Whatever it is, it breaks her.
She takes a step back. Then another. Her hand comes up to cover her mouth, a gesture so raw it makes my chest tighten in a way I don't appreciate. She turns and walks away, and her gait is wrong, unsteady, like the gravity has shifted under her and she hasn't recalibrated. She makes it around the corner before she falls apart completely. I can see it in the way her pace changes on the secondary corridor camera, the way her walk becomes a stumble becomes a near-run, one hand braced against the wall like the station itself is the only thing keeping her upright.
I switch back to Ethan's door.
He's still standing there. The corridor is empty now, and he's standing in the doorframe staring at the space where she was. His mask is gone. It's the first time I've seen him without it, and the face underneath is something I wasn't prepared for.
Pain. Actual pain, not performed, not calculated. The kind that lives in the bones. His eyes are closed, and his hand is gripping the doorframe hard enough that I can see the tendons standing out along his wrist. His mouth is a line so tight it's bloodless. He stands like that for six seconds, and in those six seconds I see something I can work with.
Then he opens his eyes. Exhales once. Steps back into his quarters.
The door closes.
I sit back in my chair and press two fingers against my sternum where that unwelcome tightness still lingers. The monitor glows with the empty corridor, and I stare at it for a long time.
"You should be sleeping."
Ky's voice comes from the doorway of the adjoining room, quiet and carefully neutral in the way that means he's already seen too much. My brother moves through spaces like he's apologizing for occupying them, all that height folded inward, those broad shoulders curved down. He'd learned young that being Half-Empri and large was a combination that made people nervous, so he'd spent his whole life trying to take up less room. It works on most people. It doesn't work on me.
"I don't sleep during active operations," I say without turning. "You know that."
"This isn't an active operation. It's a diplomatic assignment." He comes closer, and I can feel him reading the monitors over my shoulder. The empty corridor. The frozen frame I haven't dismissed, the last clear capture of the girl's face before she turned away. "Aura."
"I'm reviewing security footage."
"You're surveilling your fiancé."
"Those aren't mutually exclusive."
He's quiet for a moment. I hear him breathe, and I hear the small sound he makes when he's deciding how honest to be with me, a faint click of his tongue against his teeth. Then the light in my peripheral vision shifts, and I know without looking that his eyes have flashed. That brief, involuntary pulse of bioluminescence in his irises, hazel bleeding to blue for just a fraction of a second before he catches it and forces it down. The Half-Empri tell he's spent twenty-eight years learning to suppress.
It always surfaces when he's worried about me.
"Don't," he says.
I pull up the secondary display and start a search query. "Don't what?"
"Whatever you're planning. I know that look." He moves around to the side of my desk, positioning himself where I'd have to actively avoid his gaze to not see him. Tactically sound. Emotionally manipulative. He learned from the best. "That's Elissa Torrence."
The name clicks into place with a satisfaction that feels almost physical. I let it settle, let the implications arrange themselves. "The youngest."
"The youngest. And if you use her, if you turn whatever's happening there into leverage..."
"Why would I use her?"
The question hangs between us, and we both know it for what it is. Reflex, not denial. The kind of thing I say to buy three seconds of processing time while the calculation runs underneath. Ky knows this. He's watched me do it since we were children, since I was twelve and already learning to parseconversations for exploitable information the way other girls learned to braid hair.
He doesn't answer. He just watches me with those careful hazel eyes, the bioluminescence tamped down now, nothing showing but his concern and the particular exhaustion of being the person who loves me and can't stop me.
I'm already filing the information away.
Elissa Torrence.Twenty-five. Born in the outer systems, adopted into the Torrence family at age three. Human. Entirely, completely human, no genetic modification, no psychic capability, no bioluminescent markers. The only member of the family with no biological connection to the bloodline and no enhanced abilities to compensate.
Protected, then. Sheltered. The kind of sheltered that comes from a powerful family recognizing that one of their own is fundamentally vulnerable in ways the others aren't, and building walls around her so high she might not even know they're there.
I pull her file from three separate databases, cross-referencing Ky's intelligence briefings with publicly available records and the less public information my family's network has been compiling on the Torrences for years. The picture assembles itself with the satisfying precision of a puzzle I didn't know I was solving.
Social calendar shows regular attendance at family functions, charity events, the expected rounds of a youngest daughter in a powerful political family. Until eight months ago. Then the attendance drops. Charity galas attended by proxy. Social appearances reduced to the absolute minimum required by protocol. Her name disappears from guest lists and shows up instead in training facility logs. Sessions with one Astra Venn, a combat instructor whose reputation I'm familiar with becauseanyone worth surveilling in this system eventually crosses paths with someone worth knowing.
