7 Kaia #3
I pressed closer. Tightened my fists in the fabric at his back and pulled, closing the last half-inch of air between us, my body fitting itself against his with the desperation of a thing that had been standing in the wrong place its entire life and had just found the right one—and the fit of it, the sheer physical rightness of the way we lined up, made me make another one of those sounds, low and broken and wholly unguarded, and I felt him shudder against me when I did.
And then—
He went rigid.
Every muscle in him locked at once, his hand going still on my breast, his mouth coming off my throat, his breath sawing ragged against my wet skin—
And then he set me back.
Both hands at my shoulders, firm, putting space between us, cold air where there had been none, and the loss of his heat hit me like the door opening onto winter.
“No.” His chest heaved. The word came out wrecked. “No, we—stop. Stop.”
I stood swaying in the dark with my hands still half-raised toward him and my mouth swollen and my whole body keening at the withdrawal, and I didn’t understand.
I genuinely didn’t understand. My mind had gone so far down into the older country that it took whole seconds to drag itself back up into language.
I caught the color in his eyes.
They were gold.
Not the warm brown I’d cataloged at the intake desk.
Gold—bright, lit, animal—burning in the dark of the booth, and the rational floor I’d stood on my entire life cracked clean down the middle, because I knew what gold eyes meant, I had been raised on what gold eyes meant, I had spent years guarding a building built to put gold eyes back to brown.
He saw me see it. And something shut behind his face.
His shoulders came down. The bright loose careless costume of Tommy-from-California was gone.
What stood in front of me now in the copper dark was something still and certain and entirely sober.
The hard lines of his chest and the sheer, intimidating breadth of his shoulders seemed to fill the tiny booth, pressing in on me not with heat now, but with the cold, immovable reality of a warrior who had finally stopped playing games.
And when he spoke his voice had no music in it at all.
“The lower floors.” Flat. Level. A man reading coordinates. “There’s a level under this building you don’t put on the maps. Harvest Floor. I need the access for it. The biometric clearance. Who carries it?”
The question made no sense. My body was still singing his name. I shook my head, slow, the heat and the confusion tangling.
“What—”
“The keycode, Kaia. You said it. I have to leave tonight. The door at the end of the corridor that goes down. How do I access it?” He didn’t raise his voice. He didn’t have to. In the dead silence of the booth it cut like a blade through silk. “I need it. Tonight. Tell me who holds the clearance.”
And there it was. The whole shape of it arriving all at once, cold and complete, while my lips still throbbed from his mouth.
He’d kissed me back. He’d fisted his hand in my hair and growled into my throat and let me put my hands on his bare skin—and then he’d stopped, and the first thing out of him, the very first thing, was not my name and not an apology and not what are we. It was a question about a door.
Humiliation flooded up so fast it scalded.
It went into my face and my chest and the wet ruined ache between my thighs, and it turned the ache to something sick.
I stepped back until the foam stopped me and wrapped one arm around my own ribs, using my other hand to physically pinch the skin of my wrist—hard enough to leave a bruise.
The wild rose must be trimmed, I chanted silently, desperate for the pain to anchor me.
The wild rose must be trimmed. I held the chained thing down with the last of my strength, because if I let it loose now it would not be to kiss him.
But even so. He was right.
Neither of us could stay here anymore.
The truth came up out of me because I had nothing left to hold it back with. He had stripped me down to the floor of myself.
“Not me.” It came out wet. I made myself say the rest. “Stewards don’t carry it. We log the floor, we don’t open it. The clearance is biometric, blood-locked, and it’s keyed to the Wardens.” I lifted my chin. “Wardens like Miller can open that door.”
Something moved through him at the name—a flexing, a settling, the look of a man who has just found the one piece he was missing and does not like where it sits.
I waited for him to say something. Anything. To put one human word into the wreck he’d made.
He didn’t.
He turned his gold eyes toward the sealed slab, toward the building beyond it and the floor beneath it and the work he’d come to do, and I understood that I had already become a thing he was finished with—a door that had opened, a code that had transferred—and the understanding sat in my chest like a swallowed stone.
The thing under my ribs looked at him with its head lowered, and it was not afraid, and it was not lost, and it was not sorry, and that was the worst of all of it.
Because even now—humiliated, used, scraped down to nothing in the dark—it still knew exactly what he was.
Chosen, it said, quiet and ruined and certain. Even though he hadn’t chosen me back.
And the slab seal began to hiss open.