He knocked.
A beat of silence, and then footsteps on the cabin's metal floor.
The door opened.
She stood in the frame. She had washed her face — the grime from the hold was gone. Her skin was warm brown under the corridor's flat lighting, and there was that strand of dark hairthat had escaped whatever arrangement she'd attempted and fell across her forehead.
She was composed and she looked at him the same way she had looked at him in the hold. Clear. Unafraid. Waiting. Not for rescue, not for answers, but for whatever came next, as if she had learned that the next thing came whether you were ready for it or not and you might as well face it standing up.
His rehearsed words were ordered. His terms were precise. The logic was airtight and the delivery was prepared and his mouth opened to begin?—
"So, you're here to propose, huh?"
His mouth opened, but he'd forgotten how words worked.
"Well, you don’t have to look so grim about it. I’ll say yes.”
FOUR
She'd saidproposeto save him from having to. She’d meant it as a joke. That didn’t make it any less true.
Something moved behind his eyes. A flicker. Amusement, maybe? Definitely surprise. His mouth opened. Closed.
November leaned against the doorframe and let the joke breathe. She'd learned a long time ago that humor was the fastest way to take the temperature of a room — or a person. A panicked horse couldn't laugh, but a person could, and the way they responded to the unexpected told you almost everything about the architecture underneath.
Lord Rhaezon Vaethari did not laugh. But he didn't shut down either. The flicker stayed, caught somewhere between his dark eyes and the hard line of his jaw, and that told her more than laughter would have.
"May I come in?"
His voice was low and careful, each word placed with such deliberation that suggested he was always aware of what his voice did to a room. There was a physical quality to it, a resonance that she registered somewhere below her collarbone.
She stepped back and gestured him inside.
The cabin was small. It had seemed adequate when she was alone in it — a bunk, a narrow desk bolted to the wall, a sanitation unit behind a sliding panel. With Rhaezon inside, the proportions shifted. He filled the space the way a draft horse filled a single stall — not by moving aggressively into it but by simply being the size he was and having nowhere to put it all. He stood near the door, and she watched him do something she recognized: he made himself smaller. Drew his shoulders in. Kept his wings tight against his back. Positioned himself so the scarred left side of his face angled slightly away from her.
She'd seen horses do the same thing. Turn the injured side. Present the good profile. Hope you don't look too closely.
She sat on the edge of the bunk and looked at him directly.
"Sit if you want. The chair doesn't bite."
He glanced at the narrow desk chair as though calculating whether it would hold him. He sat, and the chair protested with a low creak, and November pressed her lips together to keep from smiling because the absurdity of this enormous scarred alien lord perched on a chair designed for someone half his weight was the kind of thing her mother would have found hilarious.
Her mother's voice filled her mind, unbidden:Well, ‘Vember. That's a whole lot of man for a very small chair.
She put the voice away. Locked it back in its room.
"I have a proposal." He paused. "That is not — I am not using that word because of what you said."
"I know."
"The arrangement I am suggesting is political. Legal. It is not a real bonding."
"I know that, too."
He looked at her, and she watched him recalibrate. She could almost see it happening — the prepared script adjusting to the fact that she was three steps ahead of where he'd expectedher to be. He'd come in ready to explain. She didn't need the explanation. She needed the terms.
"Tell me the specifics," she said.
