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The knife bites deeper. He doesn’t flinch. He only kisses me harder.

My knees threaten to give. Blood roars in my ears. His teeth scrape my lower lip—warning and promise at once—and then his hand slides to the back of my neck.

Not forcing.

Anchoring.

Like he’s afraid if he lets go, I’ll vanish.

“Selah.” My name leaves him like a prayer he hates knowing. “God⁠—”

I kiss him back before I can talk myself out of it.

Before grief can crawl up my throat and remind me what wanting costs. Before fear can sharpen its teeth. Before every dead thing between us can rise up and tell me this is stupid, reckless, doomed.

I kiss him anyway.

Hard enough that it doesn’t feel like softness. Hard enough that it feels like answer. My mouth opens under his, not gentle, not careful, because there is nothing gentle about the way this has been building in me—through blood and silence and every time he stood too close and made me hate how much safer the air felt with him in it.

I meet him the only way I know how now.

With teeth.

With hunger.

With the kind of choice that scares me because it feels too much like power.

Malek makes a sound against my mouth, low and wrecked, and it goes through me like a match struck in the dark.

Then something in him gives.

Not slowly.

Not softly.

All at once, like restraint was never a wall.

Only a door he finally stopped holding shut.

Then—

A snarl detonates across the barn.

Shadow.

Not a bark. Not fear. A warning so sharp it cuts straight through the heat between us.

Malek tears himself back like the sound puts hands on him.

For one breath, I’m still against the post with his taste in my mouth, the knife heavy in my hand, my body reaching after the place he’d just been. Then everything changes.

The air goes cold where he used to be.

His hands fall from me, fingers flexing once like he has to force them to remember they are not for touching right now. His shoulders lock. His head turns toward the dark end of the barn, and whatever I’d pulled out of him disappears behind something older, harder, trained into his bones.

Malek Vane looks at the shadows, and the man who kissed me is gone.

The weapon answers first.