Page 18 of Fifth
“You can. Because you are angry.”
She blinked, throat raw. “What?”
“You have been holding it in since the cage. Every jeer, every drone, every taunt from the guards. Anger sharpens you.” His breath warmed the edge of her mouth, the words intimate as a kiss. “Angry people listen when the anger is pointed. Point it for me. Use it now, Hannah.”
Her chest tightened at the sound of her name on his tongue. He had seen through her, laid bare the fury she had been trying to mask, and the truth of it rattled her. All the fear, all the shame, all the hunger twisted together until she shook with it. She hated that he could name it so easily. And hated more that she needed him to. For a moment she broke, trembling against him, rage and want spilling together until she couldn’t tell one from the other.
Her lip curled. Asound that wasn’t a laugh scraped her throat. “Fine. I’m furious. Use it.”
“Good.” He pushed, grinding her harder against him. His thighs flexed, solid and inexorable. She locked her calves tighter to keep from sliding. “Right.”
She shifted. He followed. The micro-change let him wedge his foot deeper, bumping them the width of a hand. She sensed it like a pulse between her legs. Heat climbed, shame chasing it, pulling a sound from her that had nothing to do withfear.
His breath toughened. “Left.”
They climbed.
Not graceful, but brutal and exact. He moved in relentless bites. When a ledge crumbled, he released and found another before gravity remembered them. When her arms shook, he told her to rest her chin on his shoulder for three breaths, then lift. When a spike jutted near her calf, he shielded her with his thigh, metal screeching across his skin. She smelled his blood, hot iron and salt, sharp and undeniable, smearing her knee as it mixed with her sweat.
“I am fine,” he said before she could speak.
“You’re bleeding.”
The sight of his blood smeared against her skin jolted her. Fear spiked, sharper than the ache in her shoulders. She couldn’t bear the thought of him falling because of a wound she had ignored.
“It will stop.” His voice was calm, but there was a tremor in his body where she clung.
“What if it doesn’t?” The question tore out of her, sharper than she meant, fear twisting her chest.
“It will.” His angle shifted by inches, steady despite the strain. “Do not waste breath on a wound I can close once we are out. Iwill not fall. Not with you.”
Her mouth thinned. “I’ll waste breath on anything I want.”
“That sounds like you.” His grunt carried effort. “Right.”
She obeyed, mouth brushing his jaw, stubble rasping her lips. Heat bloomed beneath her tongue. He made a sound as if biting back a word. Not a curse, but something else. She didn’t ask. She didn’t trust herself to hearit.
They climbed past slick algae. He tested it, rejected it. Shifted toward rusted metal hammered into stone long ago. Hooks and braces bent into sharp mouths. Amisstep would shredthem.
“You knew we had to do this,” she said. “The gate only opens if we go through the pit.”
“Affirmative.” His mouth tightened. “The men who built this preserve understand power. They make buyers watch a choice. It keeps them paying.”
Her lips curled. “I hate them. Hate everything about their games.”
“Good. Hate is fuel.” His tone was flat steel, unyielding. “They will be dealt with. Iwill see it done.”
A shiver worked through her arms where they clung around his neck. She wanted to ask how, wanted to demand details, but the fire in his eyes warned her that answer would be for another day, and that it would be nothing gentle.
He tested a brace with palm, knuckle, wrist, heaving on it. It held. He shifted her, flipping her so she was pressed to his back and hooked his fingers on the brace.
“Hold.”
“I am holding.”
“Harder.”
She locked down. Her belly pressed tight to spine. The center of her pulsed, mortifying and alive. She closed her eyes against the sensation. His body burned. She wanted to be anywhere but here, and yet, exactlyhere.
