Turn 14 of 21

Tell him to stop holding back

MC's hand finds his face. Her palm presses against the changed angle of his jaw, thumb tracing the ridge of bone that wasn't there an hour ago, and she holds him there — holds his gaze, those black depthless eyes that are burning with something too large for the body containing it. He is shaking above her, a fine sustained tremor that runs through every point of contact between them, and the effort of it is visible in the corded muscles of his neck, in the way his fingers have stopped moving on her hip and simply grip, held in place by a restraint that is eroding second by second.

"Stop holding back," she says.

The words land in the space between them and the silence that follows is total — not the absence of sound but the absence of everything, a held breath in the fabric of the room itself. Valko's eyes close. His forehead drops to her collarbone and he presses there, hard, and the sound that comes out of him is not a growl and not a word and not a breath. It is the sound of something breaking that has needed to break for a very long time. His shoulders heave once, twice, and the pigment lines across his torso flare dark and then pulse fast, faster than she's ever felt them, a heartbeat that is finally, fully unshackled.

"You don't —" he starts, and his voice fractures on the second word, and he stops. Swallows. She can feel his throat working against her skin, the anatomy there different now, the swallow itself a different mechanical action than it would be in a human throat.

"You don't take that back. You understand me? You don't get to take that back."

"I'm not taking it back."

His mouth finds hers. The kiss is nothing like the first one — that was a detonation, a threshold crossed. This is what comes after the threshold, the territory beyond the door, and it is uncareful and consuming and his hands move with a purpose that has abandoned calibration entirely. His fingers find the waistband of her training shorts and pull, and the fabric slides down her hips with a roughness that leaves no question about what he is anymore — not a trainer, not a professional, not a man holding a line. Something that has been caged for six months and has been told, finally, that the door is open.

MC arches into him. Her hands pull at the waistband of his shorts, and the reality of him — fully changed, fully himself, the transformation complete in every way the word implies — presses against her with a heat and a weight that makes her vision swim. He rolls his hips forward and the contact is searing, immediate, and the sound she makes is lost in his mouth because his kiss hasn't broken, won't break, his lips and teeth consuming the sound as she makes it. His hand slides beneath her, lifting her hips off the mat with that impossible strength, adjusting the angle, and the first push of him against her is not entry but intention, a promise of what is coming, and her fingers dig into the dense muscles of his back hard enough that her nails leave marks in hide that is no longer quite skin.

"Look at me," Valko says, pulling back just enough to speak, his voice a subsonic growl that she feels in her teeth. His hand is on her jaw, tilting her face up, and his black eyes are burning.

"I need you to look at me when I —"

He doesn't finish the sentence. He doesn't need to. MC is already looking at him, has been looking at him since she walked into this gym thirty minutes late, and she doesn't look away now.