Chapter 6
ROXY
He takes me to the dance floor with the kind of ownership that should terrify me, and instead it steadies something in my chest. There’s tension in his eyes, his grip. He remembers the slap. My hand still stings. Felt like hitting a brick wall. Then something else hits me:
I don’t remember saying yes.
Maybe I didn’t. Maybe I just moved and he moved with me, and now I’m here in this place I swore I’d never let myself get dragged into again—eyes burning under neon, heartbeat syncing with bass, and him.
Him.
His presence is absolute.
He doesn’t guide me with words. He doesn’t ask.
He just moves like he knows the gravity between us is already doing the work.
Like orbit isn’t a choice—it’s a law. The crowd splits for him without argument, and I go with him, dazed, off-balance, but still moving.
My legs are caught in the pull of momentum and mistake, and I’m starting to think maybe they’re the same thing.
The music swallows us whole.
Bass drops like a hammer to the chest. The floor vibrates beneath my boots. Sweat slides down my back, and every nerve in my body screams for clarity it doesn’t get.
His body is close. Not touching. But close.
I can feel the heat radiating off him. A field of pressure. Of promise. He’s tall enough to block half the club’s lights, wide enough to make me feel like the air only gets past him because he lets it.
We start to move.
No, he moves—and I follow. Because I don’t trust myself not to bolt, and because there’s something weirdly safe about how absolutely confident he is. Not arrogant. Not performative.
Certain.
Like he’s been through worse and came out on the other side with all the patience in the galaxy for people like me who shake when they shouldn’t.
I hate that I like it.
I hate that I don’t hate him.
My arms stay close to my sides, elbows tucked in, like if I make myself smaller I won’t be noticed. But he notices. Of course he does.
“You can breathe, you know,” he murmurs, voice low and rough and way too close to my ear.
I jump a little. Not visibly. I hope. But the words hit my skin like heat, like awareness.
I tilt my head just enough to glance up at him. “I am breathing.”
“Through your teeth.”
“Maybe I’m on edge.”
“Maybe,” he says. But he doesn’t push.
He shifts—barely—and the space between us tightens. Not closed, not yet, but tighter than it should be.
I should move away.
I don’t.
Because something about the way he holds himself—the tension in his shoulders, the way he watches everything around us without ever looking nervous—tells me this man doesn’t get surprised easily.
Which means he knows I slapped him.
And didn’t retaliate.
Which means he let me.
My stomach twists.
“What’s your name?” he asks.
I flinch. Not visibly. Again, I hope.
I stall by swaying slightly, letting the music move me a little more freely. Just enough to pretend I belong out here. Just enough to feel the heat of him against my shoulder, my arm, not quite brushing but threatening to.
He doesn’t ask again.
He waits.
Which is worse.
“I’m not certain you’ve earned my name yet.”
It’s the first thing that pops in my head. It’s not exactly a lie.
He grins, eyes sparkling. “Challenge accepted.”
His response is too much. I want to run.
I don’t.
Instead, I let the beat move through me. The rhythm isn’t complex, but it’s relentless. Thudding. Pressing. And somehow, in the middle of all this—this noise and heat and the constant threat of panic—I start to find a strange rhythm in my own body.
A beat that doesn’t feel like fear.
It feels like focus.
I slide my arms up, just a little. Not wrapping around him, not that bold, but enough to lift my elbows. To take space.
He notices. Of course he does. I catch the flicker of something like approval in the tilt of his chin.
“You’re braver than you look,” he says.
I snort. “You don’t know me.”
“I know enough.”
I take a shaky breath, and the air tastes like sweat and alcohol and something darker—something that clings to him like smoke. Like danger. I should walk away. I should cut the moment before it turns into something I regret.
But I’m tired of regrets.
“Why didn’t you hit me?” I ask.
His eyes flash down to mine.
“I don’t hit people for fun,” he says.
“Then what do you hit them for?”
His expression doesn’t change, but something behind it sharpens.
“Necessity.”
A beat.
“And you weren’t necessary.”
I nod like that makes sense, like it doesn’t send a thrill down my spine I didn’t ask for.
“I thought you might kill me,” I admit.
“You wanted me to?”
I blink. “What?”
He shrugs, one massive shoulder rising and falling like tectonic shift. “You looked like you were hoping for something.”
I bristle. “I wasn’t hoping to die.”
“Didn’t say you were.”
I glare. “You’re annoying.”
“You’re twitchy.”
“You’re smug.”
“You’re drunk.”
“That’s entirely Cynna’s fault.”
He doesn’t smile, but I feel the ripple of something like it. Not amusement. More like… interest.
“Cynna the redhead?” he asks.
“Loud. Beautiful. Owns her own batons.”
He makes a grunt of acknowledgement, the kind that says yeah, I clocked her the second you walked in.
“She dared me,” I say, quieter now.
“To slap me?”
“To make myself visible, so I came and talked to you.”
He tilts his head, considering. “That’s one hell of a dare.”
“She doesn’t think I take enough risks.”
“Do you?”
I pause.
My pulse is still too loud in my ears. My breath too shallow. But I’m upright. I’m talking. I’m here.
“I’m working on it.”
He doesn’t nod. Doesn’t agree or disagree.
But I get the sense he believes me.
The crowd starts shifting, music segueing into something faster, more chaotic.
Around us, dancers spin and twist, hips and hands colliding in messes of movement.
Someone’s laughing too hard. Someone else is crying in the corner.
The club smells like endings and bad ideas and stories that won’t be remembered right.
And we’re just standing here.
Dancing. Sort of.
Pretending we’re not unraveling.
I glance up at him again.
“Who are you, anyway?”
He hesitates.
Then leans in.
Voice low, like thunder in a box.
“Call me Vrok.”
“Vrok?”
“Like Vrok and Roll, baby.”
I snort, surprised. “Wow. So…clever. Do all the girls melt for that line?”
He arches a brow ridge. “Do you?”
“I have a thing for walking hazards.”
He huffs something that might be a laugh, might be contempt. “Then you’re in the right place.”
The chemistry overwhelms my nerves until I’m breathing through it like it’s leather.
It stretches taut across my skin, wraps around my lungs and spine, binding every twitch and tremble until I don’t know where fear ends and want begins.
I’ve never wanted like this. Not clean. Not safe.
Not like a slow realization. This feels like freefall—full-body terror laced with something hotter, heavier, meaner.
He watches me like he knows.
Like he’s already decided I’m a fixed point in his world, whether I asked to be or not. His eyes don’t leer. They claim.
And my heart, the traitorous little bastard, stutters in my chest like it agrees.
“What?” I ask, my voice rough with too much bass, too much tension. I’m not even sure I heard him right. Not over the noise.
He leans in closer.
The air between us tightens like a held breath.
“You wanna get out of here?” he says again, low and calm and laced with something that shouldn’t be gentle but is.
The words slice through the last of my caution like a clean knife. There’s no flirtation in them. No suggestion of what “out of here” means. And somehow that’s worse.
Because my brain fills in the blanks.
I assume sex, of course. Because what else could this be?
I mean—look at him.
Look at me.
Whatever game we’re playing, it started the second my palm cracked across his jaw and he didn’t break me in half for it. Everything since has just been buildup. Or foreplay. Or a slow-burn dare we’re both too stubborn to fold on.
I nod.
Not too fast.
But fast enough to mean yes.