“The math.” He shoves back from the table, the chair scraping against stone. “You're talking about math while you're, what, property now? A slave? Because of me?”
“Because of your choices.” She rises to meet him, and though she is smaller, though he has the advantage of height and the frantic energy of panic, she holds the space between them without yielding an inch. “Your choices put you here. My choice gets you out. That's how this works. That's how it's always worked.”
“It shouldn't.” Tears track down his face now, the breakdown he's been holding back since she entered finally cresting its banks. “It shouldn't always be you cleaning up my messes. It shouldn't be you sacrificing everything while I make the same stupid mistakes over and over.”
“You're right.” The agreement stops him mid-breath. “It shouldn't. But it is. So here's what you're going to do, Tomás. You're going to survive. You're going to stay alive and stay outof trouble and let me work off this debt. And when it's done, when we're both free of this place, you're going to make different choices. Better ones. Ones that don't end with your sister trading herself to alien crime lords.”
The silence stretches between them, heavy with everything neither of them can say. Then Tomás crosses the distance and pulls her into an embrace that collapses the remaining structure of his composure. His shoulders shake. His face presses into her hair. The sobs that tear through him belong to a child who has finally, catastrophically, understood the cost of his actions.
She holds him. Her expression, visible over his shoulder to the camera's unblinking eye, carries no tears and no softening. Only the tired endurance of someone who has held others through their grief so many times that the motion has become automatic, a reflex written into muscle memory by repetition.
She should be furious. She should rage at him for the choices that dragged her across three star systems to bargain for his worthless existence with the only currency she possessed. Instead, she stands in a holding room surrounded by enemies and holds her brother together while he falls apart, and the quiet patience of it catches somewhere beneath my sternum where it has no business lodging.
I close the feed.
The morning continues with reports to review, communications to answer, the endless machinery of House Draven's operations requiring attention and direction. I bury myself in the familiar weight of responsibility, letting the work fill the spaces where unwanted thoughts might otherwise take root.
She's an asset. A skilled one, perhaps more skilled than I estimated, but an asset nonetheless. Whatever peculiar gravity drew me to her door last night, whatever compulsion made me stand in the corridor breathing the same recycled air whileshe lay awake on the other side, I will not indulge it further. Discipline is the foundation upon which everything else is built. Without it, I am nothing but the monster my father raised me to be.
The emergency communication shatters my resolve before midmorning arrives.
“Lord Draven.” Vessl, one of my senior enforcers, and the strain in his words tells me everything I need to hear before he continues. “We have a situation. Krel took a plasma hit during the Sector Twelve collection. Internal damage, severe. Transport is bringing him in now, but the backup medic says it's beyond his capability.”
“Status of our medical staff.”
“Primary medic is across the city handling the Thornton situation. Backup is here, but this is beyond routine treatment.”
I'm already moving, the door to my office sliding open as my mind cycles through options and finds them wanting. Veth is competent within his limitations, but plasma burns with internal involvement require expertise he doesn't possess. The primary medic is forty minutes away at minimum. Krel does not have forty minutes.
This is the third serious injury in as many weeks. Three enforcers down during routine operations. Three incidents that should not have happened, but that question is for later. Now, only the immediate problem remains, and the solution that presents itself.
Her quarters are in my private wing. The walk takes less than two minutes at the pace I set, my stride eating distance while staff and guards press themselves against walls to let me pass. The door to her room responds to my override code, sliding open to reveal a space already empty of its occupant.
She is in the corridor when I find her, returning from a direction that suggests the medical bay. Of course. She wouldhave explored her territory. A soldier prepares for the battles she anticipates.
Her eyes find mine, and whatever she reads in my expression erases the questions before they can form. She is close enough that her scent reaches me—female warmth beneath the recycled air of the compound, the faint trace of soap, and something else. Something that makes the predator in me want to lean closer.
I do not lean closer.
“What do you need?”
“Injured enforcer.” The words emerge clipped and hard. “Plasma burn, internal damage. Fifteen minutes out.”
She is already moving, med kit materializing from her quarters in the span of a breath, the strap settling across her body. “Let's go.”
There's no hesitation, no protest of readiness, no questions about circumstance. She has shifted into a mode I recognize from soldiers who learn that hesitation kills, that questions are for the moments after crisis has passed.
I lead. She follows. The compound blurs around us.
The medical bay occupies the east side of my private wing, three beds and a surgical suite that cost more than most humans on Vahiri will earn in their lifetimes. Veth stands at the central station, his pale grey skin carrying the ashen undertone of fear.
A female in logistics colors appears at the medical bay entrance with an emergency supply case, her movements efficient as she transfers it to Veth's outstretched hands. “Vezra,” Veth acknowledges without looking up. “The coagulant stores?”
“Restocked this morning.” She lingers a moment longer than necessary, her gaze tracking over Maeve before retreating into the corridor.
Maeve does not introduce herself. Does not explain her presence or establish her authority through the social nicetiesthat other circumstances might demand. She crosses to the trauma station in four strides and begins.
“What medications do you have for shock?” The question snaps through the air, and Veth responds before he can think to question why he is answering to a human female he has never met.
