Partnership already happened.
We just didn’t vote on it.
The word love sits between us like an unexploded device.
Neither of us touches it.
Neither of us even looks at it.
Because if one of us says it out loud, everything else is going to change shape around it.
And I don’t know yet how to protect her from that too.
CHAPTER 19
KIMBERLY
The freight café in District Twelve gives new meaning to the term ‘hardscrabble’.
It’s exactly the kind of place Varek Glimner would agree to meet in if he thought he was coming to collect tribute instead of walking into a controlled burn.
I get here ten minutes early.
Not because I’m nervous.
Because I like owning the room before the villain walks in.
The café sits on the edge of a transit spur that technically counts as neutral ground under syndicate accords, which means nobody’s supposed to bring weapons heavier than a sidearm and nobody’s supposed to bleed on the floor unless negotiations go very wrong.
The lighting is bad.
The kind of yellowed industrial fluorescents that make everyone look tired and morally compromised.
Perfect.
Tur is already here.
Not visible.
I know exactly where he is anyway.
I feel him the way you feel a storm pressure drop through your sinuses before it starts raining.
I take the booth in the back corner with the cracked vinyl seat and the unobstructed sightlines to both exits, order a coffee I don’t intend to drink, and set my tablet on the table like I’m just another woman waiting on a late date who hasn’t realized yet that she’s about to ruin someone’s entire life.
Three layers of syndicate rumor did most of the work.
One forged Alliance audit notice did the rest.
It turns out Varek Glimner is very interested in not having his off-world accounts frozen or his shell companies flagged for laundering military-grade excavation equipment through port authorities that technically don’t exist.
Funny how cooperative people get when you whisper the right bureaucratic nightmare into their ear.
The door chimes.
Varek walks in like he owns oxygen again.
Same immaculate suit.
