Turn 7 of 21

Pull his shirt off

MC's fingers tighten on the compressed fabric at his waistband, and she pulls. It's not a seductive gesture, not a slow reveal — it's a demand, the same way she demanded answers, the same way she dropped the bag and walked to the mat. The compression shirt resists for a second, stretched tight across a frame that is already straining every seam, and then it comes free, peeling upward over the ridged terrain of his abdomen, and Valko lifts his arms.

The shirt clears his chest and MC gets her first unobstructed look at what she's been touching through fabric, and the air leaves her lungs in a rush that has nothing to do with exertion. His torso is mapped with muscle that sits differently than any human anatomy she's studied — the attachments are wrong, the striations running in patterns that don't correspond to any physiology textbook, deeper cuts between the pectorals, a ribcage that flares wider at the base than it should. And across his skin, visible now in a way the shirt had concealed, are marks. Not scars, not tattoos — lines of darker pigment that trace paths along his obliques and up toward his shoulder blades, patterns that look less like decoration and more like something structural, something written into him the way grain is written into wood.

Valko lets the shirt drop behind him. His arms come back down, and the motion is wrong too — not in a way she could describe to someone who hadn't seen it, but in the fluidity of it, the absence of the small mechanical hesitations that human joints make. He moves like water moves, like something designed for a different kind of motion than walking upright in a gym. His nails have darkened further, and when his hands settle at his sides, the fingers are visibly longer than they were when she first reached for him, the knuckles broader. The shimmer in the air around him is constant now, heat rising off bare skin in visible waves that make the mirror behind him ripple and dance.

"I told you not to," he says, and his voice is barely recognizable — a low, resonant growl that vibrates through the mat beneath her knees and into her bones. His eyes are pools of black, depthless, reflecting the overhead lights back as tiny points that float in the dark. The tendons in his neck are standing out like cables, and she can see the muscles in his jaw working, clenching and releasing, clenching and releasing, as though he is chewing through words he doesn't want to say.

MC is still on her knees, one hand pressed flat against his bare stomach, and the skin beneath her palm is hot enough to be uncomfortable, hot enough that she should flinch away, and she doesn't. She can feel it now, under the surface — not muscle, not bone, something else, something that shifts and rolls against her hand like a second thing living inside him, pressing outward, testing the boundaries of the shape it's wearing. His stomach contracts under her touch and a sound comes out of him, low and involuntary, somewhere between a breath and something that has no human equivalent.

"You should leave," Valko says. But his hand is on the back of her neck, fingers spread wide, thumb resting against her jaw, and he is not pushing her away.