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He crosses the corridor in two strides and steps into my space and into my room all at once, both broad hands coming up to cradle my face—gently, so gently, for hands that have done what his have done—and he kisses me like my life is the thing depending on it.

Three solid seconds of mouth, heat, and certainty, the kiss of a man planting a flag, and it does what nothing in this beautiful unbearable room could: it stops the free fall.

It gives me a floor.

It shouldn’t work.

By every rule I’ve ever lived by, the answer to a man who frightens you should never be to fall into his mouth—and he does frighten me, this one, with his pale predator’s eyes and the body count behind them.

But terror and safety have always lived closer together in me than is healthy, twin houses on the same narrow street, and somewhere in the poison and the peace my wires have crossed entirely, so that the most dangerous thing in Arch Hollow has become the only thing that feels like solid ground. I should examine that. Later, when I’m capable of examining anything, when the spiral has loosened its grip enough for the strategist to climb back into the driver’s seat.

Right now there’s only the floor he’s given me, and the desperate animal relief of having something—anything—to stand on.

The door shuts behind him—I don’t register how, whether he kicked it or it swung or the universe simply decided to grant us the privacy—and I’m climbing him.

There’s no decision in it.

My body makes the call my spiraling mind is too scrambled to make, and it decides, wholly and immediately, that the answer to drowning is to wrap myself around the one solid thing within reach and refuse to let go. I climb this giant of a man like the tree I dreamed of climbing once, hands fisting in his hair, legs banding his waist, and our mouths come together again—deeper this time, tongues entwining, a kiss with no manners left in it.

I do not peel myself off him. I cannot. He is the only stable surface in a world that has gone soft and sweet and treacherous, and I cling to his stability like a woman clinging to a spar in a flat calm sea, which is somehow more terrifying than any storm.

He’s bare.

I register it through the haze—the broad expanse of inked, scarred, furnace-warm skin under my hands, nothing on him but a pair of black boxers clinging to him in a way I already know is gloriously temporary. His scent floods me, woodsmoke and worn leather and warm iron, the smell of a building mid-burn—and the cruel joke of it is that the smell of fire is the thing that finally makes me feel safe.

It pours into me and pours the calm with it, even as the rest of me keeps sinking, even as some far-off frightened part of me notes that I am letting a man I’ve known for days become my whole horizon and that this, too, might be a beautifully wrapped trap with a hook inside it.

I let it be a trap.

Here is the secret I’d burn a second penthouse before admitting aloud: I have spent my whole life being wanted, and never once being held. The drunk Alphas wanted me. The man with the deed wanted me. Dorian wanted me the way a collector wants a rare and decorative thing, behind glass, dusted, displayed.

Wanting I understand;wanting is a transaction, a leverage, a leash I learned young to hold the other end of.But this—the way Riot’s arms close around me like he’s trying to put me back together, the way his hands map my spine as if checking I’m all still here—this isn’t wanting.

This is keeping.

And my poor starved, suspicious, brilliant heart does not have a single defense built for being kept, because it never once imagined it would need one.

He has me on the bed in moments.

Pressed back into the cool slide of those pink silk sheets, in the corner of the room—and even sinking, even unmade, the cataloguing part of me notes the geography with a flicker of something like recognition, because it’s the corner.

The far corner, where I have always, in every cell and every room they’ve ever caged me in, arranged the things I prize most. My dolls. My pole. The few possessions worth protecting. Someone built this bed into my corner. Someone knew. The thought arrives soft and unsettling and is immediately swept away by the weight of him settling over me, caging me against the silk with his arms braced either side of my head.

I look up into those pale eyes—cynical and beautiful and fixed on me with an intensity that borders on worship—and I feel, absurdly, like a woman gazing up at the stars and begging them, just this once, for a miracle. For one merciful pause in the spiral. For something to be simple.

He doesn’t rush me.

That’s the thing that nearly breaks me—that a man built entirely out of violence and impatience holds himself still above me, taking the weight on his braced arms, letting me set the pace even as the heat rolls off him in waves and his pulse hammers visibly in the inked column of his throat.

He is shaking, very slightly, with the effort of the restraint. For me. The most dangerous man in the building is trembling with the work of being gentle, and the sight of it does something to the spiral—doesn’t end it, nothing ends it, but turns it, for one suspended moment, into something that feels less like falling and more like being caught mid-fall and held there, weightless, in a grip that has decided not to let the ground have me.

“Pretty Boy,” I whisper.

He grins—that flash of glamorous, dangerous teeth, the grin that empties rooms and apparently fills me—and he leans down and kisses me again, but soft this time. Astonishingly soft. A tenderness so at odds with the brute the world built him into that it nearly undoes the small composure I’ve managed to scrape together.

“Explanations later, Vex,” he murmurs against my mouth, low and rough, a sinful little vow breathed straight into me. “Right now, I’ll tell you exactly how this goes. If I don’t get myself eight inches deep inside you in the next several minutes, I’m going on a killing spree across this whole perfect parody of a town—and the only thing I’ll regret, while I’m doing it, is not having fucked you first.”

Eight inches.