How to Train Your Channeler

[Oriena]

His fingers firm at her chin should have been a mistake. Anyone else would’ve earned broken knuckles for that alone. But Sasha didn’t do it to dominate her, he did it because something in him had finally decided not to fold. She caught the difference immediately: the grin, the heat behind his eyes, the way his words stopped circling survival and started aiming outward instead. His assertiveness stilled her. Though mostly her attention snagged on the way he licked his lips.

Then he was leaning in and speaking about gods and worship and deserving, and she hated how little of it sounded like posturing. Hated more that it wasn’t aimed at charming her. It was clumsy, earnest, painfully naïve — and he meant it. Not because he wanted something from her, but because he fucking believed it.

Oriena didn’t answer him.

She moved.

Her fingers closed around his wrist and stripped his hand from her jaw, firm and decisive — reasserting the line without retreating from the space between them. Then she leaned in and bit him. Not enough to draw blood. Enough to hurt. Enough to interrupt the thought, to short-circuit whatever fragile, dangerous conviction had just sparked to life behind his eyes. Certainly hard enough to shut him up. It was a warning and an invitation tangled together: careful and interesting spoken in the same language. Sasha reached for something dangerous, and she answered in kind. Not by rejecting it, and not by indulging it either, but by forcing it back into the language she trusted. Teeth. Heat. Immediate consequence.

This was just sex. The thought came sharp and insistent, like a knife she pressed between them — and into herself. It was always just sex.