He'd placed that conversation underunproductive.
He revisited it nightly.
Her voice in the low register, her accent showing. The Pine's light on her skin. The way she'd stood at her door and talked to a man most people couldn't wait to walk away from. The exact shade of her lipstick under the lamplight. The curl of her breath in the cold air, the way it had almost reached his face before dissolving.
Unproductive. All of it. He was a security officer, not a poet. He did not moon or pine. He certainly did not spend ten months replaying a twenty-minute walk because a woman had deigned to speak with him.
He finished the sweep on tier two, descended to the main floor, and stopped.
She was on the stage.
The house was dark, the seats empty, the work lights throwing harsh geometric shadows across the floor. No audience. No band. No one for her to perform for. Just Phoebe Calloway in a wine-dark dress, alone on the stage with a monitor wedge and a microphone, running the room.
She stood in profile, one hand resting light on the mic stand, her posture that perfectly trained alignment: spine long, shoulders open, chin lifted. The dress caught the work lights, deep garnet shifting to near-black in the folds, the fabric skimming the curve of her hips, the line of her thigh as she shifted weight. Her hair was up, an intricate arrangement of braids threaded with something that glittered, exposing the long column of her neck.
His memory had blurred her.
That was the thought that arrived first, before any of the others. Ten months of replaying the walk, the lamppost, the door, and somehow his recall had softened her into something manageable. It had filed her edges and rendered her into a composite his discipline could handle. The actual woman was not a composite. The line of her throat as she lifted her head, thetension in her fingers on the mic stand, the faint sheen of her skin under the work lights.
Then her voice arrived.
She was warming up, running a phrase. It wasn’t the polished version she'd deliver for the crowd but the raw architecture underneath, finding the room, testing how the space held sound. The note climbed, opened, her voice reaching for something high and clear with the casual authority of two decades of stages behind it. No vibrato yet, no ornamentation. Just the bone structure of the melody, stripped to its foundation.
His truth-sense responded before his brain caught up.
Warmth. In his chest, spreading through his throat, pooling behind his ribs. Actual physical warmth, the impossible inverse of the static he lived in as he listened to her. She wasn’t performing for anyone, managing her image. She was alone in an empty room, singing for the architecture and the dark seats and herself, and every note read true and unguarded, and his body was responding.
The frost on his gauntlet cracked audibly in the quiet theater. A sharp splintering sound filled the air as ice fractured along the leather. His pulse was no longer at a Mentharian resting rate.
He did not move.
He stood in the shadow at the back of the house, one hand on the rail, and did not breathe.
She ran the phrase again, higher this time, and the truth of it washed through him. He closed his eyes because if he watched the way her throat moved on that note, he would do something unforgivable like walk down the aisle toward the stage.
She finished. The last note hung in the amphitheater's acoustics, sustaining, then fading. He heard her murmur something pitched too low to catch, but the cadence sounded like satisfaction.
He left. He did not let himself look at her again.
Two hours later,the house was full.
The amphitheater thrummed with bodies. Species from across the Aromatica Nebula filling the curved seats, the three moons visible through the open roof casting their shifting light across the crowd. The aromatic compounds in the air were thick tonight, cinnamon and vanilla and ginger layering over each other, and beneath them the clean, cold bite of peppermint from his own kind, sharp enough that he could taste it at the back of his throat. Opening night. The energy was high, the Eternal Pine blazing outside, the festival officially alive.
Thorne stood at his post on the upper rail, arms crossed, scanning.
The comm chatter was the usual opening-night noise: Finn reporting a minor scuffle near the south entrance, two vendors in a territorial dispute over stall placement, a Zingiberite child separated from its family and crying in the Market District. Routine. Manageable. He dispatched responses, adjusted coverage, kept his voice flat and professional.
The work steadied him. The work always steadied him.
A human male near the front of the house drew his attention. This human was not watching like a fan.
Thorne's focus sharpened. The man was seated five rows back, center section, medium build, brown hair. Everything about him looked average, but his posture was wrong. The surrounding crowd swayed and murmured, the pre-show energy infectious, bodies loose and anticipatory. This man was still. Fixed. His attention aimed at the empty stage with an intensity that was too focused. Too directed.
It was probably nothing. But Thorne couldn’t shake the feeling that something was off. He opened a private channel. "Finn. Human male, section C, row five, center seat. Brown jacket, dark hair. Get me a visual and run him."
"On it."
He tightened the perimeter and reassigned two officers to positions flanking the section, casual enough to pass as crowd management but close enough to intercept. Protective instinct flared hot under his ribs. Hotter than the role called for, sharper than the threat warranted. He'd run security on dozens of high-profile performers. He knew the difference between a suspicious attendee and an actual threat.
