She cleaned her brushes with turpentine and a rag, working the bristles with more force than necessary. Her hands smelled of linseed oil and mineral spirits. Beneath those familiar scents, she could still catch a trace of something else that had transferred from his skin to hers in those three seconds of contact. Cold stone and ozone, like the air before a lightning strike. Wild, underneath. Animal. The same scent that had surrounded her in the maze when the beast emerged, and she'dbeen too stubborn to run and too stupid to scream, and her hand had reached for him instead because something in those ice-blue eyes?—
She dropped the rag and wiped her hands on her pants.
She needed air. She needed to move. She needed to stop staring at a half-finished portrait she’d painted as a monster and wondering why its eyes followed her with an expression that looked, from certain angles, like grief.
She walked without direction, mapping the mansion’s nervous system through her feet. Third door on the left: locked. Fourth door: a sitting room with alien flowers that turned to follow movement.
She wasn’t sure when her feet had decided to bring her to this corridor. She recognized it when she arrived — the particular width of the stone, the sconces spaced differently here than in the guest wing, the heavy door at the end that she’d stood in front of twice now, summoned both times. She wasn’t summoned tonight. She had no reason to be here.
A service cart outside his study was empty. Or nearly — dishes pushed to one side, a carafe with an inch of liquid remaining, the particular arrangement of a meal that had been eaten around rather than finished. He was working late. Or couldn’t sleep. The thought came with an unwanted intimacy she pushed aside.
A sculpture in the alcove opposite caught her eye. She hadn’t noticed before. It was barely visible in the low ambient light — small, dark, mounted on a narrow column of pale stone. She crossed toward it. The material was unfamiliar, neither metal nor mineral, its surface shifting between matte and reflective as she moved around it. She leaned closer.
The study door opened.
She went still in the alcove’s shadow. Nadir emerged from Skarreth’s study carrying a tray — the dishes half-eaten, theevidence of a working dinner. He set it on the cart without looking up, turned, and went back inside. The door swung shut behind him.
She should go back to her room. Her feet agreed. She started back down the corridor and passed the study. The door wasn’t quite closed. A sliver of light peeked through, and that was when she heard it — a single phrase through the gap, spoken in a voice she almost didn’t recognize:
“They’re not cargo. They’re people.”
She stopped.
The voice was his. She knew its register, its resonance, the way it vibrated through solid surfaces. But she did not know this version of it. Every trace of aristocratic drawl had been stripped away, and what remained was raw and urgent and desperate in a way that Lord Skarreth — cultured, cold, predatory Lord Skarreth — had never once sounded in her presence.
She should keep walking. She pressed her back against the wall beside the door instead.
“—coordinates are burned. The whole southern route.” Still that voice, clipped now, each word bitten off. “Voss’s people intercepted at the relay point. We’re looking at twelve souls stranded in a holding pattern above Thessan with no viable extraction window.”
“The secondary route through the Meridian corridor—” Nadir. She recognized the cadence, the careful warmth.
“Compromised three days ago. I told you.”
“You told me it was at risk, my lord. There is a difference.”
“There isn’t. Not anymore.” A sound — something heavy set down, or a fist against wood, controlled but barely. “Twelve, Nadir. Transit was supposed to clear last night. If we don’t reroute within forty-eight hours, they’ll be flagged in the system and we'll lose them.”
Silence. Then Nadir, softer: “The southern route was our easiest option. Rerouting while managing the estate’s current — complications — requires a level of operational?—”
“I’m aware.”
She pressed harder against the wall. Her heart beat in her throat.
Twelve souls.The phrase snagged on the same nail that had caught when Nadir saidtransitwith a weight the word didn’t normally carry.
“Fen is requesting updated manifests. She needs names and biometrics for the new route paperwork.”
“Send them encrypted. Priority channel. And tell her the holding pattern has a forty-eight-hour ceiling before automated systems flag the cargo designation as abandoned.” A pause. A breath drawn and released with the control that suggested the alternative was screaming. “But they’re not cargo. They’re people sitting in a tin box above a planet that will kill them if they land and arrest them if they stay.”
“I know what they are, my lord.”
“Then help me get them out.”
The fracture in his voice — the crack running through it like a fissure in stone that revealed something molten underneath. She had heard men try to sound authoritative. She had heard men perform strength. This was neither. He was holding twelve lives in his hands and feeling them slip.
A chair scraped. Footsteps. She moved and was three doors down the corridor by the time the study door opened fully. She didn’t look back. She didn’t need to. The sound of Skarreth’s boots moving in the opposite direction told her enough.
She stood in the corridor with her hands pressed to the wall and her mind racing through fragments like a puzzle with half its pieces missing.
