"You don't use your abilities against me or anyone I designate as protected. I will provide you with a list. The list may change. You will comply with changes as they occur."
"That's a short leash."
"You're a dangerous animal. Leashes are appropriate."
I feel my mouth twitch. Not a smile, not quite, but the architecture of one forming against my will. "And in exchange?"
"In exchange, I won't use what I know about Elissa Voss against you." She holds up a hand, ticking off points with her fingers. "Against the Torrences. Against the alliance. Against your standing in whatever new structure we build here. The information stays with me. It goes nowhere. It does nothing. As long as you honor the terms."
The words settle between us on the table like chips pushed to the center of a game.
"That's blackmail," I say.
"That's marriage."
The silence holds for one beat. Two. Then I laugh, and it's the most honest sound I've made in months, rough and startled and real in a way that embarrasses me. Her expression doesn't change, but something in her posture shifts by millimeters, afractional relaxation that someone less trained in reading bodies would miss entirely.
I extend my hand across the table. Palm up. Open. Not reaching for her, just offering. Letting her choose to close the distance or not.
She looks at my hand for a long moment. I wonder what she's checking for. Whether there's some sense she possesses that can detect manipulation through skin contact the way mine can deliver it, some alarm system calibrated to the precise frequency of what I do. I wonder if she's feeling for the push right now, probing for the faintest trace of influence in the simple act of an offered handshake.
She takes my hand.
Her grip is firm and dry and deliberate. Her palm is calloused in the patterns left by weapons training, ridges of hardened skin along the base of her fingers and the heel of her hand. I notice all of this in the two seconds of contact, and I push nothing. I read nothing. I just feel her hand in mine and the warmth of another person's skin against my own, and it is the most honest touch I've had in years.
She doesn't let go.
"One more thing," she says.
Her fingers tighten around mine. Not hard enough to hurt. Hard enough to hold.
"The wedding is in three days. The consummation will be witnessed. Consortium tradition."
I keep my expression even. My smile stays where I put it, steady and neutral, revealing nothing. "I'm aware."
"Good." Her eyes lock onto mine and stay there, and I cannot read what's behind them, and the not-knowing makes my pulse kick against the inside of my wrist where her thumb rests. She can probably feel it. The thought sends a second kick right behind the first. "Because if you push anything duringthat ceremony, any emotion, any desire, any performance enhancement, I will know. And I will cut you down."
The word "cut" doesn't sound metaphorical. Not from her.
"I believe you," I say.
"See that you do." She releases my hand. The air finds the places where her skin was, cool and insufficient. "Now get out. I need to prepare to marry a monster."
I stand. The chair makes no sound on the deck plates as I push it back. I button my jacket with steady hands and turn for the door, and I'm three steps into the corridor before I hear her voice behind me, pitched to carry exactly the distance between us and not a centimeter further.
I stop. Half turn.
"Takes one to know one, Ms. Zalt."
The door slides shut between us. The corridor is empty, humming with the station's ambient frequency, and I stand in it for a moment with my hand at my side. The palm she held is still warm. The warmth is spreading up through my wrist, following the path of my pulse.
Three days. A wedding. A witnessed consummation with a woman who can feel every manipulation I'm capable of, who reads deception like printed text, who just negotiated her own marriage like a territorial treaty and won every clause.
I'm going to have to be terrifyingly, completely, ruinously honest. No filters. No management. No carefully calibrated emotional output designed to produce the optimal response. Just myself, whatever that is underneath twenty years of strategic performance, standing in front of a woman who will know instantly if what I'm offering is real.
I start walking. My hand is still warm.
I can't wait.
