Page 14 of Curvy Sold Mate

He closed the file, locked the drawer, and went to the kitchen to make his own coffee, timing it so that Olivia would have already left.

She hadn’t.

She was at the counter with both hands wrapped around her cup, her hair still damp, wearing one of the shirts he’d seen hanging in the wardrobe the night before—green, soft at the collar where washing had worn it thin, the hem sitting mid-thigh. She looked up when he entered.

“There’s hot water,” she said.

“Thank you.”

He made his coffee. She watched the window. Neither of them mentioned that this was the first sentence she’d spoken to him since the word fine on a forest trail, or that the offering of hot water was, in the economy of two people learning to coexist inside a structure they’d both been locked into, as close to an extended hand as either of them could afford.

Chapter 9 - Olivia

Olivia walked into the briefing room without knocking. Viktor’s voice, low and measured, laying out patrol response gaps along the eastern perimeter—stopped. Four heads turned. Viktor at the map table. Chris beside him. Two senior patrol leads whose names she knew because she’d vetted them during the ritual preparations, and who were looking at her now with expressions that ranged from surprise to careful blankness.

She pulled out a chair, sat, and opened the notebook she’d brought.

“Continue,” she said.

A beat. Viktor’s gaze held hers for a fraction too long, then moved back to the map.

“The response window between anchor points six and seven is forty-three seconds wider than standard.” He traced the line with his index finger. “Marcus exploited it. We need to determine whether the gap is structural or whether someone widened it.”

“It’s structural,” Olivia said. Both patrol leads shifted in their seats. “The anchor at point seven was reset during the ward reinforcement last autumn. Caitlynn adjusted the resonance frequency to accommodate the new dual-source matrix, but the adjustment shortened the effective radius by twelve feet. Nobody recalibrated the patrol timing to compensate.”

Silence. Viktor looked at her, and there was nothing performative in it—no deference, no surprise, no irritation. He was recalculating. She watched him do it, watched the information slot into whatever framework he carried behind those grey eyes, watched the adjustment register as a slight tilt of his chin.

“You’re sure about the twelve feet,” he said.

“I helped Caitlynn build the matrix. I know where the seams are.”

Chris caught her eye from across the table and gave her the ghost of a nod—brief, warm.

The briefing lasted another forty minutes. Olivia contributed to nine of them. She identified a scheduling overlap that had left the southern approach uncovered for twenty minutes every third rotation, flagged a discrepancy in the vault access logs that Viktor had missed—or hadn’t reached yet; his expression when she raised it was ambiguous—and proposed a modification to the patrol handoff protocol that one of the senior leads wrote down without being asked.

She was good at this. She’d spent years proving it in smaller rooms, with less resistance, building credibility through competence that never rested because nobody handed it to her. The frustration wasn’t that they doubted her abilities. The frustration was that they were surprised.

When the briefing ended, Viktor stood at the map table gathering reports. She was halfway to the door when she turned back for the notebook she’d left on the chair.

He was watching her.

She’d noticed Viktor’s stillness a hundred times—the controlled kind, the tactical kind, the kind that meant he was holding something in place by force. This was none of those. His guard had slipped sideways, and what she caught in the gap was brief and unguarded.

Then he blinked, and the reports were in his hands again.

She picked up her notebook.

“The scheduling overlap,” he said, his voice level, professional. “Good catch.”

“I know.”

Olivia left, and in the corridor, she pressed her back against the stone wall and exhaled through her nose, telling herself that the hitch in her chest was residual adrenaline from the briefing, nothing else, a physiological artifact of inserting herself into a room that hadn’t expected her, even though she did not believe it.

The infirmary, the second time, felt smaller.

Caitlynn had cleared the examination table and laid out instruments Olivia didn’t recognize—crystal-tipped probes, a shallow bowl of water infused with something that caught the light, a leather roll containing needles so fine they resembled strands of copper hair.

“Lie down,” Caitlynn said. “Forearm up. Try not to move.”