Page 20 of Shatter
Dawson shook his head immediately, hands gripping his shoulders. “Don’t go slow because you’re afraid,” he said. “Go slow so I can take it.”
Something in Xaiden’s face changed at that. He reached down between them, slicking his fingers again, making sure, preparing him carefully, one more stretch, one more check, until Dawson was pushing back impatiently, breath coming fast and uneven.
Then Xaiden moved over him and pressed in slowly.
Dawson’s back arched off the basalt immediately, a broken sound pulled out of him as the stretch built, slow and steady and unavoidable. Xaiden stopped partway and held there, breathing hard, giving Dawson time, one hand braced next to his shoulder, the other gripping his hip.
“Look at me,” Xaiden said again, voice tight.
Dawson forced his eyes open. Focused on his face. On the scar along his jaw. On his mouth, open as he breathed. On his eyes, dark and locked on his.
“I’m here,” Xaiden said quietly.
Then he pushed the rest of the way in, slow and deep, and Dawson gasped and clung to him, legs locking around his waist, forehead pressed hard to his shoulder as his body adjusted around him.
They stayed like that for a long moment, not moving, both breathing hard, bodies pressed together, the green light pulsing around them.
Then Xaiden moved.
Not gentle. Slow and heavy, each movement deliberate, deep enough that Dawson lost the ability to think in full sentences. The pressure built and built, every movement dragging against nerves already lit up from Xaiden’s hands and mouth and careful preparation. Dawson held on to him and moved back againsthim, meeting each push, needing more, the friction and pressure turning into something overwhelming and consuming.
“More,” Dawson said, voice breaking. “Don’t stop. Don’t you dare stop.”
Xaiden’s grip on his hips tightened and the pace shifted, still deep, still heavy, but faster now, the control starting to slip. Dawson said his name over and over, like it was the only word he had left, like if he stopped saying it the moment would end.
When he came it hit hard, sudden and total, like something that had been building for years finally breaking loose all at once. He clung to Xaiden and buried his face in his neck, breathing hard, body still shaking as Xaiden followed with a low, rough sound against his shoulder, his grip tightening almost painfully for a second before he went still on top of him.
Afterward Dawson lay on the warm basalt with his chest rising and falling, Xaiden’s weight still partly over him, the green ceiling pulsing above. The Compliance Bracelet on his wrist remained dark and silent. No record. No log. The dead zone had done its work.
The bracelet had witnessed something it would never report.
That felt right.
The tide was the only clock. Dawson lay with his head on Xaiden’s chest, listening to the steady rise and fall, one hand still resting on the scar along Xaiden’s palm, thumb moving over it slowly, like he was memorizing it.
Chapter 6
Xaiden
The air changed at the Cantilever’s second landing. Xaiden registered it the way he registered pressure shifts in hostile rooms, not as temperature but as the removal of something that had been there moments before.
The cave’s mineral warmth and the salt-green scent woven into his clothes were stripped away by the manor’s filtration until nothing remained but processed neutrality, the atmosphere of a building that treated its own air like evidence.
He climbed the final stretch of the glass catwalk and the Abalone draft found him through the eastern vent, but it was wrong tonight. Not the low coastal current the structure usually carried. This was thinner, a high cycling whine moving through tempered glass like a complaint the house had finally stopped hiding.
He stopped at the studio door.
The light through the frosted glass was wrong. Dawson worked in warm amber, a single drafting lamp angled low over whatever he was rendering, the rest of the studio left in a comfortable dark that mapped the boundaries of his concentration. Xaiden had learned to read that light as clearly as a floor plan.
This light was blue white and absolute. Illumination that did not care what it revealed.
He opened the door.
His tactical read took two seconds.
Alden St. Claire sat at the drafting table, at ease in someone else’s space in the way of a man who had already calculated why he belonged there. His charcoal suit absorbed the cold light instead of reflecting it, a deliberate choice in a room built forsomeone who read the world through texture first. The suit did not belong in the space and that was the point.
To the left, Eddy Collins stood near the specimen shelving, arms crossed, positioned so he could block the door with a single step. He had already worked out the angles. So had Xaiden.
