Her expression went to a very specific place — the controlled, deliberate flatness of someone deciding not to react to a thing. "The efficient kind."

"Or the kind who learned that walls work better than legs for keeping things out."

The flatness cracked.

Not much. A line appeared between her brows. Her hands, resting on the chair’s arm panels, pressed slightly harder against the surface.

"You have some nerve," she said, "standing in my mechanism room, holding my best-trained operative like luggage, with your—" Her eyes moved down again, despite herself, and she completed the sentence with visible effort. "—with everything on full display, and deciding to philosophize at me."

Tianlong’s attention had moved during this. It had moved to her dress — to the gap where the prosthetic leg met the fabric, to the way the dress fell, to the question his eyes were now posing without any particular urgency.

"Are you wearing panties," he said, "or are you naked underneath?"

The silence had a different quality this time.

"How dare—"

Her hand came up.

Fast, for someone seated, for someone who had started the motion from rest — the flat of her palm aimed at his face with the efficient trajectory of a woman who has landed this particular strike before and knows the angle.

He caught her wrist.

Not urgently. Just — there. His hand closed around her wrist at the peak of the motion, her strike arriving precisely into his grip, the impact absorbed entirely. His fingers were warm. Large. They wrapped her wrist with room remaining.

She pulled.

His grip didn’t move.

She pulled harder, her shoulder engaging, her whole body’s leverage brought into it — and his arm didn’t shift, didn’t adjust, didn’t respond in any way that acknowledged the force she was applying.

He looked at her face.

She looked at his hand.

Then, while she was still processing the grip and the immovability of it, he moved. He brought her wrist down, guided it — not roughly, not with the particular force of a man demonstrating strength, but with the calm, navigating firmness of someone completing an obvious sentence — toward his cock, and pressed her open palm against it.

The sound she made was not language.

Her fingers — instinctively, before her brain had generated the instruction to resist — spread slightly against the heat of him. Against the thickness. Against the overwhelming reality of something that had spent the afternoon inside Rova, still carrying the temperature of that, still carrying a thin film of evidence that her fingers now registered directly.

The heat radiated up her arm.

Her iron-colored eyes went wide.

Not wide the way eyes go wide at a surprising sound. Wide the way they go when the body receives information that the mind is not yet equipped to store — the pupils expanding, the lids pulling back slightly, the whole face briefly open before composure assembled itself over the top of it.

She tried to pull her hand away.

His other hand came up and pressed over the back of hers. Not forcing her fingers to close. Just holding her hand against him, her palm flat on the surface of him, so that the warmth had nowhere to go except into her skin.

"You," he said, looking at her face with the patient attention of a man reading a map, "need body reconstruction."

She laughed.

It came out sharp, reflexive — the laugh of someone who laughs when they’re angry because anger alone doesn’t have anywhere sufficient to go. "Body reconstruction." Her voice was crisp, each word trimmed to its exact shape. "You are standing in my control room with your cock in a dead woman’s hand—"

"She’s sleeping."

"—telling me I need body reconstruction, as though reaching the higher cultivation levels is something you accomplish by—" She stopped. Her hand was still against him. The warmth was still moving through her fingers. "By having some man with a circus-tent erection and a philosophy problem grab your wrist and tell you things are easy."

"Of course it is," Tianlong said.

"Of course it—" She stared at him. "It is not—"

He moved her hand.

Slow. A single deliberate motion. Her palm dragged along the length of him from base to head, the warmth and the heft and the texture of him registering against her fingers whether she wanted it to or not. He brought her hand back. Did it again. The same pace. The same specific unhurried certainty.

Her throat moved.

He could see it — the involuntary swallow, the small motion in her neck, the response of a body receiving information its owner had not authorized.

"Lick it," he said.

Her head came up immediately. "Absolutely—"

He guided her hand away. Stepped half an inch closer. His cock — at the height her face occupied, at the height this chair and this world and the architecture of her life had placed her — hovered at her lip level with the warm, patient certainty of something that had already decided how this would end.

She stared at it.

The amber screen-light ran along the length of it. One hundred panels showed them from one hundred angles.

"Don’t," she said. Low. A warning that contained the frequency of someone who has given warnings that have been respected before and is not yet willing to accept that this is a different category of situation.

He didn’t move back.

Her lips were — at this distance, unavoidably — approximately three centimeters from the head of him. She could feel the heat radiating off it against her face. She could smell the afternoon, the hours of accumulated warmth, the musk of a man who had been exactly as the screens had shown him.

Her jaw set.

And she bit him.

The motion was fast, decisive — the full press of her teeth against him with the weight of everything she had: anger and humiliation and the particular fury of a woman who has built an empire in this chair and will not sit here and be treated like an objective — all of it focused into that single, sharp point of contact.

Her teeth registered the surface of him.

Her eyes went still.