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“You talk a lot for a guy I left on his back,” he said.

The insult hooked into my gut. My hand slid up from his collarbone and closed around his throat. I tightened my grip, wanting to crush his windpipe, wanting to drag him down to the slippery floor until he stopped looking at me. Under my palm, his pulse ran slower than mine. In a room holding one asset and one piece of meat, somebody was being strangled, and the readings said it wasn’t him.

A red light blinked in the corner of my vision. High in the corner, the black dome of the surveillance lens rotated with a soft mechanical whir, cutting through the steam to watch and record.

Asset Protection.

If I hit him, I lost rank. If I damaged him, the report would read willful degradation of state property. He knew it. He had known it before he ever pushed the door open. He had come to stand in the one room where I had no armband, no tier, no clothes, nothing but a temper and a camera, and let me build his case for him. He had read the shower like he had read my back line at the drill. Found the gap. Walked through it.

I snatched my hand back as if he had burned me and stepped away, putting tile between us while my chest heaved and blood pounded in my ears.

Leander pushed himself off the wall with a lazy grin, rolling his shoulders. He knew he had won this round without throwing a single punch.

“Save some hot water for me, Princess,” he said.

He turned his back on me and twisted the handle, the shower blasting to life, drowning out the sound of my ragged breathing. The turned back was the thorough insult, the engineered one, because you only show your spine to a man you have finished measuring.

I turned on my heel, grabbed my towel, and walked out, slamming the heavy door hard enough to rattle the frame.

The replay caught up with me halfway down the corridor, dripping on state tile with the towel clenched in my fist, and every pass through it landed on the same frame. I had touched him twice, chest and throat, on camera, of my own free will. Don’t let them touch you, the Director had said, and I had promised I wouldn’t let them near me. Nobody had briefed me on the failure mode where the asset did the touching.

CHAPTER 5

LEANDER

The door slammed, and then it was just me and the steam, the sound of Felix Cento’s furious exit fading into the hum of the ventilation.

I turned my face up into the spray and let the scalding water scour the mud off my skin. It took the field off me in gray ribbons, dirt, a smear of blood that probably wasn’t mine, but no amount of water pressure could rinse away the image seared into the backs of my eyes.

Felix Cento. Naked.

I pushed my wet hair back and tried to shove the picture down with the rest of the day. Hating him should have been the easy part, because he embodied everything I despised about the Academy, arrogant, privileged, polished to a shine, looking at me like I was dirt on his shoe.

But fuck, he had looked good doing it.

He wasn’t built like the guys back in Sector 9, who carried the blocky muscle of manual labor. He was carved from something finer, long lean lines of muscle wrapped tight around bone, built for explosive speed, and I kept seeing the water tracking down the sharp definition of his abs to pool in the hollows of his hips, making him look almost fragile until he moved. Then he looked like a blade.

I shut off the water and the silence rushed back in. I leaned against the wet tiles, closed my eyes, and I could still smell him under the steam and the chlorine, citrus layered over the sour, spiking heat of a man who had almost lost control.

He had tried to pin me. Weight, forearm, rank, the whole intimidation package the Academy had issued him along with the armband.

I smirked at the empty room, because he had no idea. He thought he was a predator because a screen called him Rank One, but put him within arm’s reach of a real fire and he shook. I had felt the tremor in his hands when he shoved me against the wall. I had watched the black eat the blue out of his eyes when I stepped into his space instead of backing out of it.

He hadn’t just been angry. He had been aroused.

So was I. I looked down at my own body agreeing. My cock was hard, throbbing with a violent need. I wanted to drag him back in here and wrap my hand around that pale throat to see if he made the same sounds on his knees that he made when he was barking orders on the field.

I knew hunger. It was the first language Sector 9 ever taught me, before the cages, before the smelter shifts, and I could name every dialect of it: the flat ache of a skipped ration and the wanting of things the broadcasts showed you and never handed over.

I had never once been smart about hunger. I had only ever been honest about it.

The realization landed. Beating him wasn’t going to be enough. Taking his ranking wasn’t going to be enough.

I wanted to wreck him.

That perfect porcelain composure needed to be smashed against the wall until he stopped looking at me like a rival, because rivals get beaten and forgotten, and forgetting was not what I had planned for him. "Mine," the hunger said, plain as a dinner bell over an empty stomach.

I grabbed my towel and scrubbed my skin rough, trying to rub the tension out along with the water.