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“Everything the empire touched in me feels engineered.”

“That wasn’t my question.”

His hand tightened once, then relaxed. “No.” She lifted her head. They were close enough that his breath moved across her mouth.

“May I kiss you?” he asked.

Kesta’s fear did not disappear. Neither did the band, the drone, the claim, or the possibility that someone had selected them before they met. But there was no council waiting for proof of consummation tonight, no rival camp leader to deter and no law to satisfy. She wanted him for a reason that could not be entered in a ledger.

“Yes.”

Dreven touched his mouth to hers as though he still expected the world to punish him for wanting anything gently. Kesta caught his tunic and pulled him closer, taking the restraint out of the kiss herself. His hand moved from her shoulder to the side of her neck and paused there, warm and steady, while his tail curled around the pallet leg rather than her. She smiled against his mouth. “Still disciplining the tail?”

“It has opinions.”

“I noticed.” Kesta slid onto his thigh. “It can touch me.”

The muscular length loosened from the pallet and curved around her ankle, warm scales settling against skin without tightening. The small contact sent an absurdly intimate shiver through her. Dreven felt it and deepened the kiss. The band at her wrist flashed white. Both of them stopped.

Dreven released her at once. Kesta looked down at the light, waiting for the prompt that had appeared the first time they mated. Nothing came. No instruction, no claim pathway, only a brief pulse synchronized to the implant beneath Dreven’s skin.

“It is reading us again,” he said.

“Yes.”

“We can stop.”

Kesta looked back at him. “We can. Do you want to?” The answer showed in his face before he spoke. “No.”

“Neither do I.” She touched the band with two fingers. “Last time there was a legal reason to keep going. Tonight there isn’t. I think I need that distinction.”

Dreven’s expression softened into something that hurt more than desire. “Then the machine watches. It does not choose.”

“Exactly.”

Kesta kissed him again before either of them could turn the sentence into a principle large enough to hide inside. This time his arms closed around her without the anxious hesitation of their first night. He knew how she liked to be held now, and she knew the places where his apparent invulnerability became sensation: the inside curve of his horns, the edge where black scales gave way to bronze skin, the base of his tail where a touch made his breath catch.

They undressed with less ceremony. Kesta pushed his tunic over his shoulders and found herself smiling when one horn caught in the fabric. Dreven gave her a look of offended dignity that made her laugh hard enough to lose her grip.

“Do not tell Tavi.”

“I am absolutely telling Tavi.”

He pulled the garment free and silenced her with his mouth. The laughter remained between them, changing the heat into something easier and more dangerous. Kesta had expected sex on Kharon-Veil to feel like one more survival decision. Instead, with Dreven, it could apparently include teasing a warlord about his horns while his hands slid beneath her shirt.

His palms moved over her slowly, no longer tentative but still attentive. Kesta guided one lower and felt his breath roughen when she opened her legs around his thigh. He kissed her throat, her collarbone, the sensitive skin below her ear, and every place the empire had never thought to classify because pleasure without control had no use to it.

When his mouth closed over her breast, Kesta arched into him. The band gave another faint pulse. She ignored it. Dreven did too.

She pushed him back onto the pallet and followed. The room was too small for the breadth of his shoulders and far too small for his horns, forcing him to angle his head while Kesta straddled him. The position made his tail curl around her calf again. She touched the base of one horn and watched his eyes close.

“Sensitive?”

“You ask that as though you have forgotten.”

“I am collecting repeat observations.”

“You are a menace.”