Good. I want bruises. I want evidence that this happened, proof written on my skin in his handwriting, something I can look at tomorrow and know was real and terrible and mine.

  "Don't be gentle," I tell him against his mouth. The words taste like blood. His. Blue-tinged and faintly metallic, wrong in the way everything about him is wrong, alien under a human mask. "I don't want gentle."

  He pulls back enough to look at me. His marks are lit, brighter than I've seen them, racing along his collarbones and up the sides of his throat like circuits carrying too much current. "What do you want?"

  "To feel something other than what I'm feeling."

  It's the most honest thing I've said all night.

  He picks me up like I weigh nothing, and maybe to him I don't. I wrap my legs around his waist and feel him hard against me, and the heat of it punches through my clothes and into my belly, low and tight and angry. He carries me through the doorway to his bedroom without breaking the kiss, and I rake my nails down the back of his neck and feel skin part under them. When I pull my hand away, there's something luminous on my fingertips. His blood. Blue and faintly glowing, like I've torn open a vein of starlight.

  He drops me on the bed and I bounce, already reaching for him, pulling him down. He comes willingly but not gently, his weight settling over me like a collapse, and I spread my thighs and hook my heels behind his hips and grind up against him, graceless and desperate. We're both still dressed and it's not enough, not close to enough. I need skin. I need the violence of skin on skin, the punishment of it, the way bodies can say things mouths don't have the vocabulary for.

  I pull at his shirt. He pulls at mine. Something tears. Neither of us cares. His mouth is on my throat and his teeth are there too, the edge of them pressing against my pulse, and I arch into it, daring him, begging him without words to bite down. He does. The pain is bright and specific, a flare that races down my spine and detonates between my legs, and the sound I make is not pretty. It's wrecked. It's the sound of a woman who stopped pretending ten minutes ago that she didn't want exactly this.

  His hands are everywhere. Rough. My ribs, my breasts, the waistband of my pants yanked down with no ceremony, no seduction, just the blunt mechanics of two people trying to get at each other's skin. I shove at his pants and he helps, kicking them off, and then we're bare together in the blue-grey dark, and the contact is so much I almost can't breathe. His skin is fever-hot and the marks are pulsing under it, and everywhere we touch I can feel them, a low-frequency hum that vibrates in my teeth and behind my eyes.

  "Harder," I say, and I don't even know what I mean. All of it harder. His hands, his mouth, the way he rolls his hips against mine so I can feel the full length of him dragging against me where I'm already wet, already aching, already gone.

  He bites the curve of my breast and I claw at his shoulders. He grips my hip hard enough that I feel bone grind, and the hurt is wonderful, a clean clear signal cutting through the static of everything I don't want to think about. I don't want to think. I want to be a body, just a body, bruised and used and present in this moment instead of lost in the one where he chose the mission over me.

  "Push me," I hear myself say. The words come out ragged. "Use your abilities. Make me want this. Make it not my choice."

  He goes still. Completely, unnervingly still, his mouth against the inside of my breast, his breath hot on skin he just marked with his teeth. The marks on his throat dim for a moment, then flare brighter than before.

  "No."

  "Zane."

  He lifts his head. Looks at me. And what I see in his face is the first real anger he's shown all night, hotter and more honest than anything I've thrown at him. "If you want to hate yourself for this, you'll do it honestly."

  The words land in my stomach like a fist. Because he's right. Because asking him to take the choice away was the coward's exit, the one door I could have walked through and come out the other side clean, able to say I didn't choose this, he made me, it wasn't my fault. And he won't let me have it.

  He won't let me off the hook.

  I pull his mouth back to mine. The kiss is vicious, teeth and tongues and the taste of his blood still on my lips, and I reach between us and take him in my hand. He's hard and hot and the sound he makes when I stroke him is guttural, animal, stripped of every layer of control he wraps around himself like armor. I guide him to me and rock my hips up, and he slides inside in one long, devastating stroke that fills me so completely my vision whites out at the edges.

  For a moment neither of us moves. Just the feeling of him, deep, stretching, so present it's almost unbearable. I can feel his pulse inside me, or maybe that's mine. They've synced. His marks are blazing against his skin, throwing blue-white light across the ceiling, and his eyes are closed and his jaw is clenched and he looks like a man in pain. Like a man trying to survive something.

  I move first. Rolling my hips up, clenching around him, and he groans and his hands find my hips and he starts to thrust and there is nothing gentle about it. The bed sounds brutal beneath us, the frame protesting, and I match him stroke for stroke, rising to meet him every time he drives in, and it hurts in the way that relief hurts, like crying, like confession.

  I scratch welts down his back. He grips my thigh, yanks it higher, changes the angle so he's hitting something deep inside me that makes me shout. His mouth is on my throat again, teeth on the tender underside of my jaw, and his hand slides up from my hip to the soft inside of my thigh and his thumb presses into the muscle there, hard, a bruise forming in real time under his touch.

  "More," I tell him, because I'm selfish, because I'm angry, because my body is the only language I have left for this. "More."

  He gives me more. Harder, deeper, faster, his breath ragged against my neck, and I can feel the marks on him pulsing with every thrust, and I realize he's feeling everything I feel. Every scrape of pleasure, every twinge of pain, every complicated, contradictory emotion that I can't untangle, he's taking it all in, doubled, reflected back. He's drowning in me and I'm drowning in him and neither of us is throwing a line.

  The orgasm builds like something structural failing. Not the slow sweet climb of pleasure but a fault line cracking, pressure building in places that weren't designed to hold this much weight. I'm crying again and I don't care, tears running into my hair, my throat raw from sounds I don't recognize, and his hand comes up to my neck. Not squeezing. Resting. His palm against my throat, his thumb along my jaw, and the warmth of his hand and the promise of pressure is enough, is too much.

  I come apart with a sob. The kind that wrenches up from somewhere below language, the body's last honest sound when the mind has lost the ability to lie. I feel it in my teeth, in my skull, in the spaces between my ribs where breath is supposed to live. I feel it everywhere, and it's not pleasure, not exactly, not only. It's every feeling I've been holding crushed together and released at once, a detonation that leaves me shaking and open and wrecked.

  His hand tightens on my throat. Not enough to choke. Enough to feel. Enough to remind me whose hand it is, whose bed this is, whose name I just screamed into the dark like a prayer I'll deny in the morning.

  He comes with a sound that's barely human. Low. Torn out of him. His face pressed hard against the curve of my neck, teeth still resting on skin he's already marked, his entire body rigid, every muscle locked against something that looks less like pleasure and more like survival. The marks on his skin flare so bright I can see them through my closed eyelids, blue-white constellations burning behind the thin membrane of my lids like I'm staring into a sun that shouldn't exist. He pulses inside me and I feel that too, the kick of it, the heat, and my body clenches around him without my permission because nothing my body does around him requires my permission anymore.

  He's feeling all of it. Everything I feel. Everything he feels. Doubled and folded and layered until the sensation collapses under its own mass, a gravity well neither of us can climb out of. My grief. His guilt. My fury. His refusal to be sorry for it. The orgasm still shuddering through my nerve endings. The tears drying on my temples. The taste of his blood still on my tongue. All of it feeding through whatever empathic wire runs between us, the one I didn't consent to and can't sever, the one that means he knows exactly how ruined I am right now. Not guessing. Knowing. Feeling it in his own chest like a second heartbeat laid over the first.

  I wonder if that's its own kind of punishment. I hope it is.

  His breath shakes against my throat. One ragged exhale. Then another. His hand loosens on my neck but doesn't leave. His thumb traces the line of my jaw, slow, almost absent, the way you'd touch something you broke and weren't sure you could fix. The tenderness of it is worse than the grip. The grip I understood. The grip was honest. This... this is the part that will ruin me. Not his violence. His care.

  I keep my eyes closed. If I look at him right now, I'll see whatever's in his face, and I'm not ready. I'm not ready for it to be cold. I'm not ready for it to be soft. Both options are a kind of annihilation I can't afford.

  The silence in the room is enormous. Just our breathing and the station's hum and the faint tick of the bed frame cooling, contracting, settling back into its shape after what we did to it.

  My body aches in places I'll catalogue later. Between my legs. My hip where his fingers dug in hard enough to hit bone. My throat where his hand rested like a question he never quite asked. The scratches on my shoulders from the sheets, or from his nails, or from my own desperate writhing. I can't tell which marks are his and which are mine. I'm not sure there's a difference anymore.

  It's not okay. None of this is okay.

  Not the way I came here. Not the way I hit him and then kissed him and then begged him not to be gentle. Not the way I asked him to take my choice away and he refused, because the refusal was crueler, because the refusal meant I have to own every second of this. Every sound I made. Every time I said more. Every nail I dragged down his back and every tear I shed while he was inside me. Mine. All of it mine. He made sure of that.

  It's not okay that I followed a man who used me as bait into his bed and let him wreck me and wrecked him back and called it something close to necessary. It's not okay that his hand on my throat felt like the safest I've been since I got to this station. It's not okay that I can feel his heartbeat slowing against my ribs and the steadiness of it makes me want to stay.

  None of this is okay.

  It's real.

  That's worse.

  Afterward, he holds me while I shake.

  Not tenderly, not with the careful choreography of a man performing comfort. He holds me the way you hold something that might break if you let go, and maybe that's true, maybe I will, maybe I'm already broken and his arms are the only thing keeping the pieces adjacent. His chest is solid against my back. His arm is heavy across my ribs. His breath moves in my hair, slow and even, as though he's forcing his lungs to remember their rhythm.

  He doesn't speak. Doesn't apologize. Doesn't murmur reassurances into the dark between my shoulder blades.

  I stay because walking away would feel like losing. Because getting up from this bed and pulling on my clothes and going back to my quarters would mean this was a mistake, and I can't afford for it to be a mistake, because if it's a mistake then I've made it three times now and at some point it stops being an error and starts being a pattern.

  We both know it. The knowing lives in the silence between us, breathing when we breathe.

  I don't sleep. I don't think he does either. The station cycles through its imitation of night, the light through the view port shifting in slow increments, the blue-grey dark softening by degrees toward something the station's architects decided was dawn. It's not dawn. There's no sun here. Just timers and programming, a consensus fiction that enough people believe in to make it functional.

  My body is a landscape of evidence. His teeth on my throat. His thumb-print bruises on my inner thighs, on my hip. The ache between my legs that's satisfaction and soreness wound together so tightly I can't tell where one ends and the other begins. And on my fingertips, still, the faintest trace of blue. His blood under my nails. I wore it there and I don't want to wash it off.

  The light shifts again. Gray to pale gold, the view port transmitting the glow of the station's external running lights as they cycle to daytime patterns. I feel him shift behind me. His arm loosens but doesn't pull away. His breath changes. Awake. Aware. Waiting.

  "I'm staying."

  My voice sounds like I gargled gravel. Hoarse from crying, from shouting, from sounds I don't want to catalogue.

  His arm tightens again. Barely.

  "Not because I forgive you." I need that to be clear. I need the architecture of this to be precise, weight-bearing walls in the right places, nothing cosmetic. "Not because I understand. I'm staying because walking away from you feels like cutting off a limb. And I can't afford to lose any more pieces of myself."

  He's quiet for a long time. The station hums around us, recycled air pushing through vents, gravity generators pulsing in a frequency I feel more than hear, deep in the back of my jaw. I wait. I've learned to wait with him, to let the silence run until it reaches the place where he keeps the things he doesn't say.

  "I was afraid."

  Three words. Quiet enough that I feel them more in his chest than hear them, vibrations against my spine. And something in me goes very still, because I have never heard him say that. Not about the ambush. Not about the sealed section. Not about any of the dozen moments on this station that should have terrified any sane person. Zane Torrence does not admit to fear. Fear is a variable he accounts for and discards. Fear is a weakness he can feel in other people, courtesy of his abilities, but never acknowledges in himself.

  "When they took you." His voice is stripped down to nothing, no inflection, no performance. Just the raw data of a confession he didn't plan to make. "Before the calculation. Before the tactics. Before any of it. I was terrified."

  My throat aches. Not from his hand. From something worse.

  "I did it anyway," he says. "That's worse, isn't it?"

  "Yes." I don't soften it. I don't reach back to touch him, don't offer the comfort of my body to cushion the truth. "It's worse."

  The silence fills in around the words like water around a stone.

  "You were scared and you did it anyway. That means you chose. You always choose the mission."

  He breathes in. Out. The arm around my ribs holds steady. "Maybe."

  "Maybe?"

  "Or maybe one day I'll choose wrong."

  I let that sit. Let myself hear what he's actually saying, the shape of it, the weight. He's not promising to be different. He's not swearing he'll choose me next time, that love will override logic, that I'm more important than the mission. He's saying that there's a fault line in him now, a place where the math might not hold, where the calculations might collapse under something the variables can't contain. He's telling me I'm the structural weakness.

  And it's not enough. And it's everything.

  Something has settled in me. Not peace. Peace is for people who haven't done what I've done, who haven't wanted it, who haven't come apart under hands that have killed and asked for more. This is something lower than peace. Quieter. The kind of stillness that lives at the bottom of deep water where the pressure would crush anyone who wasn't already built for it.

  It feels like home. And that should terrify me.

  I sit up. The sheet falls away from my shoulders and the recycled air hits my bare skin, cool enough to raise goosebumps along my arms and across the tops of my breasts. The marks he left on my throat pulse with my heartbeat, dull and steady, bruises that haven't forgotten the shape of his fingers. I don't touch them. I don't need to. I can feel every one like a brand burned into the nerve endings, and somewhere in the part of me I'm still learning to listen to, I like that they hurt.

  I pull my knees up. Rest my arms across them. Look at him.

  He's on his back, one arm behind his head, watching me. Those grey eyes that give nothing and take everything. His bioluminescent marks have settled to a low, steady glow, the cool blue of a pilot light. Embers banked but alive. Waiting.

  The station hums around us. Recycled air. Gravity generators. The dull, indifferent machinery of a world that doesn't care what we've become inside these walls. The sheets smell like both of us now, salt and skin and something sharper underneath, something chemical and warm that I've started to associate with safety, which is the most dangerous thing I've ever done.

  "Your father's message," I say. "Don't trust anyone."

  He doesn't blink.

  I hold his gaze. Let the words sit there between us, taking up space, taking on weight. The recycled air tastes stale on my tongue, flat and metallic, the station's version of a held breath.

  "Ethan gave you the breadcrumbs that led to the sealed section." I keep my voice steady. Each word placed like a stone in a wall I'm building in real time. I can feel the architecture of it, the way each piece has to bear the weight of the next or the whole thing comes down. "He pointed us there. Made sure we found what we found."

  Zane's expression doesn't change, but I've learned to read the places where change should be and isn't. The absence itself is the tell.

  "And my message about my father." I swallow. My throat hurts, and not just from the rawness. From the memory of hope, bright and blinding, the cruelest weapon anyone's ever aimed at me. "It was designed to lure me somewhere I'd be vulnerable. Someone knew how to bait me perfectly. Someone who knew exactly what name would make me stop thinking and start running."

  The room is quiet. The station hums its indifferent hum.

  "Ethan knew about my father's connection to yours. Ethan knows everything." I pause, letting the shape of it settle between us like something heavy lowered carefully onto a glass surface. "He knows the station's systems. He has access no one questions. And every time we've followed a trail he laid, we've ended up exactly where someone wanted us."