and less reckless on the surface, but underneath it is the same certainty.
Every second of the past eight years shrinks into nothing. I remember this, my body remembers this… and worse, so does his.
He makes a sound against my mouth, then kisses me deeper and rougher, as if he’s furious with the relief of it. My fingers tighten in his hair, and his grip of my throat briefly turns possessive instead of controlling.
When he pulls back, it’s only far enough for breath. His forehead rests briefly against mine, chest heaving. “We were always a slow-motion bullet, weren’t we?” he whispers.
The tears hit me so fast, it’s humiliating. I don’t sob or make a sound, but a tear slips down the side of my face because he said that before. He said that exact fucking thing once, and I had consciously forgotten it. My body did not. Hearing it now, older and rougher, slices me open so cleanly I can barely breathe around it.
The shock on his own face is clear; he hadn’t expected the words any more than I expected to hear them. They came out of him from somewhere older than thought, from the same place that made his mouth remember mine and his hands remember how to hold my throat without hurting me.
I swallow hard and answer before I lose my nerve. “Poison in a shared glass.”
He stares down at me like I’ve just reached into his skull and turned the key. “Fuck,” he whispers.
I wipe the tears running down the side of my face. “What did you find out?” I ask because if I don’t anchor us to language right now, I’m going to drag his lips back to mine.
We’re both still breathing hard, and it’s not because of the fistfight we just had.
“I found out what I needed to know,” he says.
I stare at him. “Which is?”
“That I wasn’t losing my fucking mind.”
A laugh breaks out of me before I can stop it, but it’s shaky and bordering on hysteria. “That narrows it down very little.”
His mouth twitches despite everything. “It narrows it down enough.”
He sits back slightly, but he doesn’t get off me, and I’m not about to point that out. Not while the heat of him still pins me to the mat with all the old consequences humming under my skin.
“I went through the files as you suggested,” he says. “There were a lot that they buried. Reports, footage, notes. I saw enough.”
Cold slips through me under the remaining heat. “How much is enough, exactly?”
“Enough to know that we were the problem, and it wasn’t some fucking passing scandal everyone dramatized after the fact. Enough to know Arseniy tried to pull you out of me and failed because I kept coming back to you,” he says, then his right eye twitches. “Enough to know you were the one who came for me after Lorenz and Fischer were done with me.”
He says it while looking straight at me, and there’s no accusation in his eyes like there was when he woke up in my bed. “So, you found all that, and came here to confirm a few things?”
“Yes,” he says, and his hand leaves my throat then. He pushes up enough to sit fully over my hips, and it almost makes mecurse because our cocks are literally lining up. “I went to see your father last night.”
For a few seconds, I just stare at him as my brain briefly abandons all language. “You did what?”
His expression is unreadable before a little smugness curls in. “I went to see your father at his villa last night.”
I shove at his shoulder, more outraged than effective from underneath him. “Are you out of your fucking mind? What the hell possessed you to do that?”
He chuckles. “You, apparently.”
