“Stop sermonizing,” I say. “If you want to tell me not to be here, say it without the monument voice.”
“Don’t be here,” he says, and the obedience of that answer should keep me from wanting what happens next. It doesn’t.
His thumb presses lightly to my lower lip, the same way it did when he lifted paint from my mouth and slides sideways as if to remove a thought I didn’t say out loud. I don’t step away. My knees warm and then warn. He lowers his head and for a suspended second I think he’ll kiss me. He doesn’t. His lips graze my temple instead, a contact that feels more intimate than his lips on mine would have. Heat blooms under my skin. It’s worse because it isn’t the thing it almost is.
He lets my wrist go. The absence of his hand is a different kind of shock, a cold breeze on skin that had gotten used to heat in a handful of seconds. He steps back by inches like he’s pulling his attention off me in strips. I can’t decide if I’m relieved or insulted by his restraint.
“Go back to your room, Aurora,” he says quietly. “Before I forget what this place is for.”
“What is it for?” I ask.
“Walk away, Rory.”
He never uses my nickname. Hearing it now is worse than a kiss I didn’t get. I swallow and step sideways along the wall until the space in front of me is empty and the door is open and the hallway feels like a corridor in an ordinary house.
The corridor outside feels colder. The portraits watch without moving. My legs go loose the way they do after rushing yards up a hill, and I have to pause halfway down to make sure my knees remember what holding weight feels like. My palm has a smear of damp from where he held my wrist; I stare at it likeit’s writing. It dries as I watch, leaving nothing you could take a picture of.
Chapter 28 – Cassian
The gym door shuts behind her and the room exhales with me.
I towel the sweat off my face until the skin warms under friction and the tremor in my right hand settles to a faint flicker. Across the glass, rain threads down the panes in unbroken lines. The estate lawns are all dark shine and moving water.
I pull a fresh shirt from the cabinet, run it up my arms, and leave the top button open because the collar on this cut always drags against scar tissue if I clamp it shut. The line on my left side—four tight sutures once upon a time, a gift from a night when a stranger’s panic met my ribs—sits just above the fabric. She saw it. I heard her voice again as I fastened the cuffs:You built this place for them… but you use it too.
I strip the wraps from my hands, fold them the way I was taught and drop them into the bin. The wrap creak is familiar as breath. A thousand repetitions to keep a body honest. A thousand more so the mind remembers who it belongs to.
The office off the gym is spare by design: a steel desk bolted, a leather chair that doesn’t swivel when I’m angry, floor-to-ceiling glass that forces me to see my reflection so I can calibrate what the house sees when it looks back. A muted television in the corner drags Caldwell’s mouth across the bottom third of the screen in a white ticker. “UNREGULATED TRAUMA CENTERS: SENATE OVERSIGHT HEARING WIDENS.” A producer somewhere decided uppercase feels like news.
Reid comes in without knocking. He’s damp from the path between the control wing and here, suit without an umbrella. He carries a tablet and the face he brings when something is being taken without consent.
“Update,” he says.
“Go,” I urge.
He stands to the side of the desk, so the wall screens stay in my sightline. “Caldwell’s committee widened the scope at 16:07. Three subpoenas to shell entities we use for site logistics—Hargate Logistics, Mercy Ops, and Pine Harbor Supply. He’s got someone on staff who can read a ledger. They want internal transfers, vendor lists, vehicle leases, subcontracts. They also filed a preservation notice with our email provider.”
“Hiring outside investigators?” I ask, though the answer’s obvious.
“Private firm out of D.C. with a Boston satellite,” he says. “Aggressive reputation, leans photogenic. Their senior partner is already talking to a cable booker off record about ‘public-private entanglements.’ Caldwell’s office is feeding them page numbers and the names of our public sites to make the pitch feel factual.”
“Leaks?” I ask.
“Almost certainly,” he says. “We’ve seen artifacts that don’t live in public filings. Someone handed over a meeting agenda from a donor event last quarter—not sensitive, but it’ll let them pretend they’re peeling tape off a secret.”
I hold out a hand. He gives me the tablet. The first headline sits on top of three versions of itself:SENATOR CALDWELL TARGETS SHADOW HEALTH NETWORK;‘UNACCOUNTABLE’ CLINICS FACE TOUGH QUESTIONS;WHERE DOES THE MONEY GO?The last link is a personal blog with a photo of our gate and a caption about “mystery cars” that reads like someone who has never driven a mile in rain.
“Legal?” I ask.
“Motions to narrow are filed,” he says. “Hamilton & Reyes added trade secret language and survivor safety jurisprudence. We’re prepared to produce audited public documents quickly and slow-walk anything they didn’t ask for correctly.”
“Public?”
“Mara’s statement is posted,” he says. “It’s earned us two decent editorials. We declined three interview requests and a podcast from a former prosecutor who wants to say the wordclandestineinto a microphone until someone pays him for it.”
“Internal?”
He shifts his weight. “Lockdown on staff comms initiated,” he says. “We’re running a packet capture on outgoing traffic from this house. Devices won’t be searched. The network will be. Rotation lists were cut to single-digit distribution. I put a flag on outbound calls to Caldwell’s office. We’re screening unknown numbers that hit our staff with a script that does not sound like a script. Cameras on the east tree line remain thermal; extra patrol tonight, no visible show.”
