Phoebe's composure almost cracked. Almost. But she caught it and pulled the polished smile into place. Her words came out reasonable and completely inadequate.
"I don't know." She looked at her drink. "I haven't decided what to do yet. The contract would mean leaving Evergleam in the middle of the festival and breaking my commitment here. Possibly never being invited back." She swallowed. "It's everything I worked for, and I'm not sure it's everything I want anymore."
The women didn't push. Ruby flagged down the server and ordered another round. Mia closed her notebook. Ivy's hand found Phoebe's knee under the table, a brief warm pressure, and then released. Ember didn't let go of her hand.
They sat together in the booth with the garlands glowing overhead and the music playing in the background and the festival humming on the other side of the tavern walls, and they let the silence hold what words couldn't.
The next morning,Thorne arrived at her door at the usual time, the vanilla-scented snow falling in slow flakes behind him, the market lane already humming with vendors setting up the stalls.
He was punctual, professional, and something essential was missing from his face.
“Good morning," she said.
He gave her a nod, but no words.
His hand did not find the small of her back on the walk to the bakery, and the place where their shoulders had come to brush ached with the absence of his body against hers. The warmth of her own coat felt wrong because there was no contrast, no temperature line between his body and hers.
She searched his face for the man who had brought her coffee barefoot in his hallway. Who had murmured against her hair in the dark. Who had let his frost reach toward her feet across the floor because he was done fighting.
He was not there.
The man walking beside her was the officer from opening night. Competent. Distant. Cold in a way that had nothing to do with his physiology. She wanted to grab his arm and make him look at her. Wanted to plant her feet in the snow and saywhat happened, what changed, where did you go between my dressing room last night and this morning?
But she didn’t. For the first time in her life, she became a coward.
At the bakery, Ember read the situation in one glance.
Her eyes moved from the distance between them to Thorne's formal posture, to the way Phoebe's hands were wrapped too tightly around her coffee cup. Kaelor set a warm cinnamon pastry in front of Phoebe without a word. The bakery smells of butter, sugar, and bread, and the familiar fog on the windows, all wrapped around her like every other morning.
A Zingiberite regular was laughing at the counter. The oven door creaked open, and a rush of warmth billowed out, golden and fragrant. All of it warm. All of it familiar. All of it wrong, because the man who had walked her here was already gone.
Her comm pinged.
Her agent. Again.
The label wants an answer by the end of the day.
The window is closing.
Other artists are circling.
Do you understand what you're risking by hesitating?
The message sat on her screen while the ghost of Thorne's frost-art was still on her skin, a phantom map of everywhere his mouth had been.
The choir rehearsalthat afternoon was a mercy. Twenty-four voices crammed into the practice room, the sound of the market drifting through the open windows, someone selling honeyed nuts in the corridor and the smell of it mixing with the warm wood of the instruments and the bright chaotic energy of species who didn't share a tonal range trying to share a song. Phoebe threw herself into the arrangement, correcting a Cinnamite tenor who kept resolving his harmonies a beat early, coaxing the Mentharian soprano through a bridge that required sustained notes her species didn't naturally hold, laughing when Ruby clapped the offbeat again with such cheerful conviction that the entire second row followed her into rhythmic chaos.
Then she looked up through the rehearsal space windows, and the laugh died in her throat.
Thorne was standing outside the door. Selene was with him. Next to him. Her body close and angled toward his, with one hand resting on his arm.
They were talking. Phoebe couldn't hear a word through the glass. Selene said something and squeezed his arm. The same arm Phoebe had gripped two nights ago while he moved inside her. The same arm her fingers had memorized from shoulder to wrist, the silvery stripe patterns under her palms, the way the muscle shifted when he braced above her.
Selene rose on her toes and kissed his cheek.
The sight of another woman's mouth on his skin sent something through Phoebe's body that was not jealousy.
Jealousy was too small a word. This was possession landing in her chest and her gut and her clenched fists all at the same time. A visceral animal claim on a man she had no right to claim because she was the one holding a contract that pointed away from him.
