He loves her completely. And he loves her most when they're alone.

She's not exactly different when alone with him. She's always been unconcerned with romance, unfamiliar with whispered sweet nothings and roses left on doorsteps. She's forward and unabashed when alone with him, words seldom spoken but always understood. She prefers to show, not tell, her love to him, in all the ways she does.

He's found that he prefers it that way.

It's the slight pressure against his arm as she leans into him while they receive mission orders. Or the ghost of a touch on the back of his hand as they pass in a hall. Other times it's her silently slipping into his window at night, curling up beside him in bed only to disappear come dawn, or when she beckons for him to follow her to the roof to show him the sparkling expanse of the night sky in the dead of darkness.

An upgraded holotome with jailbroken settings is her version of a rose left on the bedside, handmade gadgets and tinkered, half finished electronics scattered like velvet petals of circuitry and wire around it. A sparring round where she forgoes dancing just out of his reach and lets him catch her, lets him get her in a hold so they're face to face and panting with unbridled energy, is her version of a kiss with a fist.

Then there's the more intimate way she shows her love.

He's never had a partner like her. The wild, near feral undercurrent that hums through her flesh is in its own league entirely. He can feel it pulsing through her and through him as she digs her nails into his shoulders, sees it burning through her skin in the flush that creeps into her cheeks.

Part of him wonders if it's something she's picked up from her time in the streets. Wonders if everyone who runs that gauntlet of misery and survival and trauma and triumph comes out on the other side with the same wild energy that thrums barely contained beneath her tawny skin.

He wonders if she was born with it, grew alongside it in the seedy back alleyways and bitter winters of Rotterdam, tempered and honed it with the blood and bones of those she was ordered to kill.

The other part of him doesn't care. The energy is so subtle and subdued while in the presence of others that he longs for it, aches for it to be unleashed on him as the days drag on until they are finally, finally alone again.

And when alone with him, sometimes, if it is just so, she lets it loose. It consumes everything, a fire unrivaled until met by his own. Together they watch the world around them burn away, uncaring until there's nothing left for the flames to devour but their own beings and they relish in the heat lapping at their skin as he burns her and she burns him. They rest in the ashes as the world fades back in around them and wait for the embers to grow again.

He remembers the first time they joined in the adrenaline rush after a mission together. He couldn't help himself when she slipped into his hotel room behind him. He didn't say anything and she didn't have to. Her eyes held the same hungry light as his, her body still tense and coiled, waiting for another fight.

The sounds she made when he touched her were intoxicating. Every gasp and hitched breath, every muffled cry and incoherently hissed word dug addictive claws into his very soul. She tugged at his hair and nipped his skin, begged him to sink his teeth in where her neck met her shoulders. When he complied she cried out against him, whimpering as she came down from a high he had yet to understand but wanted to with every fiber of his self.

He loved the way she shivered when he growled against her throat, the way her hands scrabbled for an anchor to reality on his chest when he swiped his tongue across the white stripe, satin scar embedded there. He learned that he too had a beast inside of him when she carved her feral song into his flesh with her teeth, leaving crescent indentations that mirrored her namesake hanging outside the shuttered windows.

They gave and took in equal measure. They traced soft, silky scars and open battle wounds with sinful lips. They made new marks in fevered skin that flared red in the night, untamed powers trailing at their fingertips as they gave in to their inner savagery. There was no sweet romance, no roses or gentle caresses as they joined. The only thing that mattered was the feeling of being together, the heat and the power and the unparalleled rush as worlds collided and the entire universe was theirs and theirs alone.

But he knew he loved her.

He knew she loved him too.

When it was all over he knew she loved him when she pushed her face into the crook of his neck, wrapping her arms around his heaving chest. She pressed her lips, lips that had only moments before dripped with fragments of whirlwind, incoherent sentences for him and him alone, against his throat and measured his pulse.

They lay in silence for what seemed an eternity.

And then, she murmured something against his flushed skin.

"If you ever tell anyone that I can even remotely sound like any of what you just heard, I'll reconsider killing you."

He laughed and kissed the top of her head. She nuzzled closer to him.

They were definitely, completely and totally, in love.