Page 23 of Curvy Sold Mate

“Leave them,” Kahn said.

Viktor’s hand stilled.

The study was quiet in a way that had weight—the loaded kind of quiet, heavier than the pauses between briefing topics, holding a question someone hadn’t asked yet. Kahn was still sitting behind the desk, hands flat, the light through the window retreating toward the wall as the afternoon faded.

“How are you sleeping?” Kahn asked.

“Fine.”

“You’ve been in the barracks gym at four-thirty every morning this week. The night guard mentioned it.”

“I’ve always been an early riser.”

“You’ve always been a five-fifteen riser. Four-thirty is new.” Kahn leaned back. The chair creaked beneath him. “And you look like you’ve been running on coffee and patrol reports, which is normally your preferred condition, but there’s a quality to it this week that concerns me.” He stopped. Tried a different approach. “Are we alright, Viktor?”

The question sat between them. The “we” encompassed fifteen years of doorways stood in, briefings shared, the unsaid things that had accumulated between them like sediment—building a foundation neither of them had examined because examining it would have meant admitting it was there.

“We’re fine,” Viktor said.

Kahn’s mouth compressed at the corners—the expression Viktor knew better than any other, the one that meant Kahn had heard the answer, measured its distance from the truth, and decided to let the gap stand for now.

“The files stay,” Kahn said, nodding toward the desk. “I want to read them again tonight.”

Viktor left. The corridor was dim, the sconces lit for evening, and his footsteps were the only sound. He walked past the kitchen, where the smell of chamomile drifted through the half-open door, telling him Olivia was in there without needing to check.

He went to the quarters. Sat at the desk. Opened the investigation notes and worked them by lamplight, because work was the one language that never required him to be anything other than competent.

He worked until the lamp burned low. Olivia came in sometime after nine, moved through the sitting room without speaking, and closed the bedroom door behind her. The click of the latch was quiet, ordinary, the kind of sound that should have been nothing.

Chapter 15 - Olivia

She found out from Chris, which was the worst part.

Not worst because Chris had done anything wrong—he hadn’t. He was simply talking, leaning against the kitchen doorframe with a mug in his hand and the easy warmth that made him the person everyone in the compound felt comfortable around, which was why Kahn kept him close. He’d been telling her about the ward reinforcements on the eastern boundary, and somewhere in the middle of a sentence about resonance frequencies, he said it.

“Viktor’s suspect list—the three he brought to Kahn yesterday—did any of them overlap with yours?”

She went still with her cup halfway to her mouth.

“The three he brought to Kahn,” she repeated.

Chris’s expression shifted. The warmth didn’t leave, but something behind it recalculated—she watched it happen, watched the moment he understood that she hadn’t known. His mouth opened, closed, and he looked into his coffee with the sudden intensity of a man who’d just realized he’d pulled a pin he couldn’t put back.

“Olivia—”

“He briefed Kahn. On the mole investigation.”

“Yesterday afternoon. I assumed you were—” He stopped and released a slow breath. “I assumed wrong.”

She put the cup down carefully, centering it on the counter with a precision that kept her hands occupied while the rest of her caught up. The mug made a small ceramic sound against the stone, exact and final.

“Thank you, Chris.”

He recognized the dismissal.

She stood in the kitchen for ninety seconds. She counted them the way she counted everything when the ground beneath her shifted—a habit built at sixteen with her palms flat on bathroom tile, grief pressing against her chest, counting because counting imposed structure on chaos and structure was the only thing she’d ever been able to trust.

Then she went to find Viktor.