Phei hadn’t meant to kiss Catrina. Not yet and here in this gilded corridor where the boutique’s distant murmur rose like a forgotten hymn and the night clawed coldly at the glass, pressing its black fingers against the fragile warmth they had stolen for themselves.

Not here, with the rest of his crew scattered like careless shadows across the building, doing whatever mortals do when they are not standing six inches from a girl whose entire body thrummed against his like a tuning fork struck by some cruel, laughing god.

He’d meant to say something, something smooth, probably; clever and warm and layered with the kind of dual-meaning that let a woman know she was wanted without making her feel hunted —a velvet-wrapped phrase laced with that practiced duality, the kind that promised sin without ever naming the devil.

He had the words somewhere—queued up, half-formed and ready to deploy.

But fate, that sly bastard with its crooked grin, had other plans; it always did, didn’t it?

One glance and the script crumbled like ash in his mouth.

But then he looked at her again and the words dissolved into smoke, leaving only the hollow ache of desires stirring in his chest.

Because Catrina’s face, tilted up toward his, flushed and trembling and completely unguarded, was doing something to him that no amount of experience had prepared him for.

It wasn’t her beauty—though she was beautiful, achingly so, it didn’t strut into a room demanding applause, just sat there being quietly devastating until a man looked too long and realized his chest hurt and his mouth was dry and his thoughts had stopped forming in any useful order.

It was the quiet ruin of her, the way innocence itself had cracked open like a porcelain doll dropped from a careless height, shards glittering with something far more dangerous than fragility.

It was her eyes:

Dark and wide and looking up at him with such open, terrified, hopeful want that it physically hurt to hold her gaze and physically impossible to look away.

There was nothing in those eyes that had been practiced, armor, and no carefully constructed expression designed to attract without revealing.

She was just—there, naked in the emotional sense.

Every want she’d ever hidden, every fantasy she’d ever constructed about this moment and the nights she’d spent imagining what it would feel like to stand this close to him—all of it was right there on her face, unprotected and offered up with the reckless bravery; she’d decided that if she was going to be vulnerable she might as well be completely fucking vulnerable and let the chips land where they would.

Gods, she was breaking right in front of him, a soft and sinful fracture that made his own soul ache in answer; he could almost hear the delicate snap of whatever last defense she still clung to, and the sound was sweeter than any sin he’d ever tasted from a girl of her caliber...

Phei’s chest tightened.

The hand was still cradling her jaw thumb was still resting against her cheek; Catrina’s pulse hammered beneath his fingers—he felt it in her throat, rapid and desperate, and her lips parted and her breath came shallow and damp against his chin.

She smelled like something clean and warm and young, not perfume, just her; skin and soap and the faint sweetness of lip balm, and beneath all of it the deeper, headier warmth of her body that was so aroused it radiated heat through her clothes.

The same heat that curled around his restraint like smoke, soft and treacherous, promising to burn them both without leaving a single mark.

He lingered on her, Phei let himself look, his eyes traced the flush spreading across her cheeks, the way her lower lip trembled, the way her lashes kept fluttering like her body couldn’t decide whether to keep her eyes open or shut them and surrender.

Phei let himself feel the softness of her face against his palm, the warmth of her skin, the small desperate movements of her jaw as she tried and failed to say something that her mouth had forgotten how to form.

She was irresistible; not the way Valentina was irresistible, or Madam Ashford, his women or the celebrity woman on the rooftop who wielded her beauty like currency.

Catrina was irresistible in the way that an untouched thing was irresistible; innocence wrapped around while her desire for him created something so unbearably sweet and so agonisingly ready that a man’s body stopped asking his brain for permission and simply acted.

And oh, how that readiness undid him—slowly, deliciously, like a blade slipping between ribs in its gentleness.

Phei kissed Catrina...

His hand tightened on her jaw tilting her face up that final half-inch, and his mouth came down on hers—warm, slow, deliberate, his lips found hers with a certainty that left no room for misunderstanding.

This was not accidental but a man taking something he wanted with the full conscious intention of taking it, and making sure the girl he was taking it from felt every single ounce of that intention against her mouth.

Kissing Catrina tasted of surrender and stolen light, soft yet deep enough to drown them both in the fragile dark where broken things fit together perfectly.

Catrina froze completely as every muscle in her body locked at once—her arms, her legs, her fingers, her lungs, everything seized in the full-body paralysis of a girl whose first real kiss had just arrived without warning and whose nervous system.

And she was becoming increasingly wet with every second, but she responded to that by simply shutting down at first and hoping someone else would handle the situation. She was shattered glass held together by nothing but his touch, trembling on the edge of flight or falling, and the sight of it clawed at something ancient and hungry inside him.

Her hands then flew to his sides; she grabbed fistfuls of his shirt and held on, gripping the fabric so tightly her knuckles went bone-white, her fingers dug into the muscle beneath like she was clinging to a cliff face and the ground was very far away and letting go was not an option her body was willing to consider.