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Hale doesn’t know she’s a piece on a board she didn’t set.

She thinks she walked in here to run a homicide and instead she’s providing cover for three men to circle the same woman without any of them having to say the word out loud.

Riot in his chilled chamber, plotting his way back into the same air as her.

Crowe, drifting toward this building like a moth that’s scented a particular flame.

And me, having quietly annexed her cell and dressed it with the one gift guaranteed to reach her, telling myself it was clinical.

It wasn’t clinical.

None of it has been clinical since the moment she said woof and sat. We are not investigators orbiting a suspect.

Because she’s barely dressed.

She danced herself out of the jumpsuit at some point in those five hours and she’s standing in nothing but a bra and underwear the pale nude of bare skin, the set leaving little to the imagination and offering everything to the eye—and whatthe eye finds isn’t merely the obvious, though the obvious is considerable.

It’s the map.

Her body is a document written in a language I happen to read fluently. A dancer’s architecture, yes, long and deliberate. But beneath the grace, the rest of the text: the silvered seam of an old break healed without proper setting, the puckered ghost of a restraint worn far too tight for far too long, the faint geometry of teeth at the wrist, a constellation of small white punctuation marks scattered across ribs and hip that each, individually, tell a sentence I want to finish.

Her scars.

Heavens help me…

Every one of them is a record of agony survived, of a body that was hurt and refused, repeatedly, magnificently, to stop—and the recognition of that, the kinship of it, does something to me that has no place in a homicide investigation.

It isn’t the wounds that move me.

It’s the surviving.

The defiant, unkillable fact of her, standing damp and unbroken in a cell that has eaten stronger people whole, and I am not built of stone no matter how convincingly I’ve dressed the absence up. My pulse, which obeys me in front of finger-collectors, slips its leash.

Heat coils low and unwelcome.

My cock twitches behind the immaculate line of my trousers like the body underneath the suit has remembered it’s a body, and perhaps I need what Riot has—a chilled chamber and an endless cold shower—to drown the part of me that has begun, urgently, to imagine.

Imagining what it would be like to be buried in her.

Envisioning worse, softer things.

Daring to dream—and here is the door I keep nailed shut sliding open a treacherous inch—climbing onto that pole beside her.

Which...no.

That belongs to a chapter of me that hasn’t seen daylight in a decade, securely buried under degrees and citations and very good wool.

A past of survival by any means the night demanded, in rooms lit red, before I discovered that the one weapon no one could confiscate was the machine between my ears, and turned it, coldly and completely, into the respectable fortune and the respected name and the man who now stands fully clothed and composed and pretending his heart rate is his own.

I was very young, very pretty, and very poor.

The city has an old and reliable economy for boys who are all three. I learned the steel before I learned the science—learned how to make a body say what a room wanted to hear, how to read an appetite across a dim floor and price it, how to climb and arch and smile through whatever the smiling cost.

I climbed out, eventually, hand over patient hand, the same way I climbed everything:by understanding the mechanism better than the people who built it.

No one alive connects the doctor to the boy.

I made certain of the gap with the same thoroughness I bring to everything. And now a woman in a pink jumpsuit has spent five hours doing, for the sheer wild joy of it, the precise thing I once did to stay fed, and the sight has reached across ten sealed years and rung the old bell.