"I need you to see something," he says.
NotI want. Notyou will. Need.
He's never used that word before. Not with me. Every interaction we've had has been structured around his control, his authority, his ownership of every variable including me. Commands. Statements. The architecture of a man who needs nothing because he has everything or can take it.
This is different.
I look at him standing in my doorway in the middle of the station's night, his body flickering with light he can't control, and I feel the ground shift beneath me. Not physically. Something structural. The framework of our dynamic, captor and captive, predator and prey, adjusting by a single degree.
He is showing me weakness.
And that, more than anything he has done to me since I arrived, terrifies me.
Because monsters who show you their underbelly aren't becoming less dangerous.
They're deciding you're close enough to bite.
I push the sheets aside and stand.
"Show me," I say.
Chapter 5
Zane
My hands won't stop shaking.
I killed a man eleven minutes ago and my hands won't stop, this fine tremor running through my fingers like current through a bad wire. I watch them under the corridor lights, turning my palms up, studying the blood caught in the creases of my knuckles. His blood. Blue-black under the overheads, already oxidizing to something darker where it dries against my skin.
I flex my fists closed. Open. Closed again.
The tremor doesn't stop.
The assassin had been waiting in the maintenance crawl between decks four and five. A stretch of corridor I shouldn't have been walking, except I'd taken the back route from the fabrication bay because I wanted three minutes alone with my own thoughts.
Three minutes without someone watching me for weakness.
Without Astra's security detail breathing down my collar.
Three minutes nearly got me killed.
He came from behind a junction box. Fast. Faster than he should have been, which told me stims, maybe military-grade neural acceleration. The blade caught the light first, a matte-black edge that ate the glare instead of throwing it back, and then it was at my throat. Would have opened me from ear to ear if I hadn't turned my head at the sound of his boot on the grating. A sound so small it shouldn't have mattered. Half an inch of metal flex under seventy kilos of killer, and that was the margin between me breathing and me bleeding out against the wall.
I got my forearm up. The blade bit through my jacket sleeve and into muscle, a hot line of nothing that would become agony in about thirty seconds when the adrenaline ebbed. I didn't have thirty seconds. I had the half-breath between his backswing and my counter, and I used it the way my father taught me: dirty. Thumbs in the eyes. The heel of my palm up into the cartilage of his nose. The wet crunch of it giving way, and then my hand was on his wrist, twisting until something snapped, and the blade fell, and I caught it.
Caught it and put it through the soft space under his jaw.
He died looking surprised.
They always look surprised, the ones who come for you expecting the heir, the boy playing at power. Not expecting the thing Malachar Torrence built out of a boy across twenty-three years of lessons that left marks.
I pulled the blade free. Wiped it on his jacket. Checked the body for identification I knew I wouldn't find. Then I stood there in the corridor with a dead man at my feet and blood on my hands and the shaking started.
Not fear.
I know what fear feels like in my body and this isn't it.This is the aftermath of the machine winding down, combat chemistry bleeding out of my system, leaving me standing in the wreckage of my own biology.
The body doing its housekeeping while the mind is still three seconds behind, still in the fight, still feeling the blade's edge against the skin of my throat.
