Page 9

Cleats crossed the wet tile, unhurried, dragging. I froze, because this was the Tier 1 zone, a sanctuary the unwritten laws of the Academy held closed to the lower ranks, and nobody who belonged up here walked like that. Nobody in this building was allowed to be unhurried around me. Even Tegula’s stride kept a schedule.

“Lost?” I called out, my voice distorted by the steam.

“Just sightseeing.”

The voice was gravel, and I knew it before the steam gave him up.

I turned off the water. The roar of the jets died instantly, leaving the echo of droplets counting off the silence. Steam swirled around me, a shifting gray curtain that offered no real cover.

Leander Regillen stood in the entryway, a stain on the pristine chrome of the room.

He was still in his muddy uniform, clumps of synthetic turf clinging to his shins and dropping onto the white tiles with every step.

“Tier 3 showers are in the basement,” I said, while water tracked down my chest.

He shrugged and walked farther in, taking the room as he had taken the intake yard in the rain. “Water pressure is better up here.”

He stopped a few feet away and ignored my nakedness completely. Most men would have flinched or studied the floor, giving a naked superior’s aggression somewhere safe to land. Leander stared. He scanned me from the wet hair plastered to my skull down to the water pooling at my feet, neither impressed nor intimidated, just thorough, and for the second time in two days I felt found. The Academy had watched me my entire life and never once made me feel naked. He managed it in one look.

I stood taller, squared my shoulders, put the difference between us into my spine where he could read it.

Leander hooked his thumbs under the hem of his jersey and took his time.

He pulled the gray fabric up over a strip of tanned skin, then a block of abs, then the heavy expanse of his chest, muscles rippling as he dragged the shirt over his head, and he did all of it slowly, on purpose, undressing in my shower room like the space had been issued to him at intake.

He was thicker than me, built with a density I lacked, not the swimmer’s build the Academy bred into its Tier 1 strikers but the frame of something designed to break walls. Scars mapped a jagged path across his ribs, white lines against tanned skin, a service record from soccer matches this institution kept no file on. A faded tattoo of a wolf’s jaw sat low on his hip bone and disappeared into the waistband of his shorts, and my eyes followed the line of it one full second past reconnaissance.

He balled up the sweaty, muddy jersey, held my gaze, and dropped it on the floor. My floor.

The wet slap of the fabric against the tile echoed in the silence.

“Pick that up,” I growled.

Leander smiled, though it didn’t reach his eyes. “Make me.”

The challenge hung in the damp air, bait so blatant it bordered on insulting.

I closed the distance.

The wet tiles were slick under my feet as I crossed to him, close enough to smell the sweat clinging to him.

“You think you’re clever,” I said. “You think because you blindsided me, you won something.”

“I think you spent the last forty minutes playing dance recital while I played real soccer.”

Something went through me. Rage was the nearest label, so I filed it as rage.

My hand connected with his bare chest, slamming him back against the wall with a heavy thud.

He didn’t fight back. He didn’t even flinch. He let me pin him there, my forearm pressed against his collarbone.

The contact was shocking. My wet skin against his chest created a friction that sent a jolt up my arm, and it kept arriving, a low current under my forearm where his pulse should have been spiking and wasn’t. He ran hot. He ran steady.

Tegula touched me like a technician checking for cracks, the physios handled me through gloves, and here was a Sector 9 pressed skin to skin against my arm, breathing evenly, while my body, trained to report only what was useful, insisted on reporting all of it.

“You are nothing,” I hissed, leaning in until our noses almost touched. “You are a rounding error in the budget, a warm body to fill a jersey until the real season starts.”

Leander looked down at me. He was taller by an inch, maybe two. His eyes dropped, scanning my throat, then my chest. They traveled lower, lingering where the water dripped off my hips, and came back up to my eyes without a flicker of apology. He had wanted me to see him look.