I sit up. The sheet falls away from my shoulders and the recycled air hits my bare skin, cool enough to raise goosebumps along my arms and across the tops of my breasts. The marks he left on my throat pulse with my heartbeat, dull and steady, bruises that haven't forgotten the shape of his fingers. I don't touch them. I don't need to. I can feel every one like a brand burned into the nerve endings, and somewhere in the part of me I'm still learning to listen to, I like that they hurt.
I pull my knees up. Rest my arms across them. Look at him.
He's on his back, one arm behind his head, watching me. Those grey eyes that give nothing and take everything. His bioluminescent marks have settled to a low, steady glow, the cool blue of a pilot light. Embers banked but alive. Waiting.
The station hums around us. Recycled air. Gravity generators. The dull, indifferent machinery of a world that doesn't care what we've become inside these walls. The sheets smell like both of us now, salt and skin and something sharper underneath, something chemical and warm that I've started to associate with safety, which is the most dangerous thing I've ever done.
"Your father's message," I say. "Don't trust anyone."
He doesn't blink.
I hold his gaze. Let the words sit there between us, taking up space, taking on weight. The recycled air tastes stale on my tongue, flat and metallic, the station's version of a held breath.
"Ethan gave you the breadcrumbs that led to the sealed section." I keep my voice steady. Each word placed like a stone in a wall I'm building in real time. I can feel thearchitecture of it, the way each piece has to bear the weight of the next or the whole thing comes down. "He pointed us there. Made sure we found what we found."
Zane's expression doesn't change, but I've learned to read the places where change should be and isn't. The absence itself is the tell.
"And my message about my father." I swallow. My throat hurts, and not just from the rawness. From the memory of hope, bright and blinding, the cruelest weapon anyone's ever aimed at me. "It was designed to lure me somewhere I'd be vulnerable. Someone knew how to bait me perfectly. Someone who knew exactly what name would make me stop thinking and start running."
The room is quiet. The station hums its indifferent hum.
"Ethan knew about my father's connection to yours. Ethan knows everything." I pause, letting the shape of it settle between us like something heavy lowered carefully onto a glass surface. "He knows the station's systems. He has access no one questions. And every time we've followed a trail he laid, we've ended up exactly where someone wanted us."
Zane goes still in a way that has nothing to do with calm. His marks dim, dropping from pilot-light blue to almost nothing, and I've been around him long enough now to know what that means. It's the Empri tell for focused danger, every ounce of empathic energy pulled inward, concentrated, a predator going quiet before it strikes.
"I think," I say, "it's time to find out what else Ethan knows."
He looks at me for a long moment. Then he sits up, and the sheet falls away from him too, and in the station's manufactured dawn he looks like something carved fromthe same cold material as the hull. Beautiful and functional and built to survive the vacuum.
"Yes," he says. Just that.
The enemy is in the house. We're just starting to see his face.
And I'm sitting in a monster's bed, wearing his bruises like jewelry, planning war.
I don't know when I became this person. I think I've always been her. I think she was just waiting for a dark enough room to open her eyes.
Chapter 13
Zane
Three daysof watching a man breathe, and I've learned nothing except that Ethan Eames sleeps exactly six hours, takes his coffee without sugar, and has the emotional depth of a vacuum seal.
The security hub sits in the guts of Meridian Station, four levels below the command deck, a room that smells like cooling fans and stale protein bar wrappers. Twelve screens tessellate the far wall, each one feeding a different angle on a different corridor, a different room, a different slice of my territory that might be rotting from the inside. Astra Venn occupies the center console like she was born in it, her fingers moving across three separate data streams without looking at any of them. She hasn't slept either. I can feel the brittle edge of her focus, a wire pulled taut enough to hum.
"Anything," I say. Not a question. I already know the answer from the flat line of frustration running beneath her professional calm.
"He had breakfast in the officers' mess. Spoke with two of Dexter's supply chiefs about inventory rotations. Spentforty minutes in the training bay running weapons drills with your sister." She pulls up the relevant feed without being asked. "Then he went back to his quarters for an hour. No communications in or out during that window."
"That you can see."
"That I can see." She doesn't take the implication personally. Astra deals in facts and the spaces between them, which is why I trust her more than almost anyone on this station. She tips her chin toward the secondary monitor. "I've flagged the communication gaps. He's using the station's relay system like everyone else, but there are dead zones. Sixty to ninety seconds at irregular intervals where his node goes quiet. Could be nothing. Could be burst transmissions compressed tight enough to hide in the system noise."
I lean forward. The chair creaks beneath me. "Can you crack the bursts?"
"If they exist, and if they're using standard encryption, give me a week. If they're using something proprietary." She shrugs one shoulder without taking her eyes off the data. "Then I need hardware I don't have and time we probably don't."
I stare at the grid of feeds. Screen seven shows Ethan crossing a junction on level three, his stride unhurried, his posture relaxed. He stops to let a maintenance crew pass, nods to the foreman, continues on his way. A man with nothing to hide. A man so perfectly at ease in his skin that the ease itself becomes suspicious, because nobody who lives in this world is that comfortable. Not honestly.
