She pressed the cup against her lips and closed her eyes and admitted, in the privacy of the warm kitchen with no one watching, thatmy wifein his voice made her feel something she had no business feeling. Something that had nothing to do with safety or transactions or tribunal timelines.
She finished the tea and stood.
She started back toward the parlor. The corridor was dim with only the wall sconces lit and casting long amber shadows across the stone floor. Her footsteps were quiet. She was halfway to the parlor door when she heard voices through it and stopped.
Davn's voice, low and measured: "We don't know what Varek knows or suspects. The visit tonight was a test. He came to see what you'd show him, and you showed him plenty." A pause. "She's a target now, if she wasn't before. Varek saw how you looked at her. His son already knew. At this point, it's safer for her to be someplace else."
Silence.
Then Rhaezon, and his voice was stripped of everything — the authority, the growl, the careful control. "I know. She has to go."
November stood in the corridor with her empty cup and the warmth of the tea still in her hands and the weight of his words pressing against her sternum like a fist.
She has to go.
TWENTY-ONE
The corridor was too narrow for everything it held.
The conversation still vibrating between them like a struck blade when November came around the corner. The empty teacup hung from her fingers. Her face was composed. Her eyes were not.
She knew.
"You heard," he said.
"I heard enough."
Davn cleared his throat. "I'll check in with Alliance command. It's possible we're jumping ahead of ourselves. Varek's visit could be exactly what he said it was — an apology." He paused. "I'll see if there's anything new from the intelligence network. Maybe we're being too hasty."
Rhaezon looked at him. Davn looked back. They had known each other for ten years. They did not need to speak to communicate the shape of what Davn was doing — building a bridge out of thirty seconds so Rhaezon would not have to stand in freefall quite yet.
"Perhaps," Rhaezon said.
Davn nodded once, held November's gaze for a beat longer than usual, and left.
Then it was the two of them.
"Dinner," he said. "You should eat."
"I'm not hungry."
"You haven't eaten since the afternoon."
"Rhaezon—"
"Please." The word came out rougher than he intended. He softened it with nothing. He did not have softening available to him at the moment. "Eat with me."
She studied him. Those brown eyes, creek water in afternoon light, moved across his face. She could see what he was doing. Offering her food because he could not offer her safety. Suggesting dinner because the alternative was standing in a dim corridor admitting that the world was about to subtract her from him and he had no strategy to prevent it.
His eyes did not leave her. He could not make them.
Something shifted in her posture. "It's fine," she said. "It's going to be fine."
She turned back toward the kitchen. His hand rose as she turned — the involuntary reach his body had developed around her, the gravitational error his discipline could not correct — and fell back to his side. He followed her.
November movedthrough the kitchen with the ease she had built over two weeks of making this room hers. She was pulling plates down when Davn appeared in the doorway.
His face was not fine.
