Chapter 5 Control Freak #3
This is what I am. In the steam, in the blue-white light, there's no pretending.
Red skin and armor plating and claws gouging ceramic and a hand wrapped around a cock that doesn't look human anymore, because it isn't, because nothing about me is, because I am a Krath warrior built for violence and I am in a concrete cell getting myself off to the memory of a woman who thinks I'm a male.
My strokes are rough. Graceless. Nothing like the control I maintain in every other area of my life—here, now, alone, I let the discipline shatter.
In my mind she's laughing at the vineyard, her head tipped back, that sound of joy without armor.
She's saying my name—not Kaz, but Kazvir, rolling it across her tongue like she's tasting it, and I am coming apart.
The orgasm builds like heat in a closed room—pressure increasing until the walls can't hold it.
My claws dig deeper. The tile cracks. My core temperature spikes until the cold water turns to steam on contact, and when the release finally hits, it tears through me with a force that bows my spine and drags a sound from my throat that's more roar than moan, more animal than male.
I come shaking, gasping, my true form fully extended in a concrete box while the water turns to steam around me.
And for five, maybe ten seconds after, there's quiet.
Not the empty kind. The kind that comes after something has finally been acknowledged.
My body is loose in a way it hasn't been in weeks.
My jaw unclenched. My shoulders dropped.
The armor plates are out and the claws are extended and the red skin is exposed and none of it hurts because this is what my body is supposed to be, and for these ten seconds I'm not fighting it.
In the quiet, the truth surfaces: I don't want to force the shift back.
Don't want to compress myself into the human suit and walk out there and pretend.
I want to go to her villa, knock on her door, and let her see what's standing on the other side.
Let her decide with full information whether the man she almost kissed is worth knowing when he isn't a man at all.
The fantasy is so vivid it aches. Her opening the door.
Her eyes going wide—not with fear but with the same fascinated attention she gave my scars.
Her hand reaching out to touch the armor plates, the way she reached out to trace the scar on my knuckle.
Her voice saying you don't terrify me, and meaning it, even now.
Then the cold reality reasserts itself.
She doesn't know aliens exist. She's being hunted by a professional killer.
She's in my care, in my bed, in a country where she has no backup and no exit strategy.
Telling her the truth—showing her the truth—would terrify her, and a terrified woman is a woman who runs, and a woman who runs is a woman Zeno Christopoulos can find.
I can't protect her if she runs from me.
The red fades. The armor retracts. The claws withdraw, leaving gouges in the tile that I'll need to repair before Thysa does her inspection rounds.
I step out of the shower, dripping, wrung out, wearing human skin that feels more like a lie than it did an hour ago.
My phone has two messages from Thysa:
Zeno's back in Fira. Checked into a taverna for dinner. You've got a few hours.
And then, two minutes later:
Heard the claws from the hallway. You owe maintenance new grout. Again.
I almost smile. The expression feels wrong on my face—too soft for what I'm feeling, which is something I don't have a name for in any of my six languages. Something between grief and want and the terrifying certainty that this woman has already changed something in me that can't be changed back.
I check the villa camera feed. Edith is curled on her side in my bed, one arm tucked under the pillow, her hair spread across the sheets.
Still in the blue sundress. She fell asleep without changing, without eating, probably without closing the curtains.
Just collapsed into my sheets and let exhaustion win.
She looks small in that bed. Small and tired and sad, and I did that too. The sadness. The exhaustion of caring about someone who keeps pulling away without explanation.
Nine days. Nine days until her lawyer files the case and the legal protection kicks in. Nine days of keeping her alive and keeping my distance and pretending I'm something I'm not.
The male in the mirror looks tired. Human. Convincing, if you don't look too closely at the eyes, which are still a shade too dark, a ring of amber around pupils that haven't fully contracted from the shift.
I pull on clean clothes. Check the weapons cache. Holster the knife against my forearm, the weight of it familiar and grounding.
Then I go to the security office, because there's a professional killer on my island and a woman sleeping in my bed and the distance between those two facts is shrinking by the hour.
Thysa is waiting with coffee and tactical maps and an expression that suggests she's been thinking.
"You look terrible," she says.
"Thank you."
"The vineyard went well, I take it?"
"The vineyard went fine until I detected Zeno on the thermal updraft and had to evac her with no explanation." I sit down. The chair groans. "She thinks I'm either bipolar or a serial killer."
"So the date went badly."
"It wasn't a—" I stop. "Yes. The date went badly."
"But before it went badly?"
I stare at my coffee. The surface is dark, reflective, showing me a face I barely recognize—not because of the shift, but because of the expression on it. Open. Wrecked. The face of a male who touched a woman's lip and felt the architecture of his entire life rearrange itself.
"Before it went badly," I say, "it was the best hour of my life."
Thysa is quiet for a long time. Then she slides the tactical maps toward me and says, "Let's make sure she's alive long enough for you to have another one."
We work until 2 AM, mapping Zeno's probable search patterns, identifying vulnerability windows, running scenarios.
At some point Thysa orders food and I eat without tasting it.
At some point I check the villa feed again—Edith has changed into sleep clothes now, curled under the sheets, my pillow pulled against her chest.
She's still holding my pillow.
Something in my chest cracks open, quiet and irreversible, and I let it.
"Boss?" Thysa's voice, gentler than usual.
"Yeah."
"You're going to have to tell her. Eventually. About everything."
"I know."
"And she might run."
"I know."
"But she might not."
I look at the screen. At the woman sleeping in my bed, holding my pillow, smelling me in her dreams.
"She might not," I agree.
And for the first time in ninety-two years, I let myself believe it.