She halted.

The wheelchair stopped.

Kenji’s shoulder blades stiffened.

The voice had come from the wall.

To the left of the nurse’s station, between the directional signs for Radiology and Cardiology, in the space that should have contained a fire safety notice and a waiting chair.

A man.

Standing.

Visible to her — fully, completely visible — and to Kenji, whose hands had gone white on the arm rests — and invisible to the nurse at the station three feet away, who was typing with the focused indifference of someone who had no information that anything in her vicinity had changed.

Naked.

The full, comprehensive nakedness of a man whose body had been built with the specific, Greek-god intention of looking exactly like this — the thighs, the calves, the abdomen, the shoulders — the six-pack pressing against the skin with the clean, structural clarity of muscle that had not a single apologetic layer over it.

Black hair.

Shimmering. The specific, almost-luminous quality of it under the fluorescent hospital lights.

Purple eyes.

Looking at her.

Looking at her with the warm, patient, privately amused expression of a man who has arrived somewhere after a journey he found interesting and is now proceeding with the next scheduled item.

Between his legs:

Nine inches.

Erect. Flushed dark at the head. The specific, dimensional, impossible fact of it — standing at full attention under the fluorescent lights of a Japanese hospital hallway like it had been there the whole time and the hallway had simply failed to notice.

Kira’s thighs pressed together.

The heat that had been living there for three days spiked to an immediate, comprehensive roar.

"Greet your master, Kira."

Her hands had gone still on the wheelchair handles.

Kenji had gone very still in the wheelchair.

The nurse at the station continued typing.

The fluorescent lights buzzed.

Kira’s lips parted.

The word that was forming behind them was the word she had been building a wall against for three days — the word that her body had been moving toward from the moment the purple eyes had found hers in whatever room that had been, in whatever sequence of events she had decided was not happening — and the wall, which had seemed solid, which had seemed like the kind of wall a person builds when they have made a decision, turned out to be built from the same material all her other decisions had been built from tonight.

Insufficient.

Kira blinked.

Her mouth was still open — the word still forming, still right there at the edge of her teeth — and her brain did what brains do when they receive something they don’t have a prepared response for.

It went sideways.

’Kenji.’

The thought arrived with the force of a thrown object. ’Kenji is right here. Kenji is in the wheelchair. Kenji, who you have known since you were eleven. Kenji, who called you from the hospital at 2 AM because he was scared and had no one else to call. Kenji, who cannot walk properly. Kenji, who is—’

’You bastard.’

Not at Raven.

At herself.

At the specific, devastating fact of what her body was doing in the presence of those purple eyes while Kenji Matsushita was sitting right there in the wheelchair she was supposed to be pushing toward the reception desk.

"You," she started. Her voice was doing something strange — not the voice she used for Kenji, not the careful, managing voice of someone navigating a friend’s chronic condition — something lower, something that was being dragged out of her from the wrong direction. "You were the one who—"

"Kira."

Kenji’s voice.

The wheelchair had shifted.

She felt it before she saw it — the change in the weight distribution as Kenji twisted, his hands on the armrests, turning to see her face — and the sight of his face, the familiar geography of it, the specific expression of a man who was registering that something was very wrong with the woman standing behind him, hit her like a bucket of cold water.

She grabbed the wheelchair handles.

She turned it.

One motion — sharp, decisive, the reflexive motion of someone removing a thing from a line of sight — spinning the chair until Kenji’s back was toward Raven and Kenji’s face was toward the far wall.

The far wall had a mirror.

A full-length door mirror.

Kenji’s face was in it.

And behind Kenji’s reflection — behind her own reflection, the expression on her own face that she had not yet seen and would not have recognized if she had — the reflection of a man who did not need to be facing a mirror to look at exactly what he wanted to look at.

"Kira?"

Kenji’s voice from the mirror.

His eyes in the mirror.

Finding her.

She was bending.

She did not decide to bend.

Her body made the decision before she had finished processing the instruction — the specific, trained, involuntary bend of a body that had been calibrated toward something and was now moving toward it with the unconscious certainty of a needle toward north — her hips turning, lowering, the full curve of her pressing backward in the slow, inevitable arc of a car reversing into a parking space.

The insignia on her skin pulsed.

Under the fabric of her jeans, at the base of her abdomen — the mark he had placed, the binding he had sealed into her skin three days ago — it glowed, warm and gold through the denim, the light visible at the waistband, at the inner thigh seam.

Her breath came out shaky.

His cockhead pressed against the back of her jeans.

Right at the dip of her ass crack, the fabric doing nothing functionally, just the mechanical fact of him pressed at the exact location her body was presenting to him — and the contact traveled through the denim like it wasn’t there, the heat of it landing directly against her. 𝑓𝘳𝘦𝑒𝑤𝑒𝘣𝘯ℴ𝘷𝘦𝓁.𝑐𝑜𝑚

She trembled.

"Kira," Kenji said. His voice had changed. The careful, steady voice he used when he was pretending he was not in pain had dropped away entirely, replaced by something raw and confused and beginning to understand what it was looking at. "What are you doing."

She straightened.

Tried to.

His hand found her hip from behind.

Held her down.

"Kira. Listen to me. What is this."

The words arrived in the specific, cracking register of a young man who has been in love with his best friend since they were fifteen and is currently watching her bend her hips toward another man in a hospital hallway with the specific, devoted motion of something that has been trained to do exactly this.

"What are you—who is—"

She couldn’t answer.

Her hands left the wheelchair handles.

Raven’s fingers found her waistband.

Not the zipper — the fabric itself, pulling it straight down over her hips, the jeans sliding in one smooth motion to mid-thigh.

The panties.

Black. Thin. The kind of underwear that required a decision to own — not the panties of a woman who had packed in a hurry for a hospital visit, the panties of a woman whose body had been marking time for three days and had apparently dressed accordingly without consulting the rest of her.

A panty a whore would prefer.

Kenji saw them.

In the mirror.

His face in the mirror did something that Kira, if she had been able to look at it, would have recognized as the face of a young man having something broken inside him — the particular breakage that happens when a reality you have been carefully managing around a specific hope makes a sudden, declarative statement about the nature of that hope.

His eyes went wet.

"Kira." Barely voiced. "Kira, those—why do you—!!!—N-no... Noo!"