Turn 8 of 21

Put your hand lower

MC's hand slides lower.

It moves down the ridged plane of his stomach, past the strange muscle attachments and the dark pigment lines that trace his obliques, and her fingertips cross the waistband of his training shorts before she has fully registered what she's doing. The heat intensifies with every inch of descent, concentric and pulsing, and beneath her palm she can feel that subcutaneous shifting growing more urgent, more deliberate, as though the thing inside Valko's skin is tracking her hand's progress and pressing toward it. His stomach contracts hard under her touch, every muscle locking at once, and the sound that comes out of him is not a breath and not a word — it's a low, guttural vibration that she feels through her wrist and up her forearm and into her chest cavity, resonating against her own ribs.

Valko's hand tightens on the back of her neck. Not pushing her away. Pulling her forward. His fingers have lengthened further, she can feel the difference in the span of them across her cervical spine, the knuckles broader, the nails curved and hard against the thin skin below her hairline. His other hand finds her hip, and the grip there is less careful, less measured, five points of pressure that dimple the fabric of her training shorts and pull her body against his with a strength that makes the contact feel like a collision. She is on her knees and he is standing and the geometry of it puts her face level with the path her hand is tracing, and the heat rolling off him is so intense now that the air between them shimmers and warps like the space above a lit burner.

"I told you to leave," he says, but his voice is wrecked. The words come out fractured, each syllable dragged through something that has shredded his vocal cords on the way up, and the register is below anything human, a frequency that resonates in the floor and the walls and the base of her spine. His forehead presses against hers, hard enough to hurt, and she can feel the bones of his skull reshaping under the skin — broader, heavier, the brow ridge thickening by millimeters she can track through the contact. His breath comes in short, sharp bursts against her mouth, and it carries that wild, storm-metal smell, stronger now, so concentrated it coats her tongue.

The thing beneath his skin moves again, and this time it doesn't retreat. It pushes outward against her palm, a broad, rolling pressure that distorts the surface of his stomach in a way she can see if she pulls back far enough to look, and she doesn't pull back. She keeps her hand where it is, fingers curling below the waistband, and she can feel the change happening in real time — the skin growing hotter, the texture shifting beneath her fingertips, something that was smooth becoming rough, something that was muscle becoming denser, rearranging, and his breath hitches and breaks and the hand on her hip pulls her harder against him and his mouth is right there, right there, and he is shaking.

"You need to understand," Valko says, and his lips brush hers when he speaks, not a kiss, not an accident, something that is both and neither, "that if you don't stop — if you stay — I won't be able to stop."

The gym's climate control whines and fails to compensate. The mirrored wall shows them as two shapes wreathed in heat distortion, one kneeling and one standing, locked together at every point of contact, and the digital clock reads 19:44, and Valko is trembling against her like a man holding a door shut against something that is coming through.