Page 28

LEANDER

Fifty-eight minutes.

I dragged myself up the final flight of service stairs while my breath burned in my lungs. The Bio-Gel was working to numb the sharpest edges of the pain, but my ankle still felt like a block of lead attached to my leg. Every step was a negotiation, and the stairwell had thirty-one of them left.

The timestamp on the wall monitor at the top of the stairs read fifty-nine minutes. My count was off by one, and the minute wasn’t in my favor.

I gritted my teeth and forced a jog for the last twenty feet of the corridor. The Duo Dorm loomed ahead with a yellow indicator light. Unlocked.

I slammed my hand against the panel and stumbled inside just as the door hissed open.

Steam hit me first, thick and smelling of citrus soap.

Felix stood in the center of the room, fresh out of the shower, water droplets clinging to his pale skin, a white towel wrapped dangerously low around his waist.

I stopped in my track.

He looked... unreal.

His wet platinum hair fell over his forehead, messy and unstyled, hiding those cold blue eyes. Water tracked down the sharp definition of his chest, pooling in the deep groove of his abs before disappearing beneath the towel, and he had that effortless athletic build that looks lazy until it moves. He stared at me, his chest heaving slightly, matching my own ragged breathing.

“You cut it close,” he said.

I leaned against the doorframe as the seal engaged behind me with a heavy thud. “I took the scenic route.”

I waited for him to step back or put up a wall.

He didn’t. He held up a hand, finger pressed to his lips, and pointed to the ceiling corner. The green light on the audio pickup stayed solid, the dorm had ears but no eyes.

“Sit,” he mouthed. He gestured to his bed.

I limped over and sat on the edge of the mattress. Felix followed, grabbing a damp towel from his nightstand.

He knelt between my legs.

The position was familiar. It mimicked the clinic, but here in the dark of the dorm, stripped of the sterile lights, it felt illicit. What was he doing?

He took the warm towel and pressed it against my shin, just above the compression tape. The white terry cloth stained gray, picking up the dust of the service shafts and the grease of the sub-basement.

His movements were precise. That was nothing new, precision was the factory setting on everything Felix Cento did, but precision would have been three fast wipes and done. This was slow. He worked the cloth along the tape line, around the ankle bone, careful of the swelling, folding the towel to find a clean edge when the gray got too thick.

I watched him, the Ice Prince kneeling on the floor, cleaning the filth off a Sector 9 rat.

“Why?” I whispered, barely making a sound.

Felix paused and gazed up, his blue eyes dark in the shadows. He looked exhausted, his mask cracking around the edges to reveal the terrified boy underneath. For a second he leaned forward, resting his forehead against my uninjured knee. The weight of his head was heavy, a silent admission that he couldn’t hold himself up anymore.

“Why the deadline?” I asked, fighting the urge to run my hand through his damp hair. “Why threaten to lock me out when we both know you need me to survive?”

He resumed wiping my skin, the towel moving in slow circles. He leaned in close, so close his lips almost brushed my knee.

“I needed to know,” he breathed, his voice so soft it wouldn’t register on the mics.

“Know what?”

His hand rested on my knee, his thumb digging into the muscle, claiming the limb he saved.

“Tegula wants us to be a single organism,” Felix whispered. “The head doesn’t work when the limbs don’t follow. I needed to see if you would come when I called.”