"That's when I knew what I wanted to do."
"Break horses?"
"No." She shook her head. "Horses don't need breaking. They need someone to show up consistently enough that they decide the risk is worth it." She took a drink of her not-quite-tea. "I became an equine behavioral therapist. Rehabilitation, mostly. Horses that had been abused, abandoned, mishandled. The ones nobody else wanted to spend the time on."
His eyes stayed on her. They were dark and steady, and she could feel the weight of his attention like a hand on her shoulder.
"You left Earth," he said.
"Eventually. Turns out horses are wildly popular across the galaxy and nobody knows how to introduce them to new environments without causing massive behavioral problems on both sides. So they started hiring human specialists." She set her cup down. "There's a bit of a legend about a human woman who ended up stranded on some backwater planet with a cyborg. He was some kind of soldier, half machine, the whole tragic arrangement. They fell in love, and he had horses shipped to their homestead. For her. Because she'd grown up on a ranch and he wanted her to have that again."
Davn's reader lowered a fraction.
"I don't know if any of that's true. I've heard four versions and in two of them she rides the horses into a battle, which — no. But the part about the horses in space? That part's real. I know because about two years after that story started circulating, I got my first off-world contract. Then another. Then six more."
She shrugged.
"People saw the horses and wanted them. Except horses don't do well on worlds that weren't designed for them. Theypanic, they founder, they colic on foreign grass. Someone had to go teach people how to keep them alive. That ended up being me and about twelve others.
"I spent three weeks on a Thelrian agricultural colony helping them integrate a herd of Morgans. Before that I was on Sareth-IV, and before that I did eight months on a private estate in the Dalvaan system trying to earn the trust of a grey mare that the owner had imported and then couldn't get within fifty feet of."
"For one creature? Eight months?"
"Eight months. She'd been transported badly — confined space, no gradual acclimation, surrounded by species she'd never encountered. By the time I arrived she was in full defensive shutdown. Wouldn't eat. Wouldn't drink unless left completely alone. Would charge anyone who entered her enclosure."
"What did you do?" His voice was quiet. That low register with the resonance underneath it that she could feel in the base of her throat when he spoke.
"Same thing I did with Sherman. I showed up. Every day, same time, same distance. Didn't push. Didn't retreat. Just existed in her space and let her decide what to do with that information." November turned the cup in her hands. "By month three she'd stopped charging. By month five she was eating while I was present. By month seven she let me stand at the fence. On month eight, day twelve, she walked up and put her head against my chest and I stood there and cried like an absolute fool for twenty minutes."
Something shifted in his face. Not a muscle, not an expression — something underneath the architecture of it, a plate moving beneath stone. He looked away. Looked at the door. Looked back.
"And then you left."
"The job ended. She was eating, socializing with the other animals, letting the stable staff handle her. My work was done." She kept her voice even. This was the part that always cost her something, though she'd gotten skilled at hiding the bill. "That's the nature of rehabilitation. You build the trust so they can give it to someone else."
Rhaezon opened his mouth to say something but paused before a word passed his lips.
Davn set down his reader.
November's cup was halfway to her mouth when she registered the change. Not in the room — inDavn. He'd been a fixed point of contained quiet since they'd sat down. Now something about the quality of that quiet had shifted. His reader lay flat on the counter. His hand rested beside it, and the placement was too precise to be casual.
He looked at Rhaezon.
One look. No words, no gesture. Just his pale eyes finding Rhaezon's dark ones and holding them for a beat. November watched the information transfer, and what she saw was a complete sentence delivered in body language she didn't know but could feel the grammar of: direction, urgency, assignment.
Rhaezon moved to her side. Not fast — nothing about him announced alarm. He simply stood from his seat and was beside her in one strike, his hand hovering near her elbow without touching it.
"Come with me."
His words were low enough they barely traveled past her ear. She looked at his face and read it: the jaw set but not clenched, the eyes dark and steady, the stillness in his shoulders that was not relaxation but readiness. Something was wrong and he was handling it, and the handling included her.
She set down her cup and stood.
He guided her out of the dining area and down the corridor, putting himself between her and the main passage, his shoulder creating a wall she walked behind. They moved past two sealed doors, a junction, and then he opened a narrow hatch on the left that November would have walked past without registering. A service alcove. Barely a closet — maintenance access, she guessed.
She stepped in. He followed. The door closed.
The alcove was built for repair bots, not for a six-foot-seven Drakon male and a human woman standing face to face. His back pressed against the door and his chest was ten inches from her nose. She could feel the heat coming off his body — a radiating warmth that she'd noticed on the corridor floor last night when their knees touched and she'd noticed it asinterestingand thennot interesting, stop thinking about that.
