He lifted his head just enough to look at her, amber eyes catching the residual bioluminescence from the moss that still clung to cracks in the rubble around them. His face was close enough that she could count the individual eyelashes framing those impossible irises, could see the tiny scar above his left eyebrow and the shadow of stubble along his jaw that hadn’t been there six hours ago.

"Lots of practice."

The honesty of it. The sheer unrepentant honesty. He didn’t flinch or soften the admission or dress it up in acceptable language. He looked down at Blair with those amber eyes and told her the truth and waited for her to decide what she wanted to do about it.

Blair grabbed the back of his head and pulled his mouth back to hers.

This kiss was different from the first. The exploratory quality had burned away, replaced by something Blair recognized from combat, the reckless aggression that emerged when strategy failed and the only remaining option was total commitment. She kissed him like she fought, overwhelming force concentrated in a single point of contact, and Jace met her intensity without flinching. His teeth caught her lower lip and pulled, harder than before, hard enough to make her gasp into his mouth, and the sound she produced vibrated between their tongues and made her toes curl inside her tactical boots.

His hand left her face and traveled down her body, tracing her collarbone, the swell of her breast through the damaged suit, the sharp indent of her waist, the curve of her hip where tactical pants hung lower than regulation allowed due to river damage and general catastrophe. His fingers curled over her hip bone and his thumb pressed into the sensitive skin of her lower abdomen and Blair’s entire body seized like she’d grabbed a live wire. The burn on her left side screamed in protest but the sensation from his touch screamed louder, and Blair chose which signal to listen to without a moment’s hesitation.

She was wet. The realization arrived with the blunt force of a gate breach notification, impossible to misinterpret and impossible to dismiss. She was wet and he hadn’t even gone below her waistband and the ache between her thighs had become so insistent that she found herself rolling her hips against his leg in a rhythm her body apparently knew how to produce despite her brain never having authorized such movement.

"I hate you." The words sounded different now. Softer. Almost fond. Completely dishonest. "I genuinely, completely, absolutely hate you."

"I know." He pressed his forehead against hers. His breath came fast against her lips, and the knowledge that she was affecting him as much as he was affecting her sent a secondary wave of heat through Blair’s entire cardiovascular system. "You’ve mentioned that."

"I’m going to win the bet. You’re going to be mine."

"Maybe."

"Not maybe. Definitely. And when I win, when you’re wearing that collar and following me around campus, this is what I’m going to make you do. Every single day. This right here. Your mouth on my throat and your hands wherever I tell you to put them and you will not complain and you will not stop until I say you can stop."

The words escaped from Blair like molten glass spilling over the edge of a crucible—too hot, too liquid, too dangerous to ever be gathered back. Things that had existed only in the pages of novels she hid in false-bottom drawers were tumbling from her own mouth in explicit, humiliating detail. Things that made her face burn so intensely she was shocked the stone beneath her didn’t begin to smoke from proximity to her skin.

She described what she would do with him, to him, because of him. She outlined scenarios in vivid, pornographic specificity. She promised acts that Blair Davenport had only read about in stolen moments between classes, acts that no daughter of Davenport Industries should even be aware of, let alone speaking aloud while sprawled across a balcony floor with a lottery winner’s hands on her waist.

Jace’s expression did something strange. The smirk remained, but other things moved underneath it. His pupils were blown wide, his breathing had changed tempo, and the way he was looking at her now made Blair’s entire nervous system short-circuit with the realization that she was affecting him. Actually, genuinely affecting him.

When he spoke, his voice had dropped to that low register that did terrible things to Blair’s ability to think rationally.

"That’s a lot of confidence from someone who’s never been kissed before tonight."

The sentence detonated somewhere in Blair’s chest. She felt the blood evacuate her face completely, then return with such velocity that she thought her skull might crack open from the pressure. Her entire body went through a thermal cycle so extreme that the stone beneath them probably registered the fluctuation.

How did he know. How could he possibly, impossibly, devastatingly know that when her lips collided with his earlier tonight, the contact had represented the entirety of Blair Davenport’s romantic history in its totality.

"It’s obvious when you know what to look for." He said this without cruelty, without the mocking edge that Charles or any other guild student would have weaponized. His thumb still drew circles on her hip bone, each rotation sending small currents of sensation radiating outward across her skin. "You kiss like someone following instructions from a manual. Perfect technique, zero improvisation. It’s the same way you fight."

"I fight at S-rank."

"And your fighting is incredible. Your kissing needs work."

Blair’s hand came up and connected with his shoulder hard enough to rock him sideways in the narrow space. The impact sent a bolt of pain through her burned side and she ignored it completely because this man, this impossible, infuriating, lottery-selected nobody had just told Blair Davenport, heiress to Davenport Industries, that her kissing needed work.

"Teach me then." The challenge dropped from her lips before the rational part of her brain could intervene.

"If you’re such an expert from your extensive practice with your collection of women, show me what I’m doing wrong."