Tests it with a small economical pull, listening to the chrome the way Riot listens to an engine.
And then?—
Then he leaves the ground, and I forget how to breathe.
It should not be possible.
He is a powerlifter’s frame, all dense muscle and contained mass, a big man built like a vault—and yet he moves through the air with a grace that makes a mockery of his own physics, climbing in slow controlled spirals, inverting without a flicker of strain, holding an extension at the apex that defies every law of leverage I thought I understood.
He transitions into a deadlift so smooth it looks edited, so effortless it borders on insolent, his whole body a single fluid line of intention. There is no jerk, no scramble, no visible cost. Just the impossible, made to look like breathing.
Heaven help me…
It is obscene how much I want him like this. The base layer clings to the working muscles of his back, sweat darkening the fabric in a slow bloom, the cords of his forearms standing in stark relief as he holds his own weight on a single grip.
His blood-orange-and-amber scent has gone thick and warm with exertion, rolling off him in waves that hit the Omega in mesquare in the chest and pull a low spike of heat straight down through my belly.
I have wanted all three of my madmen in a hundred ways by now—Riot’s feral heat, Silas’s patient worship—but this is a new and specific hunger, the want of watching a beautiful controlled creature lose his control to something he loves, watching the doctor dissolve into the dancer.
My mouth has gone dry. Somewhere very far away, the strategist clears her throat and reminds me we are in public.
I tell her to mind her own business.
The thing that undoes me—that truly takes me apart where I stand—isn’t the skill, staggering as it is.
It’s his face.
For the first time since the day I met him, there is no doctor in it.
No observer. No man cataloguing my pupils and my pulse and my tells from behind a clipboard, no strategist three moves deep, no fortress of clinical remove.
The wall of glass is simply… gone.
What’s left, suspended in the gold light with his eyes half-closed and his mouth soft and his whole body singing a song it learned before the suits and the degrees and the careful armored life—what’s left is just Lucien.
The man underneath.
The one Blackthorn never touched because this part of him existed long before Blackthorn was ever a word in either of our mouths.
I press a hand to my own sternum, because something there has cracked clean open. I had thought I was the only one of us who knew this particular alchemy—the transmutation of a body the world wanted to use into an instrument the self could wield, the reinvention of survival into art, the long brutal workof becoming someone new from the ash of someone discarded. I thought it was my lonely country.
And here he is, flying through it, fluent.
He understands performance. Survival. Grasps what it is to be sneered at and to build an empire on the snubbing, to take the very thing they shamed you for and forge it into the foundation everything else stands on.
Beneath the expensive control of him is a creature who reinvented himself exactly the way I did, and never once told me, and the recognition lands harder than any confession of love could have. Because love I could have braced for.
This—being known, and discovering I was the one who hadn’t known—this dismantles me.
He dismounts in a slow controlled descent, lands soft as falling silk, and stands there breathing a little harder, chalk ghosting off his palms, looking at me with the wall still down and something almost shy in his steel-blue eyes—waiting, I realize, to see what I do with the piece of himself he just handed over.
And it strikes me, in that suspended moment, that this is what it cost him.
Not the muscle, not the years of training rusting in his joints—the exposure.
Lucien Graves built his entire formidable life around being unreadable, around being the one who sees and is never seen, and he just dismantled that on purpose, in front of an audience of one, because I wanted it.
He didn’t hand me a routine.
