Chapter 2 · Against the Cold Lockers

Chapter 2: Against the Cold Lockers

"You don't get to lock me in here, Voss."

The file would call this captivity. My body called it body betrayal, a sensory drag I couldn't scrape off, and the pit law was older than the roster: touch her and die.

The cage door is still vibrating behind him. I can feel it in the floor, a low hum running up through my boots, and Kane Voss is already crossing the gap between us like the space doesn't cost him anything.

"Contraband sweep," he says. "Standard procedure before night rotation."

"At eleven at night. In an empty hallway. Just you."

"You want me to call in a second officer?" His mouth does something close to a smile, the kind that doesn't reach his eyes. "Because I can. I can make this a whole production, Calder. Witnesses. A report with your name at the top."

I don't answer that. A report with my name on it is the last thing I need, not with the trial sheet sitting where it's sitting.

"Hands on the locker," he says.

"Excuse me?"

"You heard me."

The gear locker room smells like gun oil and cold metal and underneath that, faint, something warmer that I refuse to name. My locker's three down from the end, the one with the bent hinge, the one with a folded trial sheet sewn into the lining of my spare vest where nobody with half a brain would think to look. I put my palms flat on the door next to it instead. Close enough that he can't tell the difference. Far enough that my hands aren't shaking on the thing that matters.

"Arms up," he says, and steps in behind me.

I feel him before I feel his hands. Heat first, radiating off him like he's running a fever, and under it that scent again, the one that hit me in the cage an hour ago and turned my knees to water in front of six other fighters. Cedar and gun oil and something underneath both of those that makes my teeth want to ache.

"This isn't procedure," I say. "This is you getting off on power."

"If I wanted to get off, Calder, I wouldn't need a locker room." His hand runs down my side, over my ribs, professional and clinical and absolutely not either of those things, because I can hear his breath change when he gets to my waist. "Hold still."

"Don't touch me like you're not checking me for something else."

He goes still behind me. Just for a second. Just long enough that I know I landed it.

"Like what," he says, low.

"Like I smell different to you tonight than I did yesterday." I turn my head, just enough to catch the side of his face. His jaw is tight. There's a muscle jumping there that I've never once seen on him in two years of him erasing my name off that board like I'm not worth the chalk. "You wiped me off the roster four hours ago. Now you can't keep your hands off the wall I'm standing at."

"Shut up."

"Make me."

That's the mistake. I know it the second it's out of my mouth, know it the way you know you've stepped off a curb into traffic, and then his hand is on my wrist, and the other one is flat against my shoulder, and he's turning me so my back hits the locker door hard enough to rattle the one above it.

"You want to test me," he says, "in a locked room, with nobody coming for either of us for twenty minutes."

"I want you to admit what this is."

"This is a search."

"This is you checking if I'm going into heat on your watch, because if I am, you're the one who has to report it to Daddy, and you'd rather die than explain to the King's examiner why his heir's night-shift reject smells like—"

He pins both my wrists above my head against the metal in one move, fast enough that the breath goes out of me in a single hard note. His body is a line of heat down the front of mine, close enough that I can feel his heartbeat where his chest meets my sternum, too fast for a man who's supposed to be unaffected.

"Say it again," he says.

"Reject." My voice comes out wrecked and I hate it. "That's what you called me in front of the whole night shift four hours ago."

"I never said mate."

"You didn't have to. The whole room smelled it when the cage locked."

His grip tightens on my wrists, not enough to hurt, just enough that I feel every bone in his hand mapping mine. His nose dips, drags along the line of my jaw down to my collarbone, and I feel the sound that comes out of him more than I hear it, something low and involuntary that he'd never let anyone else hear.

"You stink of trial sweat and gun grease," he says against my throat, like it's an insult, like it's not the single most honest thing he's said to me in two years. "And under that you smell like you're mine. I hate it."

"Then let go."

"I can't."

His free hand finds the zipper of my tactical vest and drags it down in one motion, metal teeth screaming apart, cold air hitting my sternum where the fabric falls open. I should be fighting this. Some distant, furious part of me is screaming that I should be driving a knee up between his legs and walking out of this locker room with my spine straight and my dignity intact.

Instead I arch into his hand when it slides inside the ruined vest, flat against my ribs, searing hot against skin gone cold from the locker-room air.

"Kane—"

"Don't," he says, voice wrecked now too, rough against my ear. "Don't say my name like that."

His palm moves, slow, deliberate, up under the hem of my undershirt, and I feel every callus on his fingers drag against my bare stomach, and the whole room goes quiet except for both of us breathing like we just ran the trial twice.