“I always value it,” she said, and the earnestness in her tone almost made him flinch. “I just don’t always obey it.”
His mouth twitched. “Clearly.”
She elbowed him lightly. “Come on. You can tell me if he’s a good guy.”
“He’s a good guy,” Hektor said, careful, measured.
“To you,” she clarified, tipping her head. “I mean…for me.”
He forced his gaze toward the distant stalactites. “Yes. For you.”
But in his head he added,a little too handsy for my liking.
Zara hummed. “So…you don’t hate him.”
“I don’t hate anyone.”
“You don’t glare at anyone with that intensity either.”
He shot her a look, an accidental one, too sharp, too exposed, and immediately shuttered it.
Zara only smiled, recognition bright and maddening. “That’s all I wanted to know.”
He wasn’t sure what, exactly, she thought she’d learned, but her grin told him she believed herself victorious.
And the worst part?
He didn’t correct her.
She opened her mouth, and he felt it coming, the question, the poke, the tease, but Pythorus reappeared, clipboard in hand, tail flicking in an efficient arc.
“We can triangulate from here,” the basilisk announced.
So they did. Again. And again.
Through the afternoon, heat clung to stone, air turning heavier, their world shrunk to tunnels, echoes, measurements, and the persistent, hollow nothing of no results. What grated wasn’t the boredom, nor the hours, it was Zara’s laughter, soft and easy beside the basilisk. The way she nudged him. The way he nudged her. The way they shared looks and low-voiced jokes,and how Pythorus seemed to know exactly when she was about to trip and caught her elbow every time.
Hektor stood to the side, monitoring silently, taking readings, and deliberately not watching.
Barely not watching.
By the final triangulation, when Pythorus declared they were done for the day, Zara drifted back to him, bright, flushed with heat and…something else.
“Don’t ask me again,” he said before she could speak.
She laughed. Of course, she laughed. “Fine, fine. I wasn’t going to ask that again. I was just going to ask if you think it’d be a good idea for me to go on a date with him.”
Something in his jaw clicked. “He asked you out?”
“No,” she said cheerfully, “I was going to ask Pythorus out.”
He made a sound, half grunt, half disbelief. “You’re?—”
“Oh, come on,” she cut in. “Don’t tell me you still think girls aren’t supposed to ask first.”
He just looked at her, expression unreadable stone.
“You are so old-fashioned,” she teased, tapping his arm.
