“No, you don’t.”
“No, I don’t,” he agrees. “But I’m trying to seem supportive.”
I kneel and press the chalk to the kitchen floor. The first line scrapes across the boards in a pale curve, rough under my knuckles where splinters rise from old wood. I draw slowly, using Rhazek’s corrected contract text as a guide, translating infernal alignment into something a human body can occupy without being folded inside out by law older than language.
Rhazek stands across the room near the pantry, his presence still enough to irritate me on principle. He watches the circle take shape with the focused intensity of a blade studying a whetstone.
“That lower arc is too narrow,” he says.
I pause, chalk dust on my fingertips. “Good morning to you too.”
“Widen it by two finger-widths or the breath pattern will misalign with the containment boundary.”
Corin glances at him. “That was nearly helpful.”
“It was helpful.”
“It was helpful with the personality of a locked coffin.”
I smudge the chalk with my thumb and redraw the lower arc. “Both of you are making me miss silence.”
“Silence misses you too,” Corin says. “It told me so privately.”
Rhazek’s gaze shifts toward him. “You become more talkative under stress.”
“I was talkative before stress. Stress just gave me better material.”
The circle closes beneath my hand. I sit back on my heels, studying the design, then add the small countermarks Rhazek insisted represent rhythm, continuity, and resistance to external interruption. The chalk dust clings to the creases in my palm, dry and faintly gritty.
“Now?” I ask.
Rhazek’s eyes trace the circle. “Acceptable.”
“Careful. Keep praising me like that and I’ll swoon.”
Corin snorts. “Please don’t. He’ll classify it as a cardiac event.”
“I would,” Rhazek says.
I look up at him. “That was not a challenge.”
His expression does not change, but the tether gives the faintest warmth, as though some hidden part of him has learned the shape of humor and resents it.
I step into the chalk circle.
The moment both feet cross the boundary, the air changes. It tightens around my skin, not painfully, but with a close, attentive pressure. The scent of chalk and old wood sharpens, and beneath it I catch Rhazek’s infernal heat, Corin’s sweat from the night’s watch, the herbal bitterness of our defense mixtures, and my own fear trying to disguise itself as discipline.
Corin reaches into his pocket and pulls out a short strip of charcoal. “I’ll count.”
“I know how to breathe.”
“Clearly, but now we’re making it official.” He taps the charcoal against the doorframe. “Inhale for four. Hold for six. Exhale for eight?”
I nod. “Again and again until I can keep my pulse from galloping off like an idiot horse.”
“No actual horses,” Corin says.
I glare at him.
