Chapter 287- Miss Queen

And his eyes had not left Avriana’s face.

The red on his cheek.

He looked at her, the dark, level, attending quality of eyes that had received the information of being slapped and were sitting with it with the flat, specific quality of a man deciding what the information meant.

Then his eyes moved.

Down.

Not to Avriana’s chest. Lower. Her right leg.

Avriana followed his gaze.

The prosthetic was on the mattress beside her.

She had not noticed it fall. She had not felt it detach in the scramble—or she had felt something, but the something had been indistinguishable from everything else her body was receiving, and she had not flagged it. It lay beside her on the expensive hotel sheet—the titanium composite, the custom-fitted, the excellent, technically correct, objectively functional—lying there with the flat, inert quality of an object that was no longer in use.

Because it was no longer necessary.

Her right leg.

She looked at it.

Below the knee—below where the stump had been—the full, real, present quality of a leg. Not the slow, science-fiction quality of something recently grown and unfinished. The completed, skin-warm, anatomically present quality of a leg that belonged to her body and always had. The ankle. The curve of the calf. The small, real, human toes against the hotel sheet.

She could feel the sheet against her toes.

The cotton of it, the fine, thread-count quality of the fabric pressing against the bottom of her foot, the small, particular sensation of texture against skin that she had not felt in eight years and was feeling now in an overwhelming, absolutely real quality of sensation that had never stopped being possible—that had simply been waiting.

Her mouth opened.

No sound came.

’That’s...’

’That’s my leg.’

’That is my—’

His hand.

Moving. His hand leaving Mira’s hip, reaching across the mattress—the full, unhurried, deliberate quality of it—his palm closing around her new ankle. The warm, full, human contact of a hand on skin that had not been touched in eight years.

She flinched.

The full-body, electric, involuntary quality of the flinch—a violent jolt of a nervous system receiving sensation through a pathway it had been routing around for eight years and had just found open. The jolt running from his palm at her ankle up through the newly grown calf, the knee, the thigh, meeting the rest of her body’s signals at the hip and arriving in her spine as something between ecstasy and shock.

"Hh—?!"

She gasped.

Her hands flying to her own face—the palms pressing against her mouth, the tears running between her fingers, the wet, unstoppable quality of them—her eyes fixed on the leg, on his hand wrapped around her ankle, on the titanium prosthetic lying inert beside her.

From his cheek—the red handprint still blooming there—to the leg—to the prosthetic beside her—back to his face.

"How," she said, the word arriving in a register she did not recognize as her own. Low, breaking, stripped of everything except the raw question. "How did you—"

He moved.

The single, smooth, unhurried quality of him crossing the space between them—Mira’s body making an air-emptied "Hhaah—" of a woman from whom something had just been withdrawn, her hands scrabbling at the sheets as he pulled out—and then he was in front of Avriana.

His hands finding her hips.

Her dress—the remnant of it, the silk rucked around her waist—his fingers going to the waistband of her underwear with the flat, direct quality of someone completing a task. No ceremony. No asking. His hands pulling—the waistband drawing down her hips, over the new leg, over both ankles—the fabric clearing her feet and leaving her bare from the waist down on a hotel bed in Las Vegas in the early hours of the morning.

The cold air.

Hitting the exposed, intimate warmth of her—the dark thatch of hair at the center of her, the soaked, sensitive heat of her, all of it suddenly present in the lamplight with no covering and no architecture between her and the room.

Her hands flew down.

Both of them—the involuntary, mortified, deeply human reflex of a woman reaching to cover herself, her palms pressing against the dark hair of her own mound with the desperate quality of someone using both hands for a job that required more hands than were available.

He looked at her.

The red handprint still sitting on his cheek—vivid, warm, present, undeniable evidence that she had put it there.

He tilted his head.

The dark, level, entirely unbothered quality of eyes that had just healed a woman’s leg and were now looking at her over the curve of his cheekbone with the flat, warm, specific quality of a man who had made up his mind about something.

"Now," he said.

His voice low. Unhurried. The warm, direct, entirely unapologetic quality of someone making a true statement.

"Now that I have healed your leg—"

His hand closed around her wrist, the one covering herself. He drew it—not forcing, the slow, specific, irresistible quality of being moved by something that has no intention of being argued with—away from her body.

"—spread them."

"I want to fuck you hard." His eyes on hers. The red mark on his cheek. The full, warm, present, unavoidable quality of a man who had just given her back something she had lost and was telling her, with the unhurried authority of someone who had already decided, what came next.

"For slapping me."

His hand around her wrist.

The slow, irresistible pull of it — drawing her palm away from the dark thatch of hair at her center, the cold air hitting the exposed, intimate heat of her with complete, unforgiving clarity, the lamplight catching the wet evidence of everything her body had been doing without her permission for the last ten minutes.

She did not spread them.

Her thighs pressed together — the rigid, furious, trembling quality of legs that had just been returned to her and were already being used as a battleground. Her jaw locked. Her hands, freed from their post, gripped the sheet instead.

"You healed my leg," she said. The low, stripped, raw quality of a voice with nothing left to perform. "That was already given. That was already—"

"The exchange," he said, "was discussed before the healing."

The flat, simple quality of it. Not a reminder. A correction. The way a man states the terms of something that was already settled when both parties agreed to them.

Her mouth opened.

Closed.

The recall arriving not as a thought but as a physical sensation — the night in the mansion, the candlelight, his hands on her leg, the ache of it, the desperate negotiating quality of her own voice saying ’anything, I’ll agree to anything if you can fix this—’ and his eyes, level and dark and already certain, saying ’then sleep with me.’

The plural. ’Me.’ And she had said yes without asking what that meant because she had been in pain and he had been the only answer.

She had forgotten.

She had, quite genuinely, completely, and conveniently forgotten.

His thumb moved over her inner wrist — the slow, attending quality of it, tracing the pulse point — watching her face with the patient, dark, entirely unhurried quality of a man who had all night and knew it.

"Miss Queen."

Her name in his mouth had quality of a leash.

"...I remember," she said.