Chapter 374: Surreal Sensuality [1]

Kane, now Leon, stood at the edge of the white bed and looked at her.

Thora slept on her side, one arm folded under the pillow; dark hair spilled across fabric that had never touched rain or stone.

The sheet had slipped, revealing the curve of her breast, the line of her waist, the scars he knew from a different skin.

Everything was correct, and everything was wrong.

Too soft. Too young.

The face of the woman who had walked out of Greta’s village with a borrowed axe and a refusal to leave, not the woman who had said I love you with a tsunami closing over her mouth.

’What is this?’

The thought arrived in a voice that was not the barbarian’s.

I lost the game?

So I got sent back?

Extraction? Pod failure? Then why is she here?

No system window.

Only climate control and the quiet of a building that didn’t know what a Hydra was.

Thora made a small sound in her sleep and snuggled into the dent he had left, searching for weight.

Finding none, she frowned, stretched, arms over her head, back arched, the sheet falling away from plush breasts and the plane of her stomach, and opened her eyes.

For a moment she only blinked at the white ceiling.

Then she saw him standing there in streamer clothes and indoor skin, and her whole face brightened the way it had on a morning that belonged to another layer.

"Kane."

Not Leon.

Kane.

"Why are you standing there?"

His throat worked.

"You see me?"

Thora scoffed, pushing up on one elbow.

The motion made her breasts shift, full and unmarked by the last fight’s bruises.

She looked like the first day.

Hungry, scarred, already deciding he was her problem.

"Of course I see you. You’re standing in the middle of the room like a statue. Come here."

He walked.

Each step felt wrong.

No Rage under the skin.

The body that crossed the carpet was the one that ordered pizza at three in the morning and sat in a chair until his legs went numb, Leon, black-haired, soft in the places the barbarian had been iron.

He stopped at the edge of the mattress because some part of him still expected the floor to become a quay.

Thora sat up fully.

The sheet pooled at her hips.

She reached for his belt without asking permission, fingers working the buckle with the same practical impatience she used on armour straps.

"You forgot everything, Leon?"

The name landed like a slap.

"I—"

His mind stopped.

"Leon?"

"Huhu."

Thora’s mouth curved.

She tugged his trousers open, drew him out into the cool white air, and looked down with open, assessing amusement.

"Such a small thing. Did you compare this with your barbarian body too?"

His eyes widened.

She knew.

Both names. Both bodies.

The comparison spoken as casually as a weather report.

Before he could form a question that would hold, she leaned in and took him into her mouth.

"Ugh—"

The same ruthless focus she brought to a fight, applied without warning to a body that had not been touched by a Giant island’s rain.

Leon’s head snapped back.

A sound left him that belonged in a headset, not a battlefield.

His hands found her hair on pure reflex, not to force, to balance, as she sank deeper, cheeks hollowing, tongue working the underside with a slow, deliberate drag.

"Thora—wait—how do you—"

She pulled off just long enough to speak against the head of him, lips shiny.

"Less talking. You spent whole nights in that other skin making me wait while you played politics with queens and pits."

She took him again.

He started thrusting before he meant to: short, helpless rolls of the hips into the heat of her mouth, the wet sounds loud in the white room’s perfect quiet.

Thora took it, adjusted, let him use her the way the barbarian had used her on better nights, only smaller, sharper, every nerve in this weaker body lit up and unprepared.

Her hands gripped his thighs.

One of her thumbs stroked the crease of his hip as if mapping the difference.

"Fuck—Thora—"

She hummed around him.

The vibration ran up his spine.

He lasted a humiliating fraction of the time the other body could have lasted.

The climax hit hard and sudden, and he tried to pull back, failed, and came across her tongue and then, as she drew off at the last second, across her lips and the flush of her cheek in thick, messy pulses.

Thora stayed still for a breath, eyes half-lidded, then wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and looked up at him with that same bright, dangerous amusement.

"There. Now you remember at least one thing."

He was still shaking when she pulled him down onto the bed.

The sheet tangled.

Her body under his was warm and real and scarred in the places he knew.

He put his mouth on her breast because the alternative was asking questions the room would not answer, sucked the tight nipple, felt her back arch, heard the rough approving sound she made when she stopped pretending she was only teasing.

Her legs opened.

His hand slid between them and found her clit already wet, already impatient.

"In," she muttered, fingers in his black hair.

"Stop thinking and put it in and stay."

He lined up.

The head of him pressed against her.

The white room’s light flickered.

Once.

Twice.

Then the walls went red.

Emergency red.

Hard, rhythmic blinks that painted Thora’s bare skin and the cheap mirror and the soft streamer body in the colour of the bruise-sky.

A sound like a distant alarm, or a distant scream, pressed against the edges of the silence.

Thora’s eyes widened.

"Kane—"

Before he could thrust, the bed vanished under his knees.

He was standing.

Centre of a room that was the same white and not the same: same bed, same cheap mirror, same climate-control hum, only the woman on the mattress was not Thora.

Misha slept on her side, white hair loose across the pillow, sheet tucked with administrative neatness even in sleep,

Kane stood in the centre of the white room with the taste of Thora still in his mouth, the red light still blinking at the edges of his vision, and a fear that had nothing to do with Rage overload and everything to do with a game that hadn’t let him go.

"What?"