“And increase security around Aurora without her knowing,” I read my earlier instruction back to myself and almost laugh. There is nothing she doesn’t know with her skin. She will feel it the way a bird feels a pressure drop before a storm knocks a tree down. She will look at me with those eyes that make my mouth go dry and ask what I’m not telling her, and if I am wise I will tell her truth and shape it, so it doesn’t cut her. If I am not, she’ll find out anyway and the edge will be mine.
For the first time in years, I am afraid of what losing might cost.
And for the first time, that fear feels like something I can use.
Chapter 46 – Aurora
I wake to cold linen and the shape of a body no longer there.
For a moment I stay perfectly still, as if the switch that controls everything has been turned to dim. The suite is muffled by that expensive kind of silence that makes you think you’re inside a seashell. The candles he snuffed with his fingers last night are short towers of wax, the edges white where they cooled. His shirt lies across the chair like a collapsed shadow.
I look toward the bathroom door. The light is off.You’re safe here,he said last night in a voice that made safe sound synonymous with mine.
The clock on the dresser reads 7:06. The room, which was a night sanctuary, has become an absence this morning that I can’t paint over. I sit up. What surprises me is the thin ribbon of ache running under everything else, a silly, human, unstrategic ache:I wanted him to be here when I opened my eyes.
I tell myself to stop acting like the girl in a song. I swing my legs out of bed and the sheet rasps across my skin. The floor is cool. The window shows the gardens rinsed and pale, grass sequined by last night’s rain. Somewhere below, a staff door opens and closes with a soft hydraulic sigh. I pull on my leggings and his gray cardigan, the hem falling low enough to feel like borrowed armor. When I pass the mirror my hair looks like something happened to me; I push it into a knot and leave it there, crooked and functional. The glass gives me a stranger for half a second—a woman whose mouth has recently been held and kissed and told to say what she wants—and then it gives me back my face.
The suite door is heavy and too quiet when it closes behind me. The corridor smells faintly like lemon oil and clean fabric. The East Wing has a rhythm now; I feel it when it breaks.If he’s anywhere this early, he’s with the others who move in that tone.
Down two flights and along a hall where sunlight makes glass walls look like water is the operations wing. Last time I was here it was all screens and decision, words I didn’t know yet were a language. Now I know enough to recognize the gravity. I slow at the end of the corridor out of instinct.
A glass-walled conference room angles off the main line like a transparent box someone dropped onto the floor and never picked up. The door is half-open, a wedge of sound cutting the corridor in precise strokes.
I drift until I’m under the spill of voices, then flatten my back against the sliver of wall not made of glass. It’s a childish pose that works. Through the gap I see the corner of the table. Cassian’s voice threads past the edge of the door, calm and exact, the timbre he uses when he’s fitting an answer over a problem like a lid.
“…the gala worked,” he is saying. “Caldwell saw what I wanted him to see. He’ll back off the Hale angle.”
Back off the what?
A chair leg skims a rug. Reid’s answer is not quite a question. “And the girl?”
There’s a pause. In it, I can see Cassian’s mouth the way I see it when I’m close enough to taste him—the way it turns thoughtful by a degree. He doesn’t hesitate long. “She’s useful for now.”
My brain writes the words in black paint across the glass.Useful for now.The syllables knock something off a shelf in my chest. It hits the floor and the sound is louder inside me than in the corridor. I don’t notice I’ve pressed my palm to the wall until the cold bleeds through to my bones.
Useful for now.
Not:the woman I’m trying to save.Not: the artist I’m bringing into the work.Not:the person whose ghosts I took into my hands before dawn.Useful for now, which wears the same clothes as object, as asset, and lever.
My breath goes thin. I realize my mouth is open and I shut it before I make a sound. The conversation inside shifts to dates and names, the clipped shorthand of logistics. I can’t hear the words for the rush roaring in my ears.
I back away on soles that want to grab the floor. A nurse passes at the end of the corridor and nods, neutral and kind, the way people are here because Cassian trained them to be. For a second I think I’ll smile so she won’t see the way the edges of me are vibrating, but the memory of the words makes my face forget how. I turn down a side hall. The first door I try opens into a storage room: shelves, labeled bins, the clean vanilla smell of bandages. I step inside and brace both hands on a cart until my breath remembers how to behave.
I tell myself to sort it like an adult. I tell myself to put columns in my head: what you heard, what you don’t know, what he actually did, what you wanted him to say. But it doesn’t resolve into columns. It resolves into pictures. Me on his arm under the chandeliers. Me in the velvet room with a hand over my mouth so the doorknob rattling wouldn’t find my name. Me in the blindfold calling blue just to make sure it was still there and the way he stopped like a machine switching off, the way his hands gentled, the way my body said yes again while my mouth was still forming the word. Useful for now wraps itself around every picture and asks if the frame was the point all along.
When the room stops tilting, I leave it. I’m done listening at doors. If he’s going to think of me as a tool, I’ll make him say it to my face.
He’s in his office alone when I reach it. The door is open halfway. I push it the rest and walk in without knocking becausehe didn’t. He looks up from a tablet, eyes narrowing a fraction at the force with which I move and then widen by less than that when he reads my expression. He sets the tablet down slowly. He doesn’t stand. I hate that I notice.
“Useful for now?” I grit out. My voice is low and clear and nothing like what I feel.
He recognizes the phrase. I see it hit him like a cold hand on the back of the neck. A beat, then he straightens in his chair. “Aurora—”
“Don’t,” I snap, and the warning tastes like metal. “Say it again. Out loud.”
He exhales like someone about to dive. “You paraded me like an answer to a problem,” I continue. “You used my face like Kevlar to keep bullets from hitting your precious Sanctuaries. You introduced me as your girlfriend to an enemy, in a room full of cameras, and now you get to file me under asset and move your red pins around a map.”
Color rises in his cheekbones—anger, not embarrassment. His mouth thins. “Close the door,” he commands.
