“Anything else?” I ask, putting my thumb on the scanner and feeling the machine recognize a man who shouldn’t be making mistakes.
“All quiet,” Reid says. His eyes slide once, quickly, toward the hall that leads to her. “She’s… intense,” he adds, like a man tossing a pebble into a lake to see how far the ripples carry.
“She’s mine to handle,” I answer gruffly. He dips his head in what passes for deference, and if there’s a smirk, he keeps it off his mouth.
He turns the tablet back around to confirm my override. The salmon dot goes gray, then green. A status line crawls: applying patch… patch complete. An alert window flickers and disappears—harmless, likely, unless it isn’t. I rub a hand down my face, the way I do when I’ve been in two worlds for too long and forgot to build a bridge between them. The paint smell rides my palm.
“Double her security detail,” I say, the decision arriving like a reflex. “No unscheduled visitors. I want eyes on her door and the camera inside kept high, focus set wide. No staff changes on that wing without my sign-off.”
Reid’s stylus moves. “Understood.”
“And no one but you or me clears her movements.” I don’t watch the sentence settle. I should. It’s the kind of delegation that looks like control until you remember what you’ve just handed over and to whom. “If she leaves the East Wing, I want security with her. Soft, not visible.”
“Of course. Do you want me to brief Navarro?”
“Not yet. I’ll speak to her in the morning.” The last time I slept in a bed after a night like this I was a different man, and the bed was a cot at a clinic where you could hear mice in the vents at two in the morning. It occurs to me that I’m more tired now, which feels like evolution and failure at once.
Reid tucks the tablet under his arm. “Anything else you need from me tonight?”
“No,” I wave him away. “Go home.”
He nods, turns, and walks back toward the operations wing.
***
The studio door is open two inches. I push it wider and step in.
She’s asleep on the sofa we brought in for residents who refuse to leave their workspaces—the paint-smudged blanket tossed over her like a mercy. The bandage I put on her palm is clean and white in the single bulb’s light. Dried paint streaks her shoulder, a mark like a brush made when it ran out of pigment and found skin. I should wake her. I don’t. I crouch instead and watch the stutter of her breath settle and even when I lay my hand very carefully along the edge of her hair to coax it away from her mouth.
Her face in sleep is nothing like her face when she looks at me and decides on a rule we’ll both pretend to follow. Without the grit she’s younger, which is a trick of light and angle and the fact that no one is asking anything of her in this second. Those seconds are my responsibility. I’ve just lengthened one at the expense of others.
There’s a smear of ultramarine on her cheekbone where my thumb dragged earlier. It makes her look like she belongs to a tribe that named itself. I drag my own thumb across it without pressure, not to remove it, to feel what it feels like to mark and be marked in the same room.
My phone vibrates once, the gentle insistence we use overnight to keep from waking up the whole house with sirens. I check the banner and thumb it away without opening the details—system latency resolved on South grid.Thanks, Reid.Another banner pops and dies before I can read it.
“Sleep,” I say softly, as if she were half awake and needed permission for something her body already knows how to do.
She doesn’t stir. I stand, turn, and look through the high window toward the dark grounds where rain from earlier has made the lawn look lacquered. The cameras see foxes out there most nights, slinking along the hedgerows like they own the property and don’t pay taxes. We built a world that watches the ground for everything except the thing that digs under fences.
You’re safest here,I think at her back.You’re safest with me.It’s not a prayer. It’s a tactic. There’s a difference, and right now I’m pretending I don’t know it.
I tell myself I tightened my grip tonight.
I don’t realize I’ve already put the key in the wrong hand.
Chapter 54 – Aurora
I wake with paint in my hair and the wrong ceiling above me.
For a second I don’t know where I am. The bulb over the easel glows a tired amber, and the smell of turpentine has settled into the blanket like a second skin. The sofa under me is narrow, the kind that forces you to choose a position and suffer for it. My shoulder’s cramped, my neck is a knot, and my palm pulses in time with my heartbeat under the small white bandage Cassian wrapped last night. My canvas leans on the easel where I left it—furious slashes of red and blue and black, the knife-scrapes showing the underpainting, my handprint smeared down the left third like I tried to climb out and got caught.
Cassian is gone.
I push the blanket down and sit up slowly. My chest feels hollow, a room after a storm where you can smell the water but don’t see it. The paint on my collarbone has dried into a stiff stripe; when I run a fingertip over it, flakes dust down onto my tank top. There’s a streak of ultramarine on my knee where his hand had been, and the sight hits me in the solar plexus, fast and mean. It isn’t shame exactly. It’s recognition: of how far I let myself go, how deep I let him pull me, how much of last night was mine and how much I let him make.
I rub sleep grit from my eyes, swing my legs to the floor, and make myself stand.
I peel the blanket off, fold it, and set it on the sofa arm like the act might fix the parts of me that feel scattered. I find the tiny bathroom attached to the studio.
