I let out a tired breath. “Tired brain.” It’s the simplest, truest answer.
His lips twitch, the ghost of a smile meant only for me. “Come inside. Sit with me.”
Inside, my laptop waits open on the table, the documents arranged into neat windows I’ve built and rebuilt three times. The timeline. The file of stolen phrasing. The pattern-of-appropriation notes. A space where my supporting narrative will go once I translate the logic from brain to screen.
But right now my nervous system is… too loud to think.
Not panicked. Just overloaded. Like someone filled my veins with static.
Flavius notices immediately. Of course he does.
He steps behind me and eases me into one of the kitchen chairs. “Sit,” he murmurs.
I do.
His hands rest lightly on my shoulders—steady, warm, intentional. The pressure is subtle, not guiding, just anchoring. The same instinct he’s used before, the one that seems to rise in him whenever my breath goes thin. My lungs respond before I do, drawing deeper, steadier air as if my body recognizes the cue before my mind catches up.
“You knew I needed this,” I whisper.
“I know when you’re slipping,” he says. “And how to keep you here.”
The words land low in my chest, loosening something coiled.
When he moves his thumbs along the base of my skull, a shiver runs through me—not from heat, not from want, but from the strange, holy sensation of being understood without explanation.
“Better,” he murmurs, reading my posture like text.
“A little.”
“You do not have to be stone for them,” he says. “Only steady enough to speak.”
Words jam in my throat. “I keep thinking… what if I mess it up? What if they twist every answer? What if—”
He steps in front of me so I have to look at him.
“Sophia.” Just my name, and the world quiets a little.
“You cannot control them,” he says softly. “You cannot shape their questions. Cannot make them fair. The only thing you command is how you stand.” His fingertips brush my jaw. “And you stand stronger than you think.”
My throat tightens—not with fear this time, but with something like recognition.
“I’m scared,” I admit. The words tremble but don’t fall apart.
“I know,” he says. “Be scared. And speak anyway.”
I nod, because anything more will break me open.
I turn back to the laptop. He pulls a chair beside me—not hovering, not intruding, just present—and we review the points together. Not the whole dossier; we’ve already dissected the timeline in excruciating detail. Now it’s just clarity: dates, patterns, quotes she lifted whole-cloth, emails in which I voiced ideas Blackwell later presented as hers, and the places where my autistic communication style was misread as uncertainty.
Flavius doesn’t comment much. He doesn’t need to. When something matters, his breathing changes. If something strengthens my case, he taps once on the table. And when something could hurt me, his jaw shifts the way it does before a fight. After an hour, my brain feels… aligned. Not calm, but organized.
I close the laptop with a decisive click.
His brow arches. “Finished?”
“For now. Any more and I’ll start rearranging the alphabet out of spite.”
He makes a thoughtful sound. “A fighter knows when to stop sharpening, or the blade will snap.”
