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She hated that he was good at this. She hated that his hands moved over the softness of her body with purpose, that he paid attention to the catch in her breathing, the way her hips shifted when he hit the right angle. She’d slept with men who treated her body like a destination. Chris treated it like a language he intended to learn.

He made her forget that in the years since she’d lost out on becoming Luna, her muscles had gone soft. He made her feel as though she was worthy of being adored, desired, worshiped.

She reached between them, unbuckled his belt, wrapped her hand around him. He groaned against her breast, his hips pushing into her grip, and the sound broke the last of whatever patience she’d been pretending to have.

“Now,” she said.

He pulled her trousers down, her underwear with them. She kicked them off the edge of the bed. He pushed his own down and she pulled him between her legs and he pressed into her, slow, steady, filling her until her back arched off the mattress and her mouth fell open.

He moved. She met him, her hips rising to match his rhythm, her hands gripping his shoulders hard enough to leave marks. The friction built fast, devastating, his angle hitting a place inside her that made the room narrow to the sound of their breathing. She dug her nails into his back. He drove deeper. Her legs tightened around him.

He was watching her face. She could feel it even with her eyes half-closed, could feel the attention, the careful tracking of every response, the way he adjusted when her breath caught, when her body clenched. He shifted his weight, changed the angle, found the spot that unraveled her from the inside, and when she came apart she buried her face against his neck so he wouldn’t see it.

He followed her. His rhythm broke, his body shuddering, a low sound pulled from somewhere deep in his chest. He held himself inside her through the aftershocks, his forehead against her shoulder, breathing hard.

The bedroom was quiet.

Rain on the window. Their breathing, tangled, slowing. The bond between them wide open, carrying everything she couldn’t name and didn’t want to, a warmth so vast it made her feel exposed in a way that had nothing to do with the sheets kicked to the foot of the bed.

She waited until his breathing steadied. Then she moved.

She slid out from under him. He shifted to let her, his hand trailing across her hip as she went, a touch that could have been accidental if anything Chris did was accidental. She swung her legs off the bed. Found her underwear on the floor. Her trousers crumpled near the door.

She dressed with her back to him. The shirt was inside out. She pulled it over her head without fixing it.

“Sloane.”

She stopped at the door. Her hand found the frame. She could feel him on the bed behind her, propped on one elbow, watching her leave the way he’d watched her leave the training yard weeks ago. Through the bond she felt it all, the ache, the wanting, a tenderness so steady it scraped against every wall she’d ever built.

“The drainage corridor needs covering,” she said. “Talk to Viktor in the morning.”

“Sloane.”

She walked out. Down the corridor. Her door was three steps away. She went inside, closed it behind her. Pressed her back against the wood.

Her hands were shaking. Her thighs ached. The inside-out shirt smelled like him, like rain, like the cedar that lived in everything he touched.

She stood there with her back against the door and her palms flat on the wood and breathed until the shaking stopped.

On the other side of the wall, Chris lay still. She could feel him through the bond, awake, warm, pointed in her direction. He didn’t come to the door. He didn’t call her name again.

He let her go.

She slid down the door until she sat on the cold floor with her knees pulled to her chest. Her body hummed with the memory of his hands, his mouth, the way he’d slowed when anyone else would have rushed. The way he’d watched her face like her pleasure was a problem he was solving, patient, focused, wholly there.

She pressed her forehead to her knees. The bond pulsed low in her chest, steady, insistent, a current she couldn’t shut off no matter how many doors she closed between them.

Tomorrow she’d put the walls back up. She’d drink his terrible coffee at the counter, standing, and she’d brief Viktor on the drainage corridor, and she’d avoid Chris’s eyes in the hallway with the precision she brought to everything.

Tonight she sat on the floor with her back against his door and didn’t move for a long time.

Chapter 25 - Chris

He fixed the gutter.

Around two in the morning, the rain stopped; the compound was dark except for the perimeter lamps. Chris stood on the narrow ledge outside the kitchen window with a wrench in his hand, tightening the bracket where the downpipe had pulled loose from the stone. The metal was cold against his fingers.

Below him, the courtyard stretched toward the garden, empty, wet, the flagstones catching light from the barracks. Inside the quarters, Sloane was behind her closed door. He could hear the faint creak of the floorboards through the window he’d left open. She was sitting. She’d been sitting since she’d walked out of his room with her shirt on backward and the word drainage in her mouth instead of anything real.