Blair Davenport had kissed exactly zero people in her entire eighteen years of existence.

She had read about it. Two hundred and fourteen romance novels hidden in a false-bottom drawer beneath her desk at home, each one consumed in secret during hours her father assumed she spent studying combat theory or reviewing quarterly earnings reports from Davenport Industries. She had memorized the mechanics through fiction, catalogued the vocabulary of desire through other people’s prose, constructed an entire theoretical framework for what intimacy should feel like based on the experiences of characters who did not actually exist.

None of it prepared her for Jace Monroe’s mouth.

His lips found hers in the dark and Blair’s entire nervous system short-circuited. The contact was warm and firm and tasted like river water and blood and something underneath both of those flavors that she couldn’t identify but wanted more of immediately. Her brain, the same brain that could calculate mana density fluctuations in real-time and identify geological composition by visual inspection alone, produced exactly one coherent thought before shutting down completely.

Oh no.

Then Jace’s hand came up to cup the side of her face, his thumb tracing along her cheekbone with a gentleness that had no business existing in a collapsed cave inside a Void Gate, and Blair stopped thinking entirely.

The kiss started slow. Exploratory. Like he was learning the shape of her mouth through contact rather than observation, mapping territory he’d apparently been considering far longer than Blair wanted to acknowledge. His lower lip caught hers and pulled, soft enough to register as a request rather than a demand, and Blair heard herself make a sound that would have been mortifying if she possessed the cognitive function to process embarrassment. She didn’t. Every scrap of processing power she owned was currently devoted to the sensation of Jace Monroe kissing her like she was something worth being careful with.

Her fingers found the front of his combat suit and gripped the damaged material hard enough that the remaining composite fibers creaked beneath her knuckles. She pulled him closer, which should have been impossible given that he already covered her body entirely, but her muscles moved without consulting her dignity and the fraction of distance that vanished between them somehow made everything more intense. His chest compressed against hers, and Blair felt the steady beat of his heart against the frantic percussion of her own, and the contrast made her want to either scream or cry or possibly both.

Then his tongue touched her lower lip.

Blair’s spine arched off the stone floor before she could stop the reaction. Her burned side shrieked in protest and she didn’t care, didn’t care about pain or oxygen conservation or the fact that six hours ago she had been actively plotting this man’s social destruction. His tongue slid against hers and the taste of him flooded her mouth, salt and copper and warmth, and Blair forgot about her father and her sister and the bet and the rankings and every single thing that had defined her existence before this moment in a collapsed cave with a lottery student she was supposed to hate.

A lottery student who kissed like he’d been trained for exactly this purpose by someone with a very specific curriculum.

His mouth moved from her lips to the corner of her jaw, trailing along the bone with a deliberate patience that made Blair want to punch something. Each press of his lips against her skin left a small fire behind, not her fire, not the blue-white destruction she could summon from her own biology, but something warmer and less controllable that spread through her neck and chest and stomach in waves she couldn’t predict or contain. When he reached the spot just below her ear where her pulse hammered against the thin skin, he paused.

"Don’t you dare stop."

The words left her mouth before any part of her personality had the opportunity to review them for brand consistency. Blair Davenport did not beg. Blair Davenport did not admit wanting things from people who occupied lower social strata. Blair Davenport certainly did not lie beneath a man in a stone coffin with her fingers twisted in his ruined combat suit and her burned body pressing upward into his touch because physical contact with Jace Monroe had apparently become the single most important priority in her entire life.

He didn’t stop.

His mouth found her pulse point and his tongue pressed flat against the hammering vein, and Blair’s hips jerked upward against him in a motion so explicit that her face would have caught fire from the shame alone if her flames weren’t currently suppressed from mana depletion. She felt him everywhere. The weight of his body on hers, the heat of his breath against her throat, the rough calluses on the hand still cradling her face, the hard planes of muscle beneath the damaged suit where his chest met her breasts. His other hand found her waist, fingers splaying across the strip of exposed skin between the ruins of her suit’s torso section and the waistband of her tactical pants, and the touch sent a jolt through her abdomen that made her thighs clench around his leg without permission.

This was insane.

This was the most insane thing that had ever happened to her, and Blair had been raised by a man who considered child combat training a reasonable substitute for piano recitals and birthday parties.

Jace’s mouth traveled lower, following the line of her throat toward the hollow at the base where her collarbones met. His tongue traced the ridge of bone, slow and thorough, and Blair heard herself whimper. Actually whimper. The sound bounced off the low ceiling and came back to her ears like evidence at a trial, proof that Blair Davenport had been reduced to making noises by a boy who ate commoner cafeteria food.

"Monroe." Her voice came out wrecked. Destroyed. Unrecognizable as the same instrument she used to dismiss classmates and lecture underperformers.

"How are you this good at this."