She gives me a look. “I hate that you know that.”
“That seems fair.”
For the first time since she walked into the room, something like quiet returns. Not peace. We are well past pretending peace is what good decisions feel like.
But quiet.
Enough to breathe in.
Enough to sit side by side when she moves to the chair beside mine a minute later and lets her shoulder rest lightly against my arm.
We stay like that.
The cabinet remains closed. The files remain hidden. The ceasefire remains ugly and intact for one more night.
CHAPTER 37
SELENE
Morning arrives gray and impolite.
The rain hasn’t stopped so much as thinned into a fine mist that slicks the windows and turns the city beyond them into blurred geometry—towers ghosted in silver, traffic lights smearing red and amber through wet glass, distant transit rails flashing and vanishing like nerves firing under skin. The apartment smells like toasted grain, black tea, and the faint metallic clean of the cabinet where the Senate packet now lives like a sealed infection.
I’m already awake when Rhyx comes in from the kitchenette.
He takes one look at me—still in yesterday’s sweater, barefoot, hair barely contained, staring at the dark cabinet like it personally insulted my bloodline—and says, “That expression is illegal in at least three systems.”
I don’t look away from the cabinet. “Good.”
He sets a mug beside my hand anyway. Heat ghosts across my fingers. Ginger and tea and the kind of steady, ordinary care that makes crisis feel ruder by comparison.
“You slept,” he says.
“That’s a generous word for what my body did while my brain committed felonies.”
He sits across from me, one forearm braced on the table. Civilian clothes. Work-rough hands. That infuriating calm again, except I know him better now. It isn’t calm. It’s focus with excellent posture.
“We made a decision,” he says.
I finally look at him. “Yeah. We did.”
“You disagree with it this morning.”
“I disagree with everything this morning.”
“That feels consistent.”
I wrap both hands around the mug and let the warmth sink into my palms. Outside, a skimmer hisses through wet streets below, tires slicing runoff. The sound rises and fades.
“I keep thinking about the committee notes,” I say. “How clean the language is. How many people must have looked at it and decided that if the phrasing stayed abstract enough, they weren’t authorizing bodies. Just frameworks. Just contingencies. Just… all the little words cowards hide inside.”
Rhyx doesn’t interrupt.
Of course he doesn’t. He knows when to let a thought exhaust its own poison.
“I hate that they were careful,” I mutter. “I hate that they were smart enough to keep themselves one layer back from the actual blood. And I hate that now I’m the one holding it and deciding whether the public can survive hearing how far up the rot goes.”
“That is because the position is hateful.”
