“I trust you” she says as his knife points at her throat.

The blade doesn’t move. Not a quiver. Not even a tremble in his grip. Her voice, hoarse from dust and smoke, cracks the tension like glass. She lifts her chin, just slightly, inviting the cold steel to press deeper into the soft flesh under her jaw.

He watches her for a long time. Her pulse fluttering under the tip. Her chest rising and falling in that tight synthetic corset from the lower tunnels—shimmering with sweat and blood. He says nothing. Just stares.

Neon flickers through the window behind her. Pink, then red. Then blue. Then dead. Half the signs in District One no longer work, but they still hum in the air like ghosts. Everything smells like burnt plastic and rain. District One was the first to fall when the bombs dropped. But it was the last to kneel. Even now, it stood crooked, defiant, dangerous.

“You really trust me?” he asks finally, voice like gravel soaked in whiskey and regret. The blade drags sideways across her throat, not slicing, just teasing. “Or are you just tired of being alive?”

She doesn’t answer.

Instead, she lowers to her knees.

His lips twitch, just slightly. A smile? Maybe. Maybe not. His name is Wren. Or that’s what she calls him. No one knows anyone’s real names anymore. Names got people killed. Got people sold. Got people traded like currency. Like the drugged girls in the clubs. Like the boys running circuit fights for scraps of protein pills. Like the ones who used to scream.

She reaches for the buckle at his hip. There’s a scar that cuts across the left side of his stomach—burned in by the militia in the early days of the collapse. She traces it with her fingers, gently, reverently, like she’s praying to something that can still bleed.

“Stop,” he says, but doesn’t move to stop her.

“I’m already on my knees,” she whispers. “You think I don’t know what that means?”

He inhales sharply as her mouth finds the waistband of his worn, soot-streaked pants. His fingers tighten around the hilt of the blade. Not shaking. Just… remembering.

Her tongue is rough. Desperate. She licks like she’s starving and he’s the last bit of warmth on Earth. Maybe he is. Maybe they both are.

Neon flickers again.

Outside, rain begins to fall.

Inside, she unzips him and tastes the apocalypse.

The knife is gone now, tossed onto the table with the rest of their weapons—black matte steel, fingerprint-coded pistols, an old photo of her dead sister under a cracked glass screen. The old world is a graveyard. District One is the rot on top of the bones. And they are both feral things crawling through it.

He grips her hair as her mouth works. She’s skilled—too skilled. But he doesn’t ask questions. Everyone here is either broken or pretending not to be.

When he pulls her off him, she gasps, lips slick, breath short.

“Take off your clothes,” he orders.

She doesn’t hesitate.

Her name is Lora. Or at least that’s what he calls her. In truth, she used to go by Angel_9 in the towers, back before the tower fell. Before everything below the 40th floor was swallowed by black market flame. Before sex stopped being currency and started being survival.

She strips fast. Top first, the corset undone with a practiced tug. Breasts small, high, scarred from shrapnel. One nipple pierced, the ring a dull bronze. She’d bartered her old food rations for that ring. Thought it might make her feel something again. It didn’t. But he’s looking at it now like it means something.

He grabs her and throws her onto the metal table with a clang.

It isn’t gentle.

She doesn’t want gentle.

She spreads her legs without being told.

The scars between her thighs tell their own stories. Not all of them cruel. Some… reminders. She keeps one tattoo down there, low enough it almost got removed in a fire—just a number: 342.

It’s the ID of the first soldier she ever slit open while he slept.

He presses into her without warning. No preamble. No words.

She gasps. The table rocks.

His hand grips her throat—not tight, just a reminder.

“You trust me?” he says again.

Her eyes burn as they lock onto his. “More than anyone.”

She feels like a liar. But isn’t that what trust is in the end? A gamble? A whisper in the dark that the thing holding the blade might want you alive just a little longer?

They fuck like war.

Like the world ended and this is the only way to scream.

He doesn’t let her breathe without permission. Doesn’t let her move. She wraps her legs around his waist and digs her heels into his back. Draws blood with her nails on his neck. He growls into her ear like a beast, biting her shoulder until she cries out.

She doesn’t say stop.

She says, “Harder.”

Afterward, silence.

Her legs hang limp off the edge of the table, bare feet dripping blood and sweat onto the floor. Her chest rises and falls, a faint grin at the corners of her bruised lips.

Wren lights a cigarette and sits beside her.

Outside, a building collapses.

Nobody reacts.

“Why’d you come back?” he asks.

She looks at him through half-lidded eyes. “Same reason anyone does. I ran out of people to use.”

“And now you’re using me?”

She turns her head. Her voice, dry, faint: “You were the only one who didn’t ask for anything.”

A long moment passes.

He exhales smoke. “And if I want something now?”

She closes her eyes.

“Then I’ll let you take it.”

Night falls like a sickness.

District One breathes in smoke and breathes out silence.

They sleep in shifts, weapons in hand.

But at some point—maybe around midnight—he wraps his arms around her, and she doesn’t pull away. Doesn’t flinch. Even when his fingers rest on her neck again, right where the blade had touched.

“I dreamt you’d come back,” he murmurs.

“I never left.”

“You left, Lora. You left when the city burned and you didn’t even look behind you.”

“I couldn’t. If I had, I’d have stayed. And I would’ve died.”

His breath is hot on her neck.

“So what now?”

She answers with a kiss, soft, bitter, stained in ash.

In the morning, the walls of the bunker shake.

District One is waking up.

Someone screams in the alley outside—gunfire, then silence.

Wren is already dressed by the time she opens her eyes.

“Going somewhere?” she asks.

“There’s a kill-mark on your name,” he replies. “Black contract. Someone’s paying real meat for your head.”

She laughs. “They’ll have to stand in line.”

He tosses her a blade.

“You want to survive, you stick with me.”

She straps the knife to her thigh. Stretches her jaw. Her muscles ache in the best way.

“You trust me?” she throws back, echoing his question.

He doesn’t smile.

But his voice is certain.

“Enough to bleed for you.”

And maybe that’s the only kind of love left in Neon City.

Not softness.

Not hope.

Just two broken monsters, clutching each other in the dark, trading pain for pleasure and survival for another night.

Because in District One, love is war.

And war is the only thing they still know how to win.