"Say it and mean it." Knox's thumb is still on my pulse, right where my collar used to be, and my hand is still fisted in his shirt like it forgot how to let go.
"Stop." It comes out on a breath instead of an order. Weak. Wrong.
"That's not a no, Voss. That's a maybe with your legs still open."
Heat crawls up my neck. I hate that he's right. I hate more that my spine's still arched off the cold steel, chasing whatever's left of him.
The wash corridor door takes another hit, dull and far off, somebody's fist or a shoulder, and a voice — Delgado, maybe — yells something about the override clock. Neither of us turns our head. The vault's gone quiet in the way a held breath is quiet.
"They're going to get through that."
"No they're not." His mouth drags along my jaw, not a kiss, a warning shaped like one. "I built that door. I own the code. You think a crowbar beats my own hardware?"
"I've got a tray with your fire on it." My voice cracks in the middle and ruins the effect. "Chain of custody. The second this seal breaks, that stem goes to the state lab with my name on the log. Your code doesn't unwrite that."
He goes still. One full second, real, not performed. Then his hand tightens at my hip and drags me half an inch closer, like he's burying the hesitation in me instead of dealing with it.
His eyes flick to my mouth, then back up, like he's checking whether I'll bolt if he blinks first. I don't. That's the part that scares me — not that he's got me caged against the steel, but that some stupid, traitorous piece of me doesn't want out.
"You'd love that," he says against my throat. "Handing me over. Standing there with your little tray, feeling righteous while they walk me out."
"Try me."
"I am trying you." His fingers find the torn collar he ripped open earlier and pull it wider, baring my shoulder to air gone cold since the sprinklers cut the heat.
"Telling me to stop with that mouth. Pulling me in with those hands. You don't even know which one of you is lying anymore."
He's not wrong. I hate him for it more than I've hated anyone who ever lied to my face.
My fingers stay knotted in his shirt. I don't push. My back arches instead, chasing the heat coming off him through wet cotton, and the second I do it his breath goes ragged right against my skin — like my body just confessed something my mouth's been denying for ten straight minutes.
"There it is." No laugh left in his voice now. "That's the truth. Right there."
His palm drags down my ribs, slow, deliberate, memorizing the shape of me through soaked fabric, and I bite down on the sound trying to climb out of my throat. It gets loose anyway — small, wrecked — and he catches it against my mouth like he's been waiting on it since the tray hit the light.
"Look at me." His thumb tilts my chin up when I try to duck it. "Not the door. Me."
"You want me to stop," he says, "say it clean. No shake in it."
I open my mouth. Nothing clean comes.
His hand finds the button of my slacks. I know exactly how this ends if I let him. My hand should push him off — instead it lands on his wrist and just holds, like I'm the one steering, which is the biggest lie either of us has told tonight.
"Knox." The only word left that isn't a lie.
"Say it again like that."
The button gives. Cold air hits skin already burning and the sound that comes out of me isn't a protest, isn't a plea, it's both, tangled together with no seam between them. His forehead drops to mine, close enough that I feel his breath shaking too — close enough this stopped being just him doing this to me about three minutes ago.
The pounding on the corridor door keeps going, further off now, background noise, somebody yelling about the forty-eight-hour override, about opening up before the crew loses its patience and calls it over his head. Neither of us looks toward it. His forearm's braced against the steel by my ear, caging me in heat where the vault's gone to ice everywhere else.
His fingers hook the last scrap of fabric still on me and peel it aside, slow, like he wants me to feel every second of losing it.
The steel's ice-cold against my spine, biting through what's left of my shirt, and he's furnace-hot everywhere he's touching, so my body doesn't know which temperature to answer. My heart's slamming so hard I feel it in my molars, and when I look up his pupils are blown wide, jaw locked tight, like he's fighting the same war I am and losing slower.
"Say I'm the only one who ever gets you like this." His mouth is at my ear now, teeth grazing the shell of it. "Say it, Rhea. I want to hear you own it before I take anything else."
"You don't get to own—"
"I already do." His hips press me flush into the steel and I feel exactly how close, exactly how ready, exactly how little space is left between the two of us and a line neither of us walks back from. "Your tray. Your signature. My door, my code, my building, and right now, mine to burn if I want to. So say it."
"I'm not yours."
"Your body already told me otherwise." His voice has gone rough, wrecked at the edges. "Beg me to stop, or beg me to finish. Pick one. You don't get a third option."
I open my mouth to answer him and there's nothing left between us — no fabric, no distance, nothing but the blunt, scorching press of him right at the edge of me, not moving, waiting, his whole body shaking with the effort of not moving.
"Say it," he breathes, right against my mouth. "Beg, or watch me burn every scrap of proof you brought in here to hang me with."
My fingers dig into his forearm, nails biting skin, my own pulse slamming so loud it drowns out the hammering on the corridor door, and I can't tell anymore if I'm holding him back or holding him right there, right at that last half-inch, with the whole vault gone silent around us except for both our ragged breathing and a fist still hammering somewhere far away on a door neither of us is going to open.