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The floor was not winning.

Across the gym, one of the crew was doing pull-ups with the slow rhythm of someone killing time. Another sat on the weight bench scrolling his phone. She didn’t care about them at all. She kept her chin down and watched Ryder through her lashes, careful to look like she wasn’t watching at all.

Her world had split into halves she couldn’t reconcile over the past two days. The public half was degradation: kneeling, silence, the casual cruelty of men who called her pet and meant it.

The private half had been something else entirely.

She’d had sex before Ryder, of course. It had been fine. Infrequent, unremarkable, confirmation that the whole activity was overrated by people who hadn’t discovered a good spreadsheet.

Two nights with Ryder had wrecked all of that.

He’d let her lead. Every time. He’d built a space for them in that little room where every choice was hers. On that bed—regardless of whether she was on top, under him, or he was plowing into her from behind—every decision had been hers.

Not in a stilted, careful way that would’ve made their lovemaking awkward. Ryder wasn’t gentle. Definitely wasn’t soft. But he was willing to follow her lead… or take the lead himself when she ran out of ideas.

In their bed, she’d never felt anything but powerful and cherished.

He was doing it to deliberately create the balance. Taking a situation that could’ve been mentally scarring for her and making it wonderful instead.

When we get out of here, I’m going to take you somewhere private where we can make as much noise as we want.

He’d said that with his mouth in between her legs, her thighs sprawled open to make room for his wide shoulders. She’d had to pull a pillow over her head to keep everyone in the house from hearing her.

Ryder probably could’ve argued that the noise would’ve helped their cover, but he hadn’t. The cover and what they did in that bedroom were two different things.

One of the crew members crossed to the water cooler, and her eyes tracked him automatically. Before she could stop herself, her eyes locked on him. He favored his left side. Old injury, long enough ago that he didn’t think about it anymore, but his body still did. Knee, not hip. The hip would have changed his whole gait, and his gait was fine until the turn. The slight hesitation before he straightened was the joint loading wrong, and if the joint loaded wrong, he’d have adjusted how he sat, how he stood, how he⁠—

Eyes down, Cassie.

Ryder’s voice, steady and low. Not the real Ryder but the version she’d built from hearing him say it in front of the Diehls, in their room, his mouth against her hair while her breathing steadied.

Her eyes dropped. Her breathing slowed. The pull released.

All from hearing his voice in her head.

Nothing else had ever even come close to being this effective at stopping the spiraling. She’d tried the breathing exercises, grounding techniques, even naming five things she could see, as if the problem were too few sensory inputs and not catastrophically too many.

None of it had worked. But Ryder’s voice in her head had.

She was choosing not to interrogate the feminism of that. His voice helped. That was all she cared about. Practicality had always been her love language.

And practicality was telling her they had to get her back to that air-gapped computer soon.

Someone had been awake in the predawn hours each night when they’d snuck out in that direction. Both times, they’d redirected to the bathroom instead. They could try to break in midmorning when everyone was almost guaranteed to be sleeping, but the daylight hours felt riskier.

They were running out of time. Those children were running out of time. They had to get on that system and discover who the kidnappers were so this all could be stopped.

Her attention was drawn back to Ryder as he traded the bag gloves for sparring gloves and stepped onto the mat.

After a little goading from the others, one of the crew pulled on a second pair and stepped up across from him, a stocky man with the kind of confident build that won bar fights. A little shorter than Ryder, but bigger, beefier.

She watched as best she could from her head angle, although she didn’t know why she bothered. Nobody was paying attention to her anyway because they wanted to watch the fight.

Ryder and the other man circled for a beat. The man threw a combination, and Ryder read it before it arrived. He slipped the jab, caught the cross on his forearm, and used the momentum to sweep the guy’s legs out. Stocky dude hit the mat hard enough that she heard the air leave him.

The crew member got up and rolled his shoulders. He came in again with a low kick that Ryder blocked without shifting his stance, then tried to close the distance with an overhand right. Ryder stepped inside it, got a hand behind his neck, and put him down again. Faster this time.

The man tapped out. Cassandra smiled underneath her bowed head.