She closes the file. Sets it on the desk between us. Her hands are steady, but the mark on her neck glows faintly, a slow pulse that matches mine, and I feel the echo of it in my own skin. Not her emotions. Not words. Just presence. Awareness. A frequency that says: I'm here, and I'm paying attention.
"What do you want from me, Zane?"
No one calls me by my first name. Not Astra, not my lieutenants, not the station. I'm Torrence, or sir, or boss, or the heir. She calls me Zane like it's a dare, and something in my chest responds to it like a fist unclenching.
"Help," I say, and the word is foreign in my mouth. Tastes like something I should spit out. "Your access to the debtor networks. Your father's contacts, whoever's still alive. Your eyes." I look at her hands where they rest on thefile, capable and scarred and still. "You see things other people miss. I need that."
She's quiet for a long time. Long enough that I hear the environmental system cycle through its loop, the faint click of the thermostat adjusting, the distant vibration of the station's spine, gravity generators humming in my back teeth.
"If I help you," she says, "I want full access to my father's file. Everything you have. Not redacted. Not curated. Everything."
"Some of that information is dangerous."
"I'm a branded debtor on a crime lord's station. My baseline is dangerous."
"Fair."
"And I want movement privileges. If I'm investigating manufacturing sabotage, I can't do it from yoru quarters with a curfew and an escort."
She's negotiating. Sitting in my office with blood still on my floor and a dead man cooling two decks below us, and she's negotiating terms. I should be offended. Instead, something in me settles. Aligns. This is a language I speak.
"Conditional movement privileges. Accompanied by someone from Astra's team."
"Not accompanied. Reported to. There's a difference."
"There is." I study her. "You've thought about this."
"I've had nothing but time to think."
I stand. Come around the desk. She doesn't stand to meet me, and the power dynamic of that is interesting, her seated and looking up, me standing over her. But there's no submission in her posture. She's choosing stillness. Choosing to make me come to her.
I reach for her wrist. She lets me take it, and I turn herhand palm-up, pressing my thumb against the pulse point just below the brand. Her skin is warm.
"If you're playing me," I say, "I'll know."
"So you keep telling me."
My thumb presses harder. Not enough to hurt. Enough that she feels the edge of it, the promise in the pressure. "I can feel every lie you'll ever tell me."
She doesn't flinch.
That's what undoes me. Not her competence, not her defiance, not the way she looked at a dead man's weapon and saw the truth before anyone else. It's this. The absence of flinching. The steadiness of her pulse beneath my hand, her eyes on mine, her body still and sure and unafraid.
She leans in. Toward me. Toward the hand on her wrist, into the threat instead of away from it.
"Then feel this." Her voice is low, and it lands in my chest like a round from a close-range weapon. "I don't trust you. I don't like you. But whoever killed your father might have killed mine. So for now, we're aligned."
Her pulse doesn't change. Not a flutter, not a spike, not the smallest variation in the rhythm beneath my thumb. She's not lying.
I feel it before I see it, a warmth that spreads from my touch, up through my forearm. In the blue light of my office, with the station humming its low chord all around us and the dead man's blood still under my fingernails, we look like two halves of something broken. Two pieces of a circuit, incomplete alone, and I can feel the current wanting to close.
I release her wrist.
"Aligned," I repeat. "That's a start."
She stands. We're close. Close enough that I can smell her, close enough that if I leaned forward three inches, Icould press my mouth to the place where her jaw meets her throat, that soft hollow where her pulse lives closest to the surface.
I don't.
