It was the silence that unnerved him the most. Not the kind that came with tension, or waiting, or fear—no. That kind of silence he understood. He could catalog it. Expected it in the hallways of Urbanshade, where noise only came with problems, and quiet meant survival. But this... this was something else. This was domestic quiet. The dull hum of an AC unit pushing filtered air through high-end vents. The occasional clink of glass in the sink when she forgot to rinse it. The tap-tap-tap of her bare feet crossing tile, heading toward him, away from him, through this damn condo that was too large, too open, and entirely too bright compared to what he'd spent the last decade crawling through. The walls didn’t sweat salt here. The floor didn’t flood with half-treated seawater. There was no alarm wail bleeding through the ducts, no reek of burning circuits or chemical preservatives. Instead, it smelled like soap. Her shampoo. Warm sheets. Spices. Her.

And she was wearing that shirt again—if it could even be called a shirt. Loose, soft fabric that hung too low on one shoulder and rode up too high on her thighs. Thin enough for light to bleed through if she stood in front of a window. The kind of thing she wore around him now like it was normal. Like it meant nothing. As if the last ten years of prison, tests, containment, and half-spoken threats hadn't carved a ritual into his every glance, touch, and twitch of restraint. Sebastian hadn’t moved in the last ten minutes. Not really. He’d sat back against the deep couch cushions, body curled in a deliberate coil to take up less space, tail half-looped beneath the coffee table. The lamp cast a yellow glow against the curve of his jaw and down the angle of his scaled chest, throwing shadows over the ridges of his gill slits as they shifted with every breath. His claws, resting on one thigh, tapped out a rhythmic, muted pattern—tik, tik, tik, tik—that only stopped when he remembered he was doing it. His third eye blinked sideways, tracking her movement out of habit, despite the way his main gaze remained fixed on the datapad in his lap, pretending to read the same passage he’d been stuck on since she walked into the room.

She passed by again. He could hear the subtle drag of fabric against her skin, the whisper of it swaying just a second behind her stride. Could feel the minute change in air pressure when she leaned over to grab something from the counter—warm skin radiating heat that his body responded to instinctively. A twitch in his tail. A shallow inhale through his nose. Briny scent glands in his sinuses flared slightly as her scent met him head-on, threaded with lemon soap, faint detergent, and her—always her. He ground his back molars together, let his eyes shut just for a second, and fought the sharp, stupid jolt of want that hit him like static down his spine. She didn’t know what she was doing. She couldn’t. If she did, she wouldn’t lean into the refrigerator like that—elbow pressed against the door, the hem of that damn shirt hiking a fraction higher, revealing soft skin and the curve of her upper thigh that he should not be looking at. That he didn’t want to want to look at. But he was, and now his chest was too tight, his gills fluttering in uneven pulses, like his body didn’t know whether to breathe or choke on the realization that hit him deeper than any chemical stimulant ever had.

He wanted her. Not just wanted—wanted to touch. To wrap. To anchor her against him, slow and close, and let her body heat soak into every inch of cold, genetically-engineered flesh he’d learned to isolate for over a decade. He wanted to pull her into his coil, drag her into the space he guarded like it was sacred, and tell her—tell her—what had been carving holes into the meat of his brain since the moment she’d first stood outside his containment cell and treated him like a person. He wanted to mark her with the kind of claim that wasn’t about ownership, wasn’t about territory, but something far worse—something needy. Emotional. Human. But how the hell was he supposed to say that? What words even fit a confession like that, when the last time he’d admitted vulnerability, it ended in syringes, restraints, and a tank built like a coffin?