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Out loud, on my knees on the floor of a seclusion room, and I have no idea what that sounded like because I have not done it in front of another living soul in a very long time.

And that was not like me at all.

“You are six foot seven,” she said. “You could do the downward dog, and you would still be the most threatening thing in this building.” And there it was again. A laugh I hadn’t had any reason to indulge in for more years than I could remember.

“Yoga was never my style.”

“No,” she said. “I can see that,” she replied with a smirk, and honestly, that was the most relaxed she had ever been around me.

Well, it was time to put an end to that, I thought darkly as I put my hands on her thighs. She jumped, and her hands came down onto my wrists, and I fed on it.

That is what I am, and I have never once lied to myself about it. I liked her frightened. I have always liked her frightened, since the first time I made that woman’s pulse jump in a prison infirmary. Because there was something in the jump, and the catch of her breath. Something about when her hands came up too late, that shot straight to the oldest, darkest part of me.

“What are you doing?” she hissed, and I tightened my hold on her when she started to squirm.

“Easy,” I soothed.

“You shouldn’t be doing this.” I grinned at that and reminded her,

“I think we both know who this body belongs to.” She shuddered at the claim, and it was a reaction I drank in before I moved my hands slowly, up and back down again. I felt her go from rigid to something a great deal less certain, and I watched her mouth come open on a breath she did not intend to give me.

“Relax,” I said. “From what I remember, you enjoyed it the last time I touched you this way.” She frowned at that, believing she could ever lie to me and get away with it.

“I did not.” I leaned in until my mouth was over hers, close enough to feel the breath leave her.

“Liar,” I whispered an inch from her lips, yet I still didn’t kiss her, because I hadn’t lost my mind entirely. It was a reason she didn’t know, and one she certainly hadn’t been brave enough to ask me for.

But the truth was that I hadn’t kissed anybody in over a decade. It wasn’t for lack of opportunity. It was that fucking was fucking. It was a release and a need, simple as that, and it had never once been anything else. I had taken what I wanted from a woman and left the room without a single thought following me out of it.

A kiss, however, was something else entirely. A kiss puts your mouth on somebody and your breath inside them. It was intimate in a way that sex had never once been for me, and intimacy was the one thing I had never given a single person in my life.

Yet I had wanted to kiss the woman in front of me ever since I had her bound in a shower block in another state.

Fuck, but I nearly did it back then, stopping myself just in time. Just the way I had stopped myself every time since, and I was aware of exactly what it meant that I had to keep stopping.

Because I refused to do it in a prison and I refused to do it here. Not in a locked room in an institution with her observation chart lying on the mattress beside her and somebody due to relieve her in four hours.

Because when I finally kissed her, I would be a free man.

So, I went to her throat instead.

She turned her head away, which put the whole length of it right in front of me, and I don’t think she understood that she had done it. I put my mouth just under her jaw, and she went absolutely rigid.

Then I put my fist into her hair and turned her head further, until she made a sound.

“There,” I hummed against her skin. “There she is.”

“I am not… this… this isn’t what I want.”

I put my other hand over the front of her throat, gripped hard and left it there as a warning.

“Your pulse disagrees with you, little bird,” I said. “And it’s a beautiful song that’s been singing to me since the second you opened that shutter.”

“I am nervous. That’s all it is.” I grinned against her neck before I bit her.

Not hard enough to break the skin, despite craving the sight of how her blood running would look against her pale skin. But my bite was enough for her to take the threat seriously. Especially with my teeth embedded at the join of her neck and shoulder, making her cry out, which was fucking music to my ears. Her hands came up and closed in my shirt instead of pushing me away.

“Lying will get you punished,” I growled before using my tongue to take the sting out, sucking on the mark I left.