I feel too much.

His lips find the junction of my throat and shoulder withsurgical intent—not casual affection or reflexive comfort, but a deliberate act of sensory reclamation. Contact that bypasses clinical definition and lands instead in the place where instinct lives.

The kiss detonates through frayed nerve endings still sparking from orgasmic backlash, a delayed echo building upon the aftermath rather than interrupting it. It’s gentle—but only in pressure.The weight behind it is anything but.

It’s a command. It’s confirmation.

It’s Riot.

"Mine," he growls, mouth brushing skin already too sensitive, voice torn from somewhere too deep for strategy or restraint. No pretense of performative dominance or institutionally approved courtship rituals.Just truth—raw, unfiltered, unchained.

And I feel iteverywhere.

Not just in the way my body responds—shivering, trembling, yielding—but in the way somethingfundamentalinside me settles for the first time since Ravenscroft split me in two. His words don’t just land—they integrate.Assimilate.Replace code once burned into synaptic response pathways with something older.

Something real.

He says mine, and my body—my soul—responds like it was designed to recognize his voice in a room full of static.

There’s no fear.

No calculation.

No performance.

Just instinct and the flickering memory of belonging.

And when my mouth opens to respond, the words don’t come from intellect or agenda. They emerge from the same place he touched with his kiss—from the core of what they tried to erase.

“Yours,” I whisper.

Not a concession.

Not a programmatic reply.

A recognition.

A vow spoken without coercion, conditioning, or cost-benefit analysis. No clause. No caveat. No careful distancing.

Just me.

Just him.

And in that moment, held in arms branded by violence and forged by betrayal—I let it be true.

Because I am.

And I always have been.

SIXTEEN

REFLECTIONS IN WATER

~JINX~

Steam billows around me like morning fog over a hidden lake, wrapping my naked body in a cocoon of blessed warmth.

Water cascades over my skin in rivulets that wash away blood and grime, carrying physical evidence of combat down the drain in swirling crimson spirals.