Turn 6 of 21

Reach for him.

MC reaches for him.

It's not a decision. It's the same thing as dropping the bag, the same thing as turning from the door, the same thing as stepping onto the mat in the first place — her body arriving at a conclusion her mind has been circling for weeks. Her hand comes up from the mat, fingers open, and she reaches for the edge of his compression shirt where it meets the waistband of his training shorts. The fabric is warm, warmer than cloth should be, and beneath it his stomach is a wall of muscle that tenses the instant her fingertips make contact, a full-body flinch that travels up through his chest and into his shoulders.

Valko stops breathing. The absence is total and startling, as though someone has pressed pause on a machine that was never meant to stop. His golden eyes drop to her hand, to the place where her fingers are curling into the elastic of his shirt, and his pupils blow wide — the vertical slits dilating until they swallow the amber, until there's barely a ring of gold left around black wells that are not human, that have never been human, that belong to something designed to see in the dark. The shimmer in the air around him intensifies, a ripple of heat that makes the mirrored wall behind them waver like a desert highway.

"Don't," he says. The word comes out broken, dragged across something jagged in his throat, and his hand closes around her wrist. His grip is careful, measured, strong enough that she can feel the architecture of his fingers against her pulse point but not tight enough to stop her. He is holding her hand in place rather than pulling it away, and the difference between those two things is so thin that MC can feel it vibrating in the space between their bodies like a wire about to snap.

She doesn't pull back. Her heart is hammering against her sternum so hard she can feel it in her teeth, and the heat pouring through the contact point where his fingers circle her wrist is almost unbearable, not painful but intense in the way that standing too close to a fire is intense. She can smell him now, beneath the ozone and the clean sweat and the antiseptic gym smell — something underneath all of it, something wild and electric and faintly metallic, like the air before a storm breaks. His chest is heaving, the compression shirt stretched to its limit across ribs that seem to be reshaping themselves beneath the fabric, broader, heavier, pushing against seams that were never designed to hold what's underneath.

"You don't know what I am," Valko says, and his voice is no longer a baritone. It's lower than that, lower than any human register, a frequency she feels in her chest more than hears with her ears. His grip on her wrist tightens by a fraction, and his other hand comes up, hovers beside her face without touching, trembling, the fingers longer than she remembers, the nails dark and slightly curved. The clock on the mirrored wall reads 19:42. The gym is silent except for the sound of two people breathing too hard in a room built for controlled exertion, and the wire is about to snap, and they both know it.

"Tell me," MC says.

Valko's jaw clenches. The muscles in his neck cord tight, and she watches something move beneath his skin — a shift, a ripple, not visible enough to name but present enough to feel through the hand still gripping his shirt. His eyes are fully black now, the gold gone, and his breathing has changed again, slower, deeper, each inhale pulling the air from the room in a way that makes the climate control stutter and fail to compensate. He leans forward, closing the last few inches between them, and his forehead stops a breath away from hers, close enough that she can feel the impossible heat of his skin against her face, close enough that when he speaks, the words land on her mouth.

"I was hoping you wouldn't ask."