Page 61 of Orc’s Bones

She glanced at him and looked away.

“The Dominion sounds different this morning,” she said.

He listened. The hum in the stone below the steps ran clean and unbroken. No interference. No directed pull. “Yes.”

“I forgot what it was supposed to sound like. I’ve been reading the wrong note in it for so long I started thinking the wrong note was the baseline.” She looked out at the city. “Four years outside and I knew something was off the moment I came through the gateways.”

“You pressed your hand to a column on your way in.”

“You saw that.”

“I saw everything from the moment you cleared the threshold.” He hadn’t been watching from the dais. He’d been in the corridor, reading Lyssa’s briefing notes, and he’d looked up when the Cathedral’s own walls changed register — the way it always changed when someone who knew how to read bone moved through the building. “I was in the corridor before you reached the authority chamber.”

She turned to look at him. Something in the precision of her expression had eased in a way he’d only started seeing in the last day.

“You were reading me before we were in the same room.”

“Yes.”

“And you were still surprised.”

He was going to let that stand.

“You’re still bleeding.”

He looked at his forearm. The cut from one of the construct’s bone fragments, which he had not addressed and had apparently not addressed since.

“Yes.”

“Korven will have supplies at the mid-level junction.”

“Later.”

She turned back to the city. He had been watching her work for three weeks in every dangerous room in the Dominion and the sharpness of her hadn’t diminished.

Neither had what it did to him.

She turned and looked at him. Not reading the room this time. Reading him. What she found made her exhale — the quiet acknowledgment of someone who’d found more than the surface suggested and had chosen to get closer anyway.

Her hand came to his chest. Not examination — she’d done that in the founding chamber, the clinical press of palms to bone structure. This was her hand against his chest because she wanted it there, and she left it there, and the pressure of her palm through the fabric was real and present and not going anywhere.

He put his hand over hers. Held it in place.

“The Archive.” Not pulling back — just the thought surfacing.

“Not yet.”

She turned into him instead of away — the same move she’d been making since the first day.

He pulled her in.

Not the three-weeks-releasing kiss of last night, not the two brief kisses before it. This was slow and deliberate and had nothing urgent in it — no construct overhead, no array pulling at his bloodline, no threat to work against. His mouth on hers and her hand still on his chest and his arm around her and both of them unhurried on the Cathedral steps with the dawn running through the Dominion below.

When it ended she stayed close. Her forehead against his jaw.

He didn’t move.

He held her on the steps and let it be that.