Something dark and bright moved behind his amber eyes. The hand on her hip tightened.

"Are you sure."

"Monroe, I just killed an apex predator with you, fled from a centipede the size of a bus, got buried alive in a cave-in, and am currently pinned beneath you in a space roughly the dimensions of my closet at home. I have never been more sure of anything in my entire existence."

He kissed her again. This time his mouth moved against hers differently, slower, and Blair realized he was demonstrating by example. His tongue traced her lower lip and then retreated, an invitation rather than an incursion, and when Blair followed the withdrawal with her own tongue she felt him smile against her mouth. His hand came up to her jaw and tilted her head slightly, changing the angle, and the new position allowed his tongue to slide deeper and find hers with a precision that made her spine dissolve.

Blair’s hands released his suit and traveled upward into his hair. Her fingers curled into the brown strands and gripped with enough force that a lesser man would have pulled away. Jace pressed closer instead. His body weight settled fully onto hers and the pressure against her chest, her stomach, her hips produced a constellation of sensations that her romance novels had failed spectacularly to convey. No author had successfully captured the feeling of being compressed between cold stone and a warm male body while his tongue mapped the inside of her mouth with the patience of someone who had nowhere else to be and nothing else he’d rather do.

She was learning. Blair Davenport learned everything quickly, and this proved no exception. By the third time his tongue swept against hers, she’d caught the pattern, the way he alternated between slow strokes and quick flicks, how he timed his breathing to complement rather than interrupt the rhythm, the specific angle that allowed maximum contact without collision. She replicated his technique and added her own variation, a sharp bite on his lower lip followed by the flat of her tongue soothing the mark, and the groan he produced vibrated from his chest through hers and into the stone beneath her back.

Time stopped mattering. The Void Gate, the scattered team members, the blocked exit, the limited oxygen, the centipede that had chased them through a collapsing cave system, all of it receded into background noise that Blair’s brain filed under problems for future Blair to address. Present Blair was busy. Present Blair had her tongue in Jace Monroe’s mouth and her legs wrapped around his thigh and her burned body singing with a combination of pain and pleasure that should have been contradictory but somehow complemented each other in ways she’d need to analyze later when she possessed cognitive function again.

Blair would take this to her grave. Nobody would ever know. Not Cassandra, not her father, not the entire student body of San Nicolas Academy. When she won the bet and Monroe became her property for the semester, this would be his reward for good behavior. The thought of ordering Jace to his knees in her Summit House apartment and commanding him to do exactly what he was doing right now, except on her terms, in her space, with her hand in his hair and her voice telling him precisely where she wanted his mouth, that thought sent a pulse of arousal through Blair’s body so intense that her ability flickered involuntarily. Blue-white light danced at her fingertips for a fraction of a second before she suppressed it, the heat harmless against his combat suit but enough to make Jace pull back and raise an eyebrow.

"Did you just light up."

"Shut up."

"Blair Davenport just lost control of her S-rank ability because I kissed her."

"I will burn this entire cave system and everything in it, including you. Especially you."

His grin was the worst thing she had ever seen. Bright and genuine and completely lacking in the fear that Blair’s threats typically produced. This man had watched her Inferno engulf an ancient forest, had pulled her from leopard jaws and dragged her off a cliff, had fought beside her against an alpha predator and combined his death mana with her Hellflame in a way that defied every textbook on elemental interaction. He did not fear Blair Davenport’s fire.

He kissed the tip of her nose. A small, casual, devastating gesture that hit Blair somewhere behind the sternum where her ribcage protected the organ she’d spent eighteen years pretending she didn’t possess.

"We should probably figure out how to get out of here," he said.

"Yes."

Neither of them moved.

Blair’s hand remained in his hair. His hand remained on her hip. Their bodies remained tangled in the narrow stone coffin with the rubble sealing the entrance and the Void Gate’s corrupted atmosphere pressing against them from every direction. The bioluminescent moss cast soft blue shadows across his face, and in that light Jace Monroe looked nothing like the overweight lottery student who had stumbled into her world six weeks ago. The jaw was sharp. The shoulders were broad. The amber eyes held something ancient and knowing that contradicted everything his academy file suggested about his origins and capabilities.

"When we get out of here," Blair said quietly. "This never happened."

"Agreed."

"I still hate you."

"Understood."

"And I’m going to win that bet."

"We’ll see."

Blair closed her eyes. The pain from her burns returned in a slow wave, reclaiming territory that adrenaline and arousal had temporarily liberated. The oxygen in the sealed space wasn’t going to last forever. Somewhere above them, a burning forest waited alongside evolved predators, scattered teammates, and a core entity that needed to die before the gate would release any of them.

She had approximately nine hundred problems that required immediate attention.

None of them changed the fact that her lips still tingled from the pressure of his mouth, and the taste of him sat on her tongue like something she’d spent eighteen years searching for without knowing it existed.

Blair Davenport opened her eyes.

"Get us out of this hole, Monroe. I have people to find."