Conquer Me on the Road

She brushes his groin with a thief's hand and vanishes into the market crowd before he can grab her — laughing, wicked, already gone. Arin catches Mira in a dark alley on the Silk Road and pins her against mud-brick, but she slips loose like she was never there. The chase carries them through rice-wine taverns and caravan stalls where bamboo shudders under their weight, into a Nubian bathhouse carved into cliffs, and finally to a village where the stench of a raid still clings to his skin. They mark each other with nails and teeth. The grit of the road never comes off.