"My latest acquisition." Skarreth kept his voice bored, proprietary. "A human. She paints."
"She does more than paint, I suspect." Voss moved forward with fluid grace, his smile reshaping itself — warmer, more intimate, rebuilt for a new audience. He extended his hand. "Rheth Voss. An old friend of your lord's, though he'd never admit it."
Octavia's gaze flicked to Skarreth — brief, measuring — then back to Voss. She took his hand.
Voss lifted it to his mouth and pressed his lips to her knuckles. The gesture was courtly, his golden eyes holding hers above her hand with an intensity calibrated to flatter. His thumb traced a small circle against her palm before he released her.
Skarreth read her body without meaning to: the slight shift of her weight backward, the line of her jaw held a fraction too level. Not charmed. Assessing. The same look she'd given Skarreth in his first week — taking inventory of a threat and deciding how to manage it.
Good.
"You have extraordinary spirit. I can see it in your bearing." Voss's voice dropped half a register, the harmonic range of Vyrenni vocal cords doing what they had evolved to do, draw the listener closer. "Skarreth always has exquisite taste."
A tidal force surged through Skarreth that bypassed his brain entirely and slammed through his bloodstream with a violence that made his vision narrow. His beast threw itself against the inside of his skin. His claws extended beneath his gloves, puncturing the leather lining. His fangs dropped a millimeter from his gums in a response so primal he couldn't have suppressed it if he'd tried.
Mine.
The word detonated in his skull, and he crushed it with every ounce of discipline he possessed. Not his. Not anyone's. She was a free woman in a cage he'd built, and the savage territorial rage boiling through him was the beast talking, not the man, and he would not —
"Octavia is painting my portrait." His voice emerged bored, faintly amused, as if Voss's attention to his property were quaint rather than an act of war. "A vanity project. She's talented enough to be worth the investment."
"A portrait?" Voss released Octavia's hand with a reluctance Skarreth cataloged alongside the brightened skin patterns and the subtle lean of his body into her space. "I'd love to see your work, Octavia. The creative mind fascinates me — the way it notices patterns others miss."
The question was a trap dressed as interest. Skarreth saw it. He didn't know if Octavia did.
"When it's finished." Her voice was even. "I don't show unfinished work."
Voss's smile widened. "An artist of principle. How refreshing."
Skarreth forced his claws to retract. The effort left sweat along his spine.
Dinner was a theatre of mutual annihilation performed with impeccable table manners.
Voss sat at Skarreth's right hand and charmed the table with effortless social gravity. He had weaponized likability. He complimented Nadir's cooking with specific technical knowledge of the cuisine's origin and culture. He asked Octavia about her "Masks and Faces" series with questions that suggested research — or an uncannily fast study. He laughed at the right moments, listened with his whole body, and made everyone in the room feel seen.
Skarreth watched the performance and assessed the man beneath it. Voss was probing. Every compliment was a sonar ping, mapping the household for structural weaknesses. The attention to Octavia was strategic — she was the newest variable, and Voss was determining her value: leverage, an intelligence asset, or irrelevance.
Octavia answered his questions about her art in the clipped register Skarreth recognized as her defensive mode. She was wary. Good. But she was also engaged — Voss was genuinely interesting when he chose to be, and Skarreth hated him for it with a purity that felt almost cleansing.
Then Voss set down his glass and said, with the same pleasant warmth he'd used to discuss cuisine:
"I had disturbing news before I left the capital. A mutual acquaintance of ours — Tolen Marr, you remember him? That delightful merchant on the Meridian circuit?" A sip of wine. A rueful smile. "Arrested by the Crimson Ledger. Trafficking charges, of all things. Apparently he'd been running some sort of — what did the Ledger's report call it? — an altruistic transit operation." A soft laugh. "Can you imagine? Tolen, of all people, delivering freedom to other people’s property."
Skarreth's blood turned cold in his veins. Tolen Marr ran the safehouse on Meridian Three. Tolen Marr had access to routing protocols for the entire eastern network. Tolen Marr knew the names of seventeen transit coordinators, three ship captains, and the location of every safehouse between here and the Free Worlds boundary.
If Tolen was arrested, the eastern corridor was compromised. Three active transits were currently moving through that corridor. Forty-one people were in that pipeline.
Forty-one people who would be recaptured or die.
The information hit him like a blade between the ribs, and he gave Voss nothing.
"Tolen always was careless." Skarreth's voice was silk over steel, his expression a mask of aristocratic disdain. He reached for his glass. Drank. The wine could have been water. "Sentimentality and commerce don't mix. I've always said so."
"You have." Voss's golden eyes watched him with a predator's patience, the vertical pupils contracted to razor-thin slits. The geometric patterns beneath his skin had gone perfectly still — that frozen quality Skarreth had learned to read as the only honest signal Voss produced. Calculating. Certain. "Curious, though. The routes he was using. Some of them ran remarkably close to your trade corridors. I wonder if there's any... overlap."
"My corridors carry cargo, not causes." The mask held. Behind it, his mind was already running. Emergency reroute through the northern corridor. Contact the backup handler on Axis Station. Pull the three active transits to secondary safehouses before Tolen's information reached the Ledger's analysts.
"Of course." Voss smiled. "Just coincidence. Tolen sends his regards, by the way. Or he will, once the interrogation is concluded."
