Secure channel established. Signal masked. Location manipulated to three systems away.
He pressed the transmit key.
“Nadir, I’ve made a purchase. Prepare the guest quarters.”
Nadir’s voice came through without inflection. “Standard protocol, my lord?”
“Standard protocol. Medical evaluation on arrival for a human female. She’ll be processed through the network within the week.”
“Understood.” A beat. “She’ll be disoriented. Frightened.”
“She didn’t look frightened.”
The words left his mouth before his control could catch them. He heard them land on the encrypted channel and sit there, exposed, saying more than they should.
Nadir said nothing. The silence was patient, observant.
Another beat. Then, his servant’s voice said, “The Crimson Ledger has been asking questions about your purchasing patterns through intermediaries. They want to know why your acquisitions keep disappearing. Some have even contacted members of the household staff.”
“My acquisitions disappoint me and disappear. Everyone knows that.”
“Everyone believes that. There’s a difference. And the Ledger is in the business of testing beliefs.” The alarm lived not in Nadir’s tone but in the careful spacing between words. “They’re getting closer, my lord.”
“They always are.”
“This time I mean it.”
“You always mean it.” He pressed his thumb into the bridge of his nose. The numbers ran themselves without permission: distance to fallback stations, transit windows, guard rotation schedules at each port. Eight hundred and twenty-three lives had passed through this network, each one surviving on an equation of timing, resources, and acceptable risk. “And you’re always right. But not yet. Not tonight. One more. I can save one more.”
A pause. Longer than operational necessity demanded.
“My lord…”
“Nadir.”
“Be careful.”
He killed the channel. The mask was completely off now, and what remained underneath was tired and hollow and responsible for more lives than one man should carry. The human’s eyes followed him even here, burning with a fury he envied because he’d lost access to his own years ago.
Her confiscated effects sat in a standard intake container on the table beside the comm unit. He’d taken them under the pretense of inspection—Lord Skarreth always picked through his acquisitions’ belongings with clinical detachment. The pretense was second nature. The reality was that he cataloged belongings to ensure nothing was lost in transit, that people arrived at the other end of the network with whatever fragments of their former lives could be preserved.
He opened the container. Clothing. A travel pack. Nutrient bars. A battered data pad with a cracked screen. And a sketchbook.
Leather-bound. Worn soft at the spine from handling. It had been held so often it had molded itself to the shape of someone’s hands. Her hands.
He opened it.
The first page stopped him. A face—alien, laughing, rendered in charcoal strokes that wasted nothing. Each line served a purpose. Each shadow fell with intention. He turned the page. Another face. Another. Page after page of seeing—not mechanical reproduction but excavation, each portrait stripping away what a person showed the world to reveal what they hid beneath it. A dock officer whose eyes held a secret. A vendor whose joy was so private it felt stolen. A child carrying a weight no child should know the shape of.
She didn’t flatter. She didn’t distort. She found the crack in every surface and drew it with the steady hand of someone who believed that being seen—truly seen—was not cruelty but mercy.
The last page. The one she’d been working on when they took her. Unfinished—the charcoal strokes interrupted mid-gesture. But the top half was complete: a play of shadow across Thessari stonework meeting Corvathi steel, and she’d captured something in the joint between them—the place where two incompatible materials had been forced together—that made his throat close.
He flinched. A visible, physical recoil, as though the paper had reached up and touched the place behind his ribs where the count lived.
Eight hundred and twenty-three. Plus one.
He closed the sketchbook. The leather covers met with a sound like a small, quiet door shutting. He held it for a moment—felt the weight of it, the worn softness of the binding, the ghost impression of hands that had held it a thousand times before his.
