November set the plates on the table. The ceramic met the wood with a sound that seemed very loud.
Davn's gaze went to her first. Then to Rhaezon. Then to the middle distance between them.
"Tell me," November said.
Davn pulled out a chair, sat, and placed both hands flat on the table.
"The two other witnesses from the slave ship who could identify Prince Dáinn in connection to the Crimson Ledger…"
"Korynn and Pael," she supplied.
"They're dead. One was killed in what local authorities are calling unrelated incidents. The other disappeared from an Alliance safehouse yesterday. They recovered the body a few hours ago."
November sat down heavy in her chair.
"Korynn had a daughter," she said. "She showed me a picture. On the transport." Her voice did not break. It simply stopped working for a moment and had to be restarted. "Pael was going back to his mother. He kept saying it. He said it every day."
Davn's jaw worked. "Command is taking you to a new location now that Vasek has seen you. But the nearest shuttle that can reach us is thirty-six hours out."
The kitchen fire popped. Sparks rose and died in the same breath.
"Thirty-six hours," Rhaezon repeated. His voice was still. The scales along the backs of his hands were not.
November's gaze hadn't left the table. She was very still. Not the stillness of shock. He had seen shock on her last night in the tavern and the trembling that came after. This was the stillness of calculation. She was thinking faster than she was afraid.
"Then we make all thirty-six count," she said.
Dinner wasa performance that none of them executed well.
Davn ate methodically. Not hungry — fueling. He did not speak much. He did not need to. He had done the math. He was sitting with the answer.
November ate, and remarkably, she talked. Small things: the groundskeeper's wife was recovering well, Shade had let Faelor brush its hindquarters today for the first time, she had found a page in the Old Drakonian book that she was convinced depicted a recipe but couldn't determine whether the illustrated ingredient was a vegetable or a small animal. She described it in detail. She pulled a laugh from Davn, which was not a simple extraction. She refilled Rhaezon's water when his cup was low without interrupting her own sentence. She asked Davn about the perimeter patrols and whether the young kethral that had broken through the fence was settling.
She was holding the room together. The way she had held the room together on the Alliance transport the first night he saw her — passing blankets, steadying a man twice her size, making the unbearable bearable by the sheer insistence of her warmth. She had done it then for strangers. She was doing it now for him. For Davn. For the space they occupied together that was about to have a her-shaped hole in it.
Rhaezon could not stop looking at her.
She sat in the kitchen of his estate wearing his name and talking about his animals and laughing with his closest friend and she belonged here. She belonged here in a way that was so obvious, so legible, so fundamentally correct that the approaching shuttle felt like a violation of natural law.
She caught him staring. Her mouth curved. Not a full smile — something smaller, something that lived in the space between brave and breaking. She reached across the table and squeezed his hand. Once. Brief. Then went back to her food.
Davn pushed his plate back. "I'm going to run the perimeter. Full sweep. I'll check in before midnight."
He stood and looked at Rhaezon. Ten years in that look. Shared captivity. Saved lives. The understanding that some things could not be fixed and would be insulted by the attempt.
"Goodnight, November," Davn said.
"Goodnight, Davn." She smiled at him, the corners of her eyes crinkling. "Thank you. For everything."
Something moved behind Davn's careful expression. He inclined his head. He left.
The firein the library was burning low when she settled in front of it with her book.
It was the one she had been carrying for three weeks, the volume with the illustrations of Aelthar's flora and fauna, the one she could not read but had been teaching herself to decode through pictures and persistence and the afternoons he'd spent translating passages while her shoulder pressed against his. She opened it across her knees and turned pages. Her eyes moved across the illustrations without stopping.
Rhaezon stood in the doorway and watched.
The firelight moved across her. It caught the loose strand of hair — the one, always the same one, that escaped every arrangement she attempted and fell across her face when she tilted her head forward. It caught the curve of her jaw, the set of her mouth, the strong line of her shoulders. She was sitting on the floor because chairs felt formal and floors felt honest and November was, in every atom of her construction, honest.
