November looked across the room at Rhaezon. He hadn't moved. He hadn't spoken. He stood with his arms crossed and his back to the wall, his scarred face unreadable, his gaze fixed on the table. But then his head lifted and his eyes met hers.
She held his gaze for two full seconds while his black eyes studied her.
"Commander Sethan." Rhaezon's voice was low and unhurried, and November felt it in her sternum the way she'd feel a bass note in a concert hall. "The safehouses."
"Arranged." Sethan nodded. "I have two secured locations for Mr. Pael and you, Korynn," she said nodding to the other two former captives. "They're alliance-monitored, off-grid, with security details. You can be transported within the hour." She paused. "But your situation, Ms. Lachlan, is more complex."
"Why?" November said.
"Because you're the primary witness. Your testimony is the most detailed and the most damaging. In addition, placing you in a standard Alliance safehouse creates a paper trail because of your political status as an Earthan. Paper trails can be followed, and Prince Dáinn has people inside Alliance intelligence — that's how he's been operating undetected."
The temperature in the room dropped. Or it seemed to. November's arms prickled.
Sethan turned to Rhaezon. "Lord Vaethari's estate is outside Alliance jurisdiction. It's an independent holding with private security and no reporting structure that feeds back into our intelligence chain. Lord Vaethari has the infrastructure and the clearance to keep you safe. He's agreed to house you, Ms. Lachlan, at the Vaethari Hold until six weeks from now when the High Council is in session and your testimony can be heard."
Six weeks. In the home of a man she'd met an hour ago, whose name she'd learned five minutes ago, whose face was half-covered in burn scars and whose eyes looked like pools of obsidian ink.
Rhaezon's jaw tightened and scales along his neck surfaced for half a second and receded.
"There's one small problem."
"Lord Vaethari?"
"An unwedded Drakon male does not bring a female into his household. Not unless they are bonded. The surrounding community will talk."
Pael blinked. Korynn's eyebrows raised. Commander Sethan pressed her lips together, and the corner of Davn's mouth lifted a fraction.
November looked at him. "What does bonded mean?"
He looked at her. His eyes shifted from black to amber.
"In your terms — married."
THREE
The door to his quarters sealed behind him, and Rhaezon stood in the dark.
He didn't turn on the light. He didn't need it. The room was small and he could see every edge of it in the ambient glow from the corridor seam. He crossed to the desk. Sat. Put his hands flat on the surface the way the human woman had put hers flat on the conference table, and he noticed himself doing it, and he stopped.
There have to be other options. Official Alliance custody. Maybe she could go there.
He started there because it was the most obvious solution and therefore the one he could discard fastest. Sethan herself had said it: Dáinn had people inside Alliance intelligence. Not low-level operatives. People who could access witness logs, transport manifests, safehouse coordinates. People who made other people disappear between one shift change and the next. Putting November Lachlan into the Alliance's formal protection infrastructure was the same as handing the Crimson Ledger her location.
A safehouse, then.
Sethan had two for the others — Pael and Korynn. Those locations were off-grid, yes. Alliance-monitored, yes. But they were also finite structures in fixed locations with security teams that rotated, and rotation meant personnel files, and personnel files meant access points. The other two witnesses were corroborating testimony. Useful but not essential. November was the primary. She had seen Dáinn's face. She had heard his voice give orders about the transport of human cargo. She could place a sitting prince of the Kleotrian throne on a slaver vessel and describe, in specific and devastating detail, what he had been doing there. If the Crimson Ledger was going to spend resources eliminating a witness, they would spend them on her.
A safehouse was a locked box with a known number of keys. Eventually, someone would count them.
Far side of the galaxy then.
He considered it for four seconds. Send her somewhere outside the quadrant entirely — far enough that Dáinn's network couldn't reach, remote enough that no one would think to look. Except remote meant unreachable, and unreachable meant that if the High Council session opened early, the primary witness would be three transit jumps away, and the Crimson Ledger's lawyers would file for dismissal before she cleared the second gate. November Lachlan vanishes to protect November Lachlan, and Prince Dáinn walks free, and every human being currently in a cargo hold somewhere in this quadrant stays there.
No.
His estate. His name. His household, with its private security measures, its independent jurisdiction, and its walls that had kept things safe before. The Vaethari Hold answered to no Alliance reporting structure. His staff were his own — hand-selected, vetted through channels that had nothing to do with official databases. Davn had built the security infrastructure himself, and Davn trusted no one, which was precisely why theinfrastructure worked. Within the Hold's borders, November would be unreachable by any mechanism the Crimson Ledger could deploy without declaring open war on a noble house.
His name was the only protection that worked. He just had to marry her.
