I check the screen.
Ethan Torrence stands outside my door. His clothes are the same ones he was wearing when Elissa came to see him, but he's put on a jacket over them, something structured and dark. His hands are at his sides. His posture is composed, almost formal, the kind of stillness that takes effort to maintain. His expression is unreadable, which tells me everything about how carefully he's constructed it.
My pulse does something I don't authorize. A single hard beat, out of rhythm, the kind of physiological response I've trained myself to notice and suppress. I notice it. I don't suppress it.
"Ms. Zalt." His voice through the intercom is low, controlled, and carries just enough warmth to sound intentional rather than natural. "We should talk. About what you just saw."
He knows.
Of course he knows. He's Half-Empri with intelligence training and a lifetime of operating in hostile territory. He probably sensed the surveillance before I finished installing it. He let me watch. He let me see the girl, the grief, the mask coming off. And now he's here, at my door, past midnight, turning my observation into a conversation I didn't plan for.
I could refuse. Keep the door closed. Maintain the distance that keeps the power on my side of the glass.
But I watched his face when the mask slipped. And I want to see what's underneath when he's standing in front of me instead of on a screen.
"You can come in," I say, and my voice is steady, pitched to convey exactly the amount of controlled welcome I intend. "But try to push me and I'll have you back in a cell before you can blink."
"I wouldn't dream of it." His mouth shifts on the monitor. Not quite a smile. Something closer to recognition, the expression of a person who has just been met at their own level and finds it, against all better judgment, appealing. "I find I prefer you unmanipulated."
I release the door lock.
Behind me, I feel more than hear Ky rise from his chair. His concern is a low hum at the edge of my awareness, as familiar and ignorable as my own heartbeat. He won't intervene. He knows better. But he'll be listening, and tomorrow he'll tell me all the things I already know about why this is dangerous.
The door slides open.
Ethan steps into my quarters, and the space around him changes. It's not a psychic effect, or if it is, it's so subtle that my shielding doesn't register it as a threat. It's just presence. The kind that comes from a man who has spent his life calculating the temperature of every room he enters and adjusting it to suit his needs.
He looks at me. I look at him. And the distance between the person I watched on a screen and the person standing three feet away collapses into something I can feel along my skin, a low electric awareness that I refuse to call attraction because the word is too simple for what this is.
We're both choosing this. Both walking into the room with our eyes open, our defenses catalogued, our vulnerabilities mapped. Both knowing that whatever happens next will be a negotiation conducted in the language of truth and misdirection simultaneously.
The games are about to become very personal.
And I find, to my great inconvenience, that I'm looking forward to it.
Chapter 4
Ethan
Her quarters smell like discipline.
Not the artificial kind, not the sterile scrub of station cleaning agents or the neutral nothing of recycled air. Something beneath that. The faint trace of whatever product she uses in her hair, something botanical and controlled, and under it the scent of a space that has been organized by someone who treats order as armor. Every surface is bare. Every object placed with intention. The bed is made with corners so sharp they could cut, and the single personal item I can identify is a slim data tablet on the nightstand, angled parallel to the edge with the kind of precision that speaks to years of muscle memory.
I know this room. Not this specific room, but this kind of room. I've built versions of it myself, in every quarters I've occupied since I was fifteen and first understood what I was. Spaces where nothing is out of place because the person living in them can't afford to let anything slip. Not a book left open. Not a glass unwashed. Not a single crack in the surface for someone to wedge themselves into.
She stands near the viewport with her arms loose at her sides, watching me take it in. Not defensive. Not welcoming. Justpresent, the way a sentry tower is present. Observing from a position of structural advantage.
"You're cataloguing," she says.
"Force of habit."
"So is breathing, but most people don't do it that loudly."
I stop in the center of the room. She hasn't offered me a seat. There are two chairs at the small table near the wall, but neither of us moves toward them, and I understand the choreography without needing to read her. This conversation happens standing. This conversation happens with distance and sightlines and the option to walk away at any moment. Two people who have spent their lives in rooms full of threats, recognizing the geometry of one.
"You wanted to talk," I say. "So talk."
"I wanted to listen." She tilts her head, and the station light catches the sharp line of her jaw. "Tell me about Elissa Voss."
