The drive to the office was his. He had begun driving them himself most mornings, because having her in the passenger seat, her feet on the dashboard despite his opinion about this, her voice filling the cabin, her hand resting on his forearm while she talked about whatever her mind had produced in the last twelve minutes, was a pleasure he was unwilling to delegate to anyone, including Gerry.
This morning she was telling him about a design problem with the V-Series housing. Something about the polymer casing and heat resistance in equatorial climates. She talked with her hands when she was excited about her work, gesturing atinvisible blueprints, and the passion in her voice, the unguarded enthusiasm for scent neutralization technology, was more compelling than any presentation he had ever witnessed in a boardroom.
“The current casing warps above forty-three degrees Celsius,” she was saying, her hands drawing shapes in the air. “But if we shift to a hybrid polymer...”
“You’re extraordinary,” he told her.
She stopped mid-gesture. Blinked.
“I’m...what?”
“At forty-three degrees. Continue.”
She stared at him for a long moment, her lips parted, the flush returning. Then she laughed, that full, startled, helpless laugh that rearranged the architecture of his chest, and went back to her polymers.
Her feet stayed on his dashboard. He chose not to comment.
Her phone buzzed in the cupholder. She glanced at it. Her thumb swiped the notification away before the screen had fully lit, and she set it face-down in her lap and went back to talking about polymers.
Her feet stayed on his dashboard. He chose not to comment. Different because the design wing now watched Zia with the particular attention that came with her new last name. Same because Zia moved through the attention like she didn’t notice it, greeting the cleaning crew by name, asking the Fae engineer about her daughter’s recital, complimenting Kirsten’s newhaircut with a sincerity that was impossible to fake because Zia didn’t know how to fake things.
That was the quality he had noticed first, from the back of a car across the street from a coffeehouse. Not her beauty, though she was beautiful, not in a way that had anything to do with symmetry but everything to do with warmth. It was her transparency. She existed without armor. Without performance. She was the same person in every room, with every person, and in a world of preters who spent their lives curating their presentation, her authenticity was so rare it bordered on alien.
It was also, he was discovering, a magnet.
The Lyccan delegate from the trade fair had requested a follow-up meeting specifically with “the product designer.” The request was professional. The way the delegate looked at Zia during the meeting was not. Alexei sat at the head of the table and watched a grown man lean three degrees too close while asking about dispersion algorithms, and something proprietary stirred in his chest.
He didn’t intervene. He didn’t need to. Zia answered every question with crisp professionalism, oblivious to the leaning, oblivious to the delegate’s interest, oblivious to the fact that her husband was calculating the structural integrity of the conference table in case he needed to break it.
After the meeting, as the delegate lingered to shake Zia’s hand with a grip that lasted two seconds longer than protocol required, Alexei placed his hand on the small of her back.
The delegate’s handshake ended immediately.
“That was productive,” Zia chirped as they walked to the elevator.
“Extremely.”
“He seemed really interested in the hybrid polymer approach.”
“The polymer. Yes. That was clearly his primary interest.”
She looked up at him. Studied his face.
“Are you doing the jaw thing?”
“I don’t have a jaw thing.”
“You do. Your jaw gets tight when you’re...” She bit her lip. The grin was forming. He could see it. He could not stop it. “Oh my gosh, you’re jealous again.”
“I am not...”
“First Mariano, now the Lyccan delegate.” She was beaming. Radiant. Insufferable. “The Prince of Atlantis gets jealous.”
“The Prince of Atlantis,” he told her, pulling her into the elevator and pressing the button for the executive level, “has no reason to be jealous.”
The doors closed. He pressed her against the wall. Her breath caught.
“Because nothing in that room,” he murmured against her ear, “belongs to him.”
