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He surged forward and smashed his mouth against mine. He grabbed the front of my shirt, bunching the fabric in his fists, anchoring himself to me like I was the only solid thing in a world that was dissolving.

The shock of it nearly buckled my knees. The taste of him flooded my senses, burning through what was left of the anger I had nursed for days. His surrender and the realization that the Ice Prince was melting in my hands sent a jolt of possessive fire straight to my cock.

I groaned, the sound rumbling in my chest. Wrapping my arms around his waist, I lifted him and walked him backward, his cleats dragging on the floor until they hit the bed frame. I pressed him down, and followed him onto the mattress, the springs creaking under us.

“Quiet,” I said against his mouth. “The mics.”

Felix nodded, his eyes wild. He bit his lip, stifling a sound as I pressed my weight over him. I pulled back to look at him.

He was breathtaking. His shirt was rucked up, exposing the sculpted landscape of his abs. The effortless beauty he usually wore like armor was ruined. He looked messy, a fallen angel who had decided to enjoy the fall.

“Touch me,” he begged, his voice a ghost of a whisper. “Leander. Please.”

I ran my hands up his sides, tracing the definition of his ribs. I wanted to memorize him. I wanted to map every inch of him with my hands so that if we died tomorrow, I would know exactly what I had lost.

I peeled the ruined shirt over his head and followed it with my palms, back down his chest, feeling his heart punch up against the skin, feeling his breathing go ragged on nothing more than that. He watched me do it, and I felt the exact moment the watching failed him, his head dropping back against the mattress, his eyes falling shut.

I wanted his skin against mine, so I sat back on my heels and dragged my own shirt over my head and let it fall wherever it landed. Felix opened his eyes for that. The scars across my ribs, the pale seam along my shoulder where a chain-link edge had once taken a strip of me off, the wolf inked low on my hip, and he did not look away from any of it.

He reached up and laid his palm flat over the worst of the scars, low on my side, and held it there like he was taking a reading.

“Who gave you this one?” he whispered.

“A fence.”

“And this one?”

“Same fence.”

The corner of his mouth moved, small and crooked, a thing I had only started seeing on him this week. He closed his fingers in the back of my hair and pulled me down.

He kissed me slowly this time, as if the clock in this building had stopped, and I let him pretend. His mouth was soft against mine, his tongue stroking in a lazy pull that I felt at the base of my spine, and when I settled my hips between his legs and he rolled up to meet me, the two of us hard and straining through the layers we had left, the sound that left him was so quiet I only knew it from the shudder behind it. The mics were listening, so he made it into my mouth, and I swallowed it.

I took my mouth down the line of his throat and found the bruise I had left there, faded to yellow now, and put my lips over it. He swallowed against me.

“Mine,” I said.

He did not argue. Once he would have had an answer ready.

From there I went lower, slowly. I licked across his collarbone and down the center of his chest, over the ridge of each rib, and his stomach jumped under my mouth when I reached it and kept jumping while I traced his abs with my tongue, one line at a time, down to the waistband of his shorts. He lifted his hips off the mattress in a plea he was too proud to say out loud.

I pushed his shorts down and dragged them off his legs, tossing them onto the floor.

He lay there exposed. He was hard, leaking, twitching with every breath.

I positioned myself between his legs and grabbed his thighs, spreading him wide.

“Open up,” I ordered quietly and he obeyed.

That word, in this room. The Captain of Tier 1, the most expensive body in the nation, spread open on a regulation mattress because a Sector 9 rat told him to, and there was nothing beaten in it. It was the opposite. Barking orders had never taken courage from Felix Cento. This was the thing nobody had trained him for.

I lowered my head and dragged my tongue up the inside of his thigh, tasting the salt of his sweat. His skin was hot, feverish.

Felix’s hips bucked. “Leander⁠—”

“Shh.”

I took him into my mouth and devoured him. I sank down, taking the entire length of him until his cock hit the back of my throat. With my eyes shut, I focused on the texture of him, the pulse throbbing against my tongue.