“Manufacturing leaves signatures.” Her words cut through the haze. “Every facility has tells. Trace elements from their equipment, patterns in how they synthesize.” She zooms in on a particular cluster of markers. “This compound has markers I've never seen. They don't match the manufacturing profiles from any of the three facilities we identified.”
I list off the suspected labs. “The Zhael labs. The Syndicate facility. Our pharmaceutical division.”
“None of them.” She meets my gaze, and the gravity in her dark eyes mirrors what takes root in my bones. “This compound didn’t come from Vahiri. Or if someone made it here, they used equipment that didn’t originate on this planet. Someone’s smuggling in materials to arm your traitor.”
Equipment acquisition routes through logistics. Through Vezra's division, with its authorization codes and supply chain documentation. If military-grade pharmaceutical equipment entered my territory without my knowledge, someone in her division processed the shipment or helped bury it.
Someone outside provided the equipment, and someone inside received it. The implication reshapes everything I thought I understood about the threat.
“Another House.”
“That would be my guess. Someone with resources and motivation to weaken House Draven's enforcement arm without triggering open conflict.” She pulls up additional data, evidence of her thorough mind at work. “The question is which House, and why now.”
The question burns through possibilities. House Korvan manufactures weapons and pharmaceuticals both. The markers she’s identified could match their military-grade output. HouseZhael runs spies who could identify targets and coordinate strikes. House Sethrak wants us weakened after we fought over territory and bloodied both houses three years ago.
I need to think. To move. To not be in this room where her scent clouds my judgment and her safety has become tangled with my sanity.
She's making progress the traitor won't ignore. If they learn what she's uncovered, she becomes a target. If they see what she is to me, she becomes leverage.
I've put her in danger. Unacceptable.
“Keep working.” The words come out clipped, colder than I mean them. “Identify the markers. I need exact specifications of what we're dealing with.”
I need to think and there's only one place I can do that without eyes on me. I'm through the door before she can respond. I cannot afford the distraction of craving her. Cannot afford the softness.
The corridor stretches before me, and I walk until the medical bay disappears behind me, until her scent fades from the recycled air, until I can breathe again without remembering how she sounded when she asked me to stay.
The walls growing rougher as I pass maintenance access points and utility junctions, the lights dimming to emergency standards because no one comes down here who has no reason to hide.
I have reason. I've had reason for thirty years, since I was a boy newly made heir with blood on his hands and nowhere to put the softness my father kept trying to beat out of me.
The maintenance tunnels open to a natural alcove where canyon rock meets compound stone, a space too small to matter and too hidden to notice. The creviks emerge from the shadows before I finish descending the final steps, six-legged bodies covered in coarse grey-brown fur that provides poor camouflageagainst the darker rock. They're scavengers, native to Vahiri's canyon depths, survivors who exist in the cracks between territories that belong to species who would kill them for sport if the killing didn't require more effort than ignoring them.
No one wants them. They hold no value. No purpose beyond existing. I've been feeding them since I was nineteen years old and newly returned from my first collection, the debtor's daughter's face burned into my memory alongside the blood I couldn't wash from beneath my claws.
The scraps I saved from my morning meal emerge from my pocket, simple protein discarded from the kitchen. The creviks approach with the hesitant movements of prey that has learned to recognize a specific predator as safe, their small bodies pressing forward, soft chittering sounds rising from throats too small to produce anything that might draw attention.
I crouch. Extend my palm. Let them eat from my hand while their bodies press against my knees and their small hearts beat against my legs. This is the only gentleness I allow myself. This, and the night I spent in her bed.
She looked at me this morning like she’d seen a person worth seeing. Not the monster, the enforcer, the weapon his father built to serve House Draven’s bloody purposes. She saw me underneath all that armor, and the recognition in her eyes hollowed out my lungs.
I think about the word weakness and wonder if my father understood what he was teaching me. Whether the lesson was true, or whether it was the only thing he had left to give after his wife betrayed him and the Council made him watch her die. Whether I'm repeating his mistakes or learning to make my own.
My father will say she corrupted me. Will point to the timeline as evidence: before Maeve, dutiful son; after Maeve, rebellion. The narrative writes itself. Sentiment makes you weak. Attachment destroys. Everything he warned me about,manifested in one human female who walked into my compound and unmade thirty years of discipline.
The creviks have hidden in these tunnels for years.
Other patterns follow the thought. Reassignments I argued for instead of punishments my father demanded. Assets I cultivated when he wanted corpses. Disagreements I buried because examining them meant acknowledging what they implied. Distance that grew so gradually I didn’t notice until deceiving him brought relief instead of guilt.
None of that started eight days ago.
Maeve didn't create the fractures in my loyalty. She illuminated them. Gave me a reason to stop pretending the cracks weren't spreading. Showed me the capacity for care I'd been protecting in secret, the softness he tried to carve out of me, and made me want to stop hiding it.
She's not the cause of my rebellion. She's the catalyst that helped me see what was already happening. The permission I didn't know I was waiting for.
My father has it backwards. He always has.
The creviks finish eating and press closer, seeking heat, seeking safety, seeking whatever comfort they've learned to take from the male who visits them when the burden of what he is grows too heavy to carry alone. I let them huddle against my legs and listen to the quiet of the hidden places where no one expects me to be anything other than what I am.
