Chapter 7: Fucking without warning
The silence after the kitchen incident wasn’t silence at all. It was a high-pitched ringing in Lace’s ears, a constant, dizzying feedback loop of shame and adrenaline. For three days, she threw herself into the simulator with a viciousness that made even Keith raise an eyebrow. She ran drills until her muscles trembled and her vision blurred, chasing the clean, binary logic of combat—success or failure, hit or miss. Something she could understand.
Lotor, meanwhile, became a ghost in the daylight halls. He was polite, detached, impeccably useful in strategy sessions. He didn’t look at her. Not once. It was a negation more unnerving than any heated glare. The foot beneath the table, the possessiveness in the sensor closet, the reverence under the stars—all of it was sealed away behind a wall of cool indifference. It made her feel insane. It made her furious.
So she went to the abandoned deck. It was her place, her discovery. She brought a blanket from her room, a thick, woven Altean throw, and she waited in the dim starlight, sitting against the curved glass with her knees drawn up. She didn’t know if he’d come. That was the worst part—the not knowing who held the leverage anymore.
The door hissed open. A silhouette filled the frame, then resolved into him. He didn’t speak. He just looked at her, and in the weak light, his expression was unreadable, carved from something harder than the usual smug alloy.
“Come to gloat?” she asked, her voice echoing flatly in the vast dome.
He moved then, a predator’s fluid grace. He didn’t answer. He just took her. There was no preamble, no sharp, witty exchange to mask intent. His hands were on her, turning her, pushing her down onto the spread blanket. His mouth was a bruising claim. It was different. A current of pure, unchecked aggression ran beneath every touch, a frantic energy that felt less like desire and more like a war against something invisible.
He was relentless. He used his hands, his mouth, the hard lines of his body not as instruments of pleasure, but of conquest. He pinned her wrists above her head when she tried to touch him back, a silent command to submit. He turned her over, his grip on her hips tight enough to leave marks, driving into her with a focused, punishing rhythm that stole the breath from her lungs. The usual playful exploration was gone, replaced by a exhaustive cataloguing of possession. He took her in every way, as if trying to erase the memory of Shiro’s interruption, of any space between them that wasn’t his to control.
Lace lost count. The peaks of sensation blurred into a continuous, crashing wave—a sharp climb, a shattering fall, only to be dragged back up again before she could catch her breath. She couldn’t tell where one ended and the next began. She lost track of how many times he found his own release inside her, each one a hot, possessive claim that made her shudder with a confusing mix of violation and absolute, melting acquiescence. It was too much. It was everything. She bit down on the blanket to stop from crying out, her body no longer her own but a landscape he was mapping with brutal, thorough precision.
And then, it stopped.
He stilled, his body heavy and damp atop hers, his breath a ragged storm in her ear. She expected him to withdraw, to stand, to make some cutting remark and vanish into the castle’s shadows. That was the rule. The only rule that had ever mattered.
He didn’t.
Instead, he rolled them, pulling her with him so she was sprawled across his chest. He adjusted her, his movements unexpectedly gentle, tucking her head under his chin. One arm banded around her back, holding her firmly in place. The other hand came up and his fingers, which had been so demanding moments before, began to trace idle, soft patterns on her bare shoulder.
She was too stunned, too physically liquid to move. She lay there, listening to the frantic drum of his heart slowly decelerate beneath her ear. The silence stretched, filled only with their slowing breath and the eternal, silent ballet of stars.
He reached out, snagging the edge of the blanket she’d brought, and drew it up over both of them. The wool was scratchy, familiar. It smelled like her room, like a life before this.
Minutes bled away. The tension, the aggression, seeped out of him, leaving a strange, heavy quiet. Lace, exhausted and overwhelmed, felt consciousness slipping away. The last thing she was aware of was the steady rise and fall of his chest, and the uncharacteristic, continuous stroke of his hand down her spine.
She slept.
Lotor did not.
He lay staring up at the nebulae swirling in the blackness above. The physical fury had been a purge, a desperate attempt to burn out the infection of feeling. It hadn’t worked. He felt raw, scoured clean, and what was left underneath was alarmingly simple.
Her weight on him was an anchor. The scent of her hair—simulated ozone from the simulators, the castle’s generic soap, something uniquely her—filled his lungs. In sleep, the defiant fire in her face was banked. She looked younger. Unburdened. A strand of hair stuck to her damp temple and he carefully, so carefully, brushed it away. She murmured, nuzzling unconsciously against his chest, and his breath hitched.
The calculus of his existence—the ten-thousand-year strategy, the careful manipulations, the lonely path of the heir who trusted no one—sputtered and stalled. This was a catastrophic variable. This wasn’t just a physical itch scratched in the dark, or a game of power played across a trembling body. The kitchen had proven that. The fear he’d felt, sharp and metallic, when Shiro had appeared wasn’t fear of exposure. It was fear of ending. Of this stolen, secret thing being taken away.
He watched the stars, their cold light indifferent to the revelation unfolding in his chest. The blanket, her blanket, covered them both. He had armies to command, an empire to either salvage or burn, a father to destroy. He had plans within plans.
And yet, here he was. On the cold floor of a forgotten room. Holding a sleeping paladin of Voltron.
The feeling ran deeper than he’d thought. Deeper than was safe. Deeper, perhaps, than anything else.
He closed his eyes, not to sleep, but to let the truth settle in the dark behind his eyelids. It changed everything. It changed nothing. The war would still come at dawn. But for these few, stolen hours, he would stay. He would feel the weight of her, and the terrifying, quiet peace it brought.