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Felix shattered. He screamed into my mouth, his body bowing tight.

The clench came, pulse after pulse around my cock, and I locked an arm under his back and held him through the first pulse, the second, the third, teeth set, my whole body shaking with the effort of not following him over. By the fifth I could no longer tell where his shaking ended and mine began.

He spilled over my hand, hot and endless, his climax triggering mine. I roared, burying my face in his neck. I emptied myself into him, pulsing through the aftershocks, pouring everything I had, the fear, the rage, the hunger, inside him. I collapsed on top of him.

We lay there, tangled and sweating, our hearts hammering against each other like they were trying to break out of our chests. The smell of sex was thick in the air, earthy and pungent.

Neither of us moved. The aftershocks kept rolling through him in long waves, his thighs jumping against my hips, his breath catching and releasing against my ear in a rhythm that loosened a little more with every pass, and I kept my weight on him instead of sparing him. I let myself lie heavy and felt him settle under me by degrees, felt his hands come up and travel over my shoulders, my spine, the back of my neck, mapping me back. I let him take everything he could carry.

Felix’s skin was slick and fever-hot, his breath hitching as he came down from the high. I rested my forehead against his, breathing in his exhales, grounding myself in the reality of him before I had to let go.

Slowly, the world came back into focus. I pulled out, the loss of connection was a physical ache.

Felix made a small, wrecked sound at it and reached for me before his pride could get a vote, fingers closing around my forearm, and I let him keep the grip until I had to stand.

“Up,” I whispered, kissing the sweat off his forehead. “We need to clean this off.”

I pulled him to his feet. He was boneless, stumbling against me, his legs shaking so hard he could barely stand. I half-carried him to the bathroom.

The glass door slid shut behind us. I turned on the shower, steam filling the small box instantly turning the world soft and white.

I grabbed the bar of soap and ran my slippery hands over his chest, his arms, his back, a moment of quiet in the storm. I washed the sweat from his neck, careful of the yellowing bruise I had left there.

I took my time. I worked lather into his hair with both hands, and he let his head tip back into the pressure, throat bared, eyes closed, water pooling in the hollows of his collarbones. I washed him everywhere I had claimed him, careful between his legs where he was tender, soothing what I had used. He flinched at the first touch and then went soft into it, trusting my hands to know the difference between taking and tending. Oh, they knew. Nobody had ever taught them the difference. They knew on instinct, for him.

Felix leaned into my touch. He rested his forehead against my shoulder, his entire body going slack against mine. His breathing slowed down, matching the rhythm of the water hitting the tiles.

I held him there. For a minute, we weren’t rivals. We were just two men trying to keep each other warm before the executioner came. I ran my thumb over the nape of his neck, feeling the fragile architecture of his spine and I realized with a sudden and terrifying clarity that I would kill anyone who tried to take him from me.

We stood there for a long time, letting the water wash the evidence away. When we finally stepped out, the room was cold. We dried off in silence.

I lay down on my bed and Felix climbed in beside me. He curled into my side, his back to my chest, fitting against me like a missing piece. I pulled the sheet up over us.

From where I lay I could see the tape line, gray in the dark, still splitting a floor that no longer had two sides. I had put it down days ago to keep him out. It had held about as well as everything else I had ever built for that job.

His heartbeat knocked against my chest through his back, fast at first, then slower, then easing toward something a recovery monitor would have logged as sleep, and I counted the beats without meaning to.

“We play tomorrow,” I whispered into his hair.

“We survive tomorrow,” Felix corrected me.

He pulled my arm tighter across his chest and folded both hands over my forearm, pinning it there.

The audio sensors blinked green in the corner, recording the silence. But they couldn’t record this. The heat and weight of him, his heart beating against my arm.

We closed our eyes, tangled together in the dark, waiting for morning to bring the day, and for the day to bring the war.

CHAPTER 25

LEANDER

The warmth of the bed felt like a lifetime ago. The sun had set an hour before, but the Colosseum was brighter than noon at 7:50 PM, the massive floodlights mounted on the rim of the stadium humming with enough voltage to light a city, turning the field into a stage for the damned.

We had spent the day in the dorm, locked in a heavy silence, watching the clock run itself down toward the summons.

I had woken at the first gray of the morning cycle with my arm dead from the elbow down. Felix had slept the whole night with it pinned to his chest, both hands still folded over my forearm exactly where he had put them.

The lights came up. The vents changed pitch. Somewhere down the corridor a door opened and closed, some other pair starting the same wait. Felix surfaced without a sound and lay still for a long time with his back against my chest and his eyes open. I could tell by his breathing. Neither of us said anything, because anything worth saying was about tonight, and we had already said all of that in the dark with no words in it.