Page 112 of Shadowed Sins: Nitro

"You don't do a lot of things you've done with me." His lips brush my forehead. "Stay. Please."

The please breaks through my last defense. I relax against him, letting his warmth seep into places that have been cold for thirteen years.

"If you tell anyone I stayed—"

"I won't." He pulls the covers over us, cocooning us in warmth and darkness. "This is just for us."

Us. Like we're something beyond handler and asset. Like we're...

I don't have words for what we might be becoming.

His breathing starts to even out, but his arms don't loosen. Even in near-sleep, he holds me like I might disappear. Like I'm something precious that requires protecting.

My feet shift against the sheets. First position. Second. Third. Fourth. Fifth.

The positions of a girl who loved to dance, carried in muscle memory too deep for any conditioning to erase.

I wait for it to happen. The wall to rebuild. The clinical distance to return. The switch that turns me back into a weapon.

It doesn't come.

I'm lying here covered in sweat and cum and bruises, completely defenseless for the first time in thirteen years, and I can't find the part of me that knows how to be anything else.

He broke something inside me.

twenty-six

Mira

The first thing I register is my body's betrayal.

Deep internal muscles protest with every micro-movement. Hip flexors burn from positions I haven't held in years. The specific soreness between my legs makes me clench involuntarily, feeling phantom sensations of him still inside me.

The walls won't rebuild.

My eyes snap open to industrial beams. Morning light through massive windows that should trigger every defensive instinct. Instead, my body catalogues exits while simultaneously curling deeper into sheets that smell like sex and safety andhim.

Eight hours. I slept eight hours in someone else's bed without weapons.

When I stand, my legs shake. Each step down the steel stairs brands last night into muscle memory—bruises on my hips where he gripped too hard, wrists that ache from being pinned, the bite mark on my shoulder pulsing with my heartbeat.

Mine made those marks. Mine.

Then the smell hits me.

Butter melting on hot surfaces. The yeast-sweet promise of rising dough. Something else that tugs at memories so deep I thought they'd been excavated and destroyed.

No. This isn't possible.

In the kitchen, Jax stands at the granite counter surrounded by ingredient chaos. Cottage cheese, eggs, flour, sour cream. A small jar of what looks like berry jam. His hair sticks up at angles that make my fingers itch to smooth it down. Or mess it up worse.

Mark him. Make sure everyone knows he's yours.

When he notices me, his entire body shifts—shoulders squaring then immediately softening, hand running through already wrecked hair.

"Oh! You're—I didn't hear you come down—" His fingers start their nervous tap against his thigh, but slower this morning. Different. Like he's processing something that makes his usual scattered energy more focused. "I wanted to make you breakfast. Something special. So I looked up fancy Russian breakfast stuff online and found like forty different recipes for these things, and I wasn't sure which one was right, so I kind of combined three different versions and hoped for the best, which is probably totally wrong but—"

He indicates the pan where golden circles sizzle. Perfect golden circles that look exactly like—