Chapter 140: What My Heart Wants to Hold

Chapter 140: Chapter 140: What My Heart Wants to Hold

Rei looked at him and wondered, not for the first time, how anyone stayed that calm while she was offering herself.

In this world, men were scarce enough to be treated like treasure and disposable enough to be used like batteries.

Most of them learned a crooked kind of pride from that contradiction, an authority that said take what is put in front of you and never examine the hand doing the offering.

If it had been almost any other support on this mat, the speech would already have died.

He would have fucked her senseless, logged the contact as useful, and never looked back at the part where her fists had failed, and her voice had almost broken.

Revien didn’t do that.

A small smile pulled at her mouth despite the heat still under her skin.

"Revien... why are you being such a goody-two-shoes?"

She barely got the last word out.

He moved fast.

The same clean motion he used in drills, no flourish, no wasted strength, turned their positions over.

Suddenly she was the one on her back against the mat, and he was above her, close enough that his breath touched her cheek.

Her wrists were guided up and pinned, not cruelly, palms locked under his so she could feel the difference between restraint and punishment.

"You’re undressing me," he said, voice low, "wanting to fuck through something that looks a lot like withdrawal, and you want me to be fine with that?"

Rei’s pulse jumped.

Being pinned should have felt like winning a different game.

Instead, it felt like being seen too clearly.

"You already did your part in the dungeon training," he went on.

"You think it will work twice?"

"Won’t it?"

She smiled and lifted her hips enough to rub against him, a deliberate, testing friction through cloth.

His body answered before his mouth did.

Of course it did.

That was the curse of his class and the honesty of being human.

She had liked exploiting him that way.

"Your words and your actions speak two different languages," she murmured.

"What I’m doing now is what my body wants," Revien said.

He didn’t look away.

"What I’m saying is what I want my heart to hold."

"Your heart doesn’t want me?"

The question came out sharper than she intended.

"My heart doesn’t want the version where you put yourself down and use your body like a tool."

His grip on her wrists stayed firm without grinding bone.

"I know how shit that feels. Even if a small part of you truly wants this, if the rest of you is only trying to outrun what just happened, then this becomes makeup and erasure. Not you choosing me."

She hated how accurately it landed.

Before he could finish the next sentence, Rei surged up the short distance and kissed him hard.

Her fingers, freed when his focus broke for half a second, tangled in his hair and held him there, mouth open, all the frustration and want forced into one contact so she would not have to hear another careful paragraph.

Then she stopped and pulled back.

"Enough lectures," she said.

"I heard enough."

"Did you?"

"Yes. Tasted enough too."

Shock flickered across his face, as if he had expected her to keep pushing until one of them made a mistake.

He recovered in the next breath and slowly stood.

Rei followed, legs less steady than she preferred, shirt still half-open from her own hands, dignity assembled out of pure stubbornness.

He started closing his buttons.

She watched the motion longer than she should have.

"Don’t overwork," Revien said.

"Don’t make Gia worry."

Rei let out a short breath that was almost a laugh.

"She worries about me too?"

Her eyes narrowed, not fully unkind.

"Will she worry about your ten-harem plan the same way?"

He didn’t reply.

The silence was answer enough and not enough at the same time.

Rei rolled her shoulders, felt the ache in her knuckles where she had punched his chest, and heard herself say, quieter, "I’m being a bitch, aren’t I?"

"No." Revien met her eyes.

"You’re being you. Keep being like that."

Something in her chest loosened and tightened in the same instant.

She turned away first, because looking at him while he said things like that was more dangerous than the kiss.

Rei picked up her bag, checked the strap, and forced her voice back into something that could survive a corridor.

"I meant the other part," she said to the door.

"About Cecilia. About not helping her do arithmetic with Gia’s name."

"I know."

"And I meant the part where you’re not only inventory."

"I know that too."

Rei glanced over her shoulder.

He stood in the middle of the mat with a faintly bruised look under the calm, shirt crooked, hair still disturbed from her hands. Ordinary. Infuriating. Still not taking the easy exit she had offered him.

"Another day then...," she said.

Not a seduction this time. A marker.

"Another day," he agreed.

"When it’s wanted by us both."

She nodded once and left before she could invent a third reason to stay and ruin the first clean refusal she had ever been grateful for.

The corridor outside the private hall was cooler.

Rei walked until the urge to go back and pick the fight again dropped from a scream to a manageable noise.

Her mouth still remembered the kiss. Her pride still remembered the almost-tears. Both facts existed in the same body, and neither canceled the other.

Men in this world were supposed to be simpler.

Take. Charge. Leave the philosophy for people who did not have a use.

Revien kept choosing the harder grammar.

She hated that it made him safer to stand beside in a Scramble full of hooks.

She hated more that a part of her had wanted him to fail the test she had set, wanted him to prove he was like the rest, so she could stop respecting the space he kept insisting she deserved.

At the lift, she stopped and pressed her forehead to the cold panel for one second.

"Just... Idiot," she muttered.

The words had no venom left.

When the doors opened, she stepped in, bag on her shoulder, blood sealed, schedule already rewritten in her head: no ghost hours, no emptying herself before the grid, no using his body as a ladder out of Cecilia’s shadow.

Gia would notice something. Gia noticed everything.

Rei decided she would survive that conversation the same way she survived bad drills, directly, without decoration.

We three.

She had not invented the phrase. She had only discovered, on her back on a mat with her wrists pinned and her worst instincts refused, that she might actually mean it.

The lift descended.

Rei Lawless, secondary on paper, not discarded, not first-by-force, wiped the last heat from her face and went to eat something that was not pride.