Chapter 6 Wine and Want #3
"Try me."
He looks at me over his glass. The candlelight turns his amber eyes to gold, and the debate playing out behind them is visible — how much truth. How much risk.
"Ninety years," he says.
I laugh. "You don't look a day over forty."
He doesn't laugh. Just holds my gaze with those too-warm eyes, and the silence stretches, and the smile dies on my face as I realize he's waiting for me to do the math.
"That was hyperbole," I say. "Right? You're not actually —"
"We should clean up." He stands so abruptly the chair scrapes. "Before the mosquitoes get aggressive."
He's gathering plates before I can process the deflection. Ninety years. He said ninety years in a voice that was conversational, not performative. Like a man rounding down rather than exaggerating.
I follow him inside, my head full of wine and math and the growing certainty that nothing about Kaz is what it seems. My biology degree is screaming at me: the body temperature, the density, the healing I've seen; the small cuts on his hands from cooking yesterday are already gone. Not scabbed. Gone.
Human bodies don't do that.
The kitchen is small. When he reaches across me for the dish soap, his chest brushes my back.
Just barely. Just enough that the heat of him registers through the thin fabric of the dress, and my body lights up in response — skin sensitizing, breathing going shallow, every nerve ending suddenly and emphatically awake.
We both freeze.
"Edith." My name in his mouth sounds like the last checkpoint before a border crossing. "What are you doing?"
"Testing a theory." I lean back. Not much. An inch, maybe two. Enough that my shoulders press against his chest, and the heat radiating through his shirt is so intense it's like standing in front of an open oven.
An oven that breathes. That has a heartbeat thundering against my shoulder blade.
"You pulled away at the vineyard," I say, and my voice comes out lower than I intended. "I want to know why."
"Because I wanted —" He stops. His breath is warm against the side of my neck, and the proximity is doing things to my ability to think clearly. "Because I wanted to do this."
His mouth touches the curve where my neck meets my shoulder.
The contact is barely there; just lips against skin, a whisper of pressure, the kind of touch that's more promise than act. But the effect detonates through my nervous system like I've been wired for exactly this frequency my entire life.
I gasp. Not a small gasp. The kind that has a voice behind it.
His response is not a human sound. A growl — deep, resonant, vibrating through his chest into my spine, into my ribs, into places I didn't know could vibrate. The sound a large predator makes when it's found prey it doesn't want to kill. When it wants something else entirely.
Then his hands are on my waist and he's spinning me around.
Lifting me onto the counter with a strength that makes the motion feel effortless, not a grunt, not a hitch, just my body going from standing to seated in a single fluid arc that tells me everything about the physics I've been cataloging.
He's stronger than he should be. Much stronger.
And now he's between my legs. His hands bracket my hips, burning through the fabric of the dress, and the counter puts us at the right height at last; his face level with mine, his eyes filling my entire field of vision.
Those eyes are wrong.
Not amber anymore. Not the warm brown-gold I've been drowning in for four days. They're black. Completely, utterly black — iris and pupil merged into obsidian, no whites visible, like looking into polished stone.
I should be frightened. Every horror movie, every survival instinct, every rational circuit in my brain should be firing alarm bells at the sight of human eyes replaced by something that belongs to a different category of creature entirely.
Instead, heat floods through me so fast it makes me dizzy.
"Tell me to stop." His voice is wrong too — deeper, layered with harmonics that human vocal cords shouldn't produce, vibrating in frequencies I feel in my teeth. "Edith, tell me to stop."
"No." I reach for him. My hands find his face — sharp jaw, the silver scar through his eyebrow, the heat of his skin like sun-baked stone. "Don't you dare stop."
He kisses me like the word stop has been deleted from every language he speaks.
There is nothing careful about it. His mouth takes mine — demanding, consuming, a kiss that isn't asking permission because I already gave it.
His tongue sweeps against mine and I taste wine and want and something else — something spiced and foreign that I've been smelling on his pillow for three nights, now concentrated on his tongue, in his mouth, flooding my senses with a flavor that my body recognizes even though my brain has no category for it.
His hands slide up my ribs. Thumbs brush the underside of my breasts through the dress, and the dual sensation of rough thumbs and burning palms makes me arch into the contact hard enough that I knock a wine glass off the counter. It shatters. Neither of us acknowledges it.
I hook my legs around his waist. Pull him closer, and there's no space left, and I can feel him, hard, pressed against me through denim and cotton, and the sensation drags a sound from my throat that I'll be embarrassed about later but right now I don't care because his hips roll against mine with a precision that suggests he knows exactly what he's doing to me.
He swears. Something guttural, syllables I don't recognize from any language I've encountered, and I minored in linguistics before switching to biology, so the list is not short. The words sound ancient. Furious. Holy.
"Kaz —" His name is barely breath.
His hands find my thighs. Fingers dig in — not painful but close, the pressure of someone restraining force, calibrating grip, terrified of the damage his hands could do if he forgot himself. The heat of his palms burns through my skin, and I know, I know, there will be marks tomorrow.
I slide my hands under his shirt.
His skin is fever-hot. Slick with sweat despite the evening breeze.
My palms find muscle — hard ridges, deep valleys, the topography of a body that was built for impact.
I trace the thick scar across his ribs. He shudders — the full-body kind, the kind that comes from a system being overloaded by input it can't process.
My hand slides higher. Over his shoulder blade.
And I feel something impossible.
Ridges. Hard geometric shapes pushing against his skin from underneath — shifting, rippling, trying to surface. Like something structural is pressing outward, testing the boundary between whatever's underneath and the skin that's supposed to contain it.
My fingers map the shape. Raised edges, angular, arranged in a pattern that's too regular to be anatomical and too organic to be mechanical. They pulse under my touch — warm, alive, responding to the pressure of my hand by pressing harder against the surface.
I freeze.
He pulls back. Eyes wild. Chest heaving. Those black, inhuman eyes locked on mine with an expression that's equal parts desire and horror.
"Don't —" he starts.
Three clear notes cut through the night.
Not a phone. Not wind chimes. Something electronic, precise, three ascending tones that sound like a system designed to convey urgency without being audible beyond the room.
Kaz goes still.
Not the stillness of a man listening. The stillness of an animal that's identified a threat — muscles locked, breathing suspended, every sense redirected.
The transition from the man kissing me to whatever he is now takes less than a second, and the contrast is so stark it's like watching someone step out of their own body.
"Stay here." His voice is flat. Scraped clean of everything that was in it thirty seconds ago.
"What's —"
He's already moving. Not to the door. To the cabinet under the sink. He kicks the toe plate and it pops free, revealing a compartment that shouldn't exist in a kitchen cabinet.
Inside the compartment is a gun.
Matte black. Professional. The kind of weapon that doesn't exist for recreational purposes; it exists because someone, at some point, sat down and designed the most efficient way to end a human life at close range.
He pulls it out. Checks the magazine. Racks the slide. Three seconds.
"Kaz —" My voice sounds small, and I hate it.
"Lock the door behind me." He's at the terrace, silhouetted against the last of the sunset. "Don't open it for anyone. Not Thysa. Not a guest. Not the police. Only me."
"What's happening?"
"Lock. The door. Edith." He looks back, and his eyes are still that impossible black — depthless, alien, seeing something I can't. "Promise me."
"I promise."
He crosses to me in two strides. Cups my face with one hand; the other still holding the gun, finger indexed along the frame, and the image of those two hands will stay with me for the rest of my life.
One hand on a weapon. One hand cradling my jaw like I'm made of something he can't afford to break.
He kisses me. Hard. Brief. It tastes like goodbye.
Then he's gone. Not through the door — over the railing.
The terrace sits ten feet above the garden path. He clears the drop in a motion that should involve a broken ankle and a hospital visit. Instead, he lands in a crouch that absorbs the impact like his body is made of something denser, heavier, more capable than bone and muscle.
Then he runs.
I've been watching him move for four days; the careful, measured steps, the controlled efficiency, the way he navigates space like a man constantly aware of how much damage he could do.
What he's doing now is none of those things.
He's running with something unleashed, covering ground in strides that eat distance at a rate no human sprinter could match.
He moves like something hunting.
I watch until the olive grove swallows him, and the darkness closes behind him like water over a diver.
Then I'm alone.
The kitchen is wreckage — broken wine glass on the floor, fish cooling on the stove. The counter where he lifted me has a hairline crack in the marble from his grip.
Berry lipstick is smeared across my mouth, my chin, probably my neck. I catch my reflection in the glass — hair wrecked, dress wrinkled where his fingers dug into my hips, pupils so blown my own eyes look almost as black as his.
I look like someone who was thirty seconds from having sex on a kitchen counter with a man who vaulted over a railing and disappeared into the dark with a gun.
A man whose eyes turned black. Whose voice dropped into harmonics that don't exist in human physiology. Who growled, actually growled, the way an animal growls, and whose body temperature should have put him in a hospital.
A man with hard geometric shapes moving under his skin.
I look at my hand. The one that felt the ridges. The one that mapped impossible architecture under human-looking skin.
I should call someone. Should pack. Should get in a cab and go to Fira and find a hotel with normal plumbing problems and normal guests and a man behind the desk whose eyes don't turn into obsidian when he kisses you.
Instead, I go to the nightstand.
Open the drawer.
Look at the blade with its tallied inscriptions and its blood-dark handle, and now the weapon doesn't look like a curiosity or a threat.
It looks like a clue. The last piece of a pattern I've been assembling since day one; the scars, the heat, the impossible density, the eyes, the ridges, and the picture that's forming isn't one I have vocabulary for yet.
But I'm not afraid of it.
I close the drawer. Sit on the edge of his bed. Pull his pillow into my lap, press my face into warmth and spice and alien chemistry, and wait.
Because somewhere in the darkness, the man who just kissed me like I was his last breath is hunting something with inhuman speed and a gun he keeps under his kitchen sink.
And whatever walks back through that door, wounded, bloody, changed, I want to see it.
I want to see him.
All of him.
Even the parts that move under the skin.