Eight months ago. I do the math against the intelligence briefings.
Eight months ago is when Ethan's exposure happened. When whatever he'd been doing in the shadows came to light within the family, and Zane Torrence began the process of deciding what to do with a brother who'd become a liability.
The connection isn't hard to find. Not if you know where to look, and I always know where to look.
I close the files and sit in the dark of my quarters, letting the pieces settle into the shape they want to make. Outside the viewport, the station's exterior lights pulse in their slow rhythm, and beyond them, stars. Cold, distant, indifferent to the small cruelties playing out in the rooms and corridors they illuminate.
He seduced her. That's the obvious read, and obvious reads are dangerous because they're usually incomplete, but in this case the obvious read has teeth. A Half-Empri man with training in subtle psychic manipulation, stationed within a family that trusted him, given access to the one member of that family with no natural psychic shielding. A young, inexperienced human woman who would have been uniquely vulnerable to the kind of influence he could exert without even trying.
She started training with a combat instructor after it ended. She withdrew from the world. She showed up at his door tonight with the body language of someone returning to the scene of their own destruction, and he stood there and let her break against him like water on a seawall.
He used her. Pushed her, probably. Half-Empri manipulation is subtle, nearly undetectable to humans. A nudge here, an emotional resonance there, the slow accumulation of influence that feels, to the person experiencing it, like their owndesire. Their own choice. She would have thought she was falling in love. She would have thought it was real.
Maybe it was real. That's the part that makes the tightness in my chest worse instead of better.
Because I watched his face when she walked away. I watched the mask come off, and what was underneath wasn't satisfaction or calculation or the cold assessment of a mission compromised. It was grief. The real kind, the kind that eats at the structural supports until the whole architecture of a person shifts to accommodate it.
She's damaged because of him. That much is clear. Her withdrawal, her sudden need to learn how to fight, the raw wreckage of her face on my surveillance feed. He took something from her that she's still trying to rebuild.
And he's damaged goods because of her. That's why Zane was willing to trade him. Not because Ethan failed operationally, though he did. Because the youngest Torrence's heartbreak is a wound that won't close, and every time the family looks at Ethan, they see the man who cut their most vulnerable member open. He became unsustainable. A brother they couldn't forgive and couldn't execute, so they did the next best thing.
They gave him to me.
I press my fingers against my sternum again. The tightness hasn't faded.
I'm marrying a man who destroys young women for strategic advantage.
The thought arrives clean and precise, and I sit with it the way I sit with all uncomfortable truths: still, patient, willing to let it cut.
I'm marrying a man exactly like me.
That one cuts deeper.
Ky is stillawake when I come out of the research spiral. He's sitting in the common area of our shared quarters, long legs stretched out, a cup of something herbal cooling on the table beside him. He looks up when I appear, and his expression is the one he reserves for moments when he wants to tell me something I won't want to hear. Gentle mouth, hard eyes. The combination used to confuse people when we were younger. They'd see the gentle mouth and miss the assessment happening behind it.
I don't sit down. I stand in the doorway and let the silence do its work.
"You're interested in him," Ky says.
"I'm marrying him. Interest is required."
"That's not what I mean."
No. It isn't. And I don't answer, because I don't have to. Ky knows me better than anyone alive. He knew what I was before our family sharpened it into something useful, and he knows what I've become since. He can read the difference between my professional attention and my personal attention the way other people read facial expressions, and right now he's reading me with a precision I find both comforting and deeply inconvenient.
I am interested. Despite the surveillance footage. Despite the crying girl. Despite the clear evidence that the man I'm binding myself to has already proven his willingness to use intimacy as a weapon and leave wreckage in his wake.
Because of it. Because he felt guilty. Because the mask slipped and what was underneath was human in a way I hadn't accounted for. Because a man who can destroy someone and feel nothing is a tool, predictable and limited. But a man who can destroy someone and carry the weight of it, who can watch a girl he wounded stumble away crying and grip a doorframe so hard his tendons stand out like cables. That man is complicated. That man has leverage points and pressure fractures and the kindof internal architecture that can be mapped, exploited, or, and this is the thought I keep circling back to, the one I can't quite dismiss, understood.
"It's a problem," I tell Ky. Not a confession. An assessment.
"It's a catastrophe," he corrects gently. The bioluminescence flickers in his eyes again, blue washing through hazel like a tide he can't fully control. "You don't do interested, Aura. You do strategic. The moment those two things become the same thing..."
He doesn't finish. He doesn't need to.
I turn back toward my quarters, and the door chime stops me cold.
Late. Past midnight. No scheduled meetings, no authorized visitors. The security protocols for this section of the station should have flagged and redirected anyone approaching our door at this hour.
