Page 41 of Make Them Pay

“Hearing isn’t the same.”

“No. It’s not.”

I stand up from the floor where I’ve been sitting with the laptop. My body protests. Every joint has an opinion about cold floors and metal chairs and eight days in spaces never meant for living. I stretch and the motion pulls his oversized hoodie up enough that cool air hits the strip of skin above my waistband.

He’s watching. He always watches. But the quality of his attention has changed in the last sixty seconds. It’s not the careful, peripheral observation he maintained for the first five days, the seeing-without-looking that let him watch my movements without ever being caught staring. It’s direct. Open. The attention of a man who’s decided that the pretense of not looking is a luxury he can no longer afford.

I feel the weight of his gaze on the exposed skin at my waist the way you feel sunlight. Warm. Present. Impossible to ignore.

“Render.”

“Yeah.”

“The conversation. The one we keep putting off. The one about everything we haven’t said.”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t want to wait anymore.”

The words settle between us, sinking into the silence with a weight that steals the air from the room. They aren't loud, but they don't have to be. I feel them all the way down to my bones.

My heart stumbles, then pounds hard enough to make my chest ache as his gaze locks onto mine. There's no looking away. No escape from the truth hanging between us.

He rises.

Not in the fluid, instinctive way I've seen a hundred times before, when every movement is driven by training and survival. This is slower. More careful. Like every inch he gains is a choice. Like he's giving himself one last chance to stop... and deciding, over and over again, that he won't.

Only four feet separate us.

He closes the distance in two strides.

The same way he crossed the storage unit the night he kissed me for the first time. The same way he crossed that shipping container to cut the zip ties from my wrists. Render James has always moved with absolute purpose. No hesitation. No wasted motion. When he decides to reach you, nothing in the world feels capable of standing in his way.

He stops just a breath away.

Close enough that I catch the steady beat of his pulse in his throat. Close enough that the warmth rolling off him wraps around me before his hands ever do. One tiny shift, one careless inhale, one impossible ounce of courage from either of us would erase the last sliver of space between us.

Eight days of pretending.

Eight days of restraint.

Eight days spent building walls that suddenly feel paper thin.

“I need you to be sure,” he says. His voice is low. Not the rough, wrecked quality it had during the first kiss. Calmer. More controlled. Like he’s holding the volume down because he doesn’t trust what happens if he lets it rise. “Because in six hours I’m walking into a building to get your brother out of a cell, and your brother is my best friend, and if we do this it changes everything between all three of us. Not just tonight. After.”

“I know.”

“If Poe finds out…”

“Nothing that happens between us makes you less loyal to him. It makes you something else to me. Both things can exist at the same time.”

He lifts his hand. The same gesture from the kiss. Not to my face. To the side of my neck. His fingers find the pulse point and this time I know he can feel the speed of it because his breath catches slightly when the contact registers what my heart is doing.

“Tell me to stop,” he says. The same words from the first kiss. But the voice is different. That kiss was a collapse. This is a choice.

I take the front of his shirt in both fists and pull him the last twelve inches.

His mouth finds mine and the contact isn’t like the first kiss. That one was desperate and sudden and flavored with the surprise of a wall coming down. This is different. This is the second time, and the second time is slower only for a moment, only for the breath it takes for both of us to register that we’re choosing this, actively, with full knowledge of the cost and the timing and the six hours ticking away and the brother in the cell and the crew in the facility and every single reason we have not to do this right now.