She searched his face. He let her look. Whatever she found there, whether she believed him, she gave no sign.
He reached past her and gripped the door handle, his arm crossing beside her shoulder as he leaned down to push it open. The height difference compressed the space between them into something barely navigable.
She turned to leave, and her shoulder brushed the inside of his forearm.
Heat. Not the ambient warmth of a living body passing close. Something specific, radiating through the fabric of her sleeve into the bare skin below his rolled cuff. It registered in his nerve endings like a brand — localized, searing — and the beast beneath his ribs lunged against its restraints with a violence that whitened his knuckles on the door handle.
She walked through without looking back.
He stood in the open doorway and listened to her footsteps recede down the corridor, and did not close the door until he could no longer hear her pulse.
Skarreth returned to his desk and stood behind it, pressing his knuckles into the wood, and took apart his own reasoning beam by beam.
The gathering. He needed a display piece. A human acquisition, visible and compliant, proof that Lord Skarreth's appetites remained consistent and his cover remained intact. Commissioning a portrait was elegant—it explained her continued presence, justified the exorbitant cost he paid for her, and gave the slavers and aristocrats who would attend the gathering exactly the narrative they expected: the monster toying with his prey. Tactically sound. Operationally necessary. The logic held from every angle.
Except he'd decided before he'd constructed the logic.
He'd made it in the maze, watching her walk toward the beast with her hand raised and her voice breaking on his name. He'd made it at her bedside, cleaning the thorn cuts with hands that wouldn't stop shaking. He’d made it this morning, watching her find the ochre under the blue — because he was compromised.
And he didn't care.
The scent of her warm skin lingered in the air like an accusation he couldn't answer.
A knock at the door. The cadence of knuckles on wood that Skarreth had been hearing since boyhood—three beats, evenly spaced, neither tentative nor demanding. A knock that would wait as long as necessary but expected to be admitted.
“Come in.”
Nadir entered and closed the door behind him. He carried nothing. His hands were clasped behind his back in the posture he adopted when delivering information Skarreth would not enjoy — a posture Skarreth had learned to interpret before he’d learned to read printed text.
The old man’s muted gold eyes moved through the room without apparent hurry. They found the space by the lightsculpture where Octavia had stood, then returned to Skarreth’s face.
“The transit window for the human woman closes in six days, my lord.”
Not a report. The words had the structure of one. They were neutral, factual, delivered with a careful blankness that understood the most dangerous truths were the ones spoken in the flattest tone. But beneath the flatness lived an offering. A door held open. An invitation to walk through it.
Six days. After that, the next safe passage through the network wouldn’t open for weeks. In six days he could give Octavia her freedom. She might even have the portrait finished by then if he pressed her.
Skarreth met his gaze.
“The gathering takes priority.”
The authority in his voice was impeccable. Every syllable defensible, operationally sound, tactically prudent. Every syllable landed in the space between them with the weight of something hollow, and they both heard it, and neither of them said so.
Nadir’s inner eyelids flickered — that translucent membrane sliding closed and open in a fraction of a second, the single tell Skarreth had spent forty years failing to decode. The single card the old man kept facedown.
The door Nadir had been holding open quietly closed.
“Very good, my lord.”
He withdrew. The door clicked shut behind him. Nadir had offered what he could and would not offer it again.
The corridor beyond the study was quiet for three seconds. Then, passing the door on her way to whatever task occupied her endless rounds, Zenith emitted a sound. Two notes. Descending. The second pitched lower than the first, with a dismissive tonal drop at the end that carried the unmistakable weight of a small,cylindrical machine who had listened to every word and found the performance unconvincing.
No translation needed.
Skarreth pressed his hands flat against the desk until they were still.
Six weeks.
