"You'll what?"
Ky smiles. It's the worst smile I've seen in weeks, and I've been married to his sister for almost a month. Cold in the way that deep water is cold. Not the surface chill but the temperature underneath, where the light doesn't reach and things with teeth live in the dark.
"I'm the soft one in my family," he says. "But soft isn't harmless. Remember that."
He stands. Pushes the coffee back toward me. Walks away with that still-water calm that suddenly reads very differently than it did five minutes ago.
The coffee has gone lukewarm. I wrap my hands around it anyway and let the inadequate heat seep into my skin and I think about the word harmless and how many people have made the mistake of confusing it with gentle.
The lightsin our quarters are low when I get back. Aura is on the narrow couch with a datapad balanced on her bent knee, scrolling through something that makes her face glow blue-white in the dimness. She doesn't look up when I come in. She doesn't need to. She already knows my footstep, my breathing pattern, the specific displacement of air when I move through a doorway. I'm starting to realize that Aura has been reading me like surveillance data since the day we met, and the fact that she lets me see it now is either trust or a new kind of weapon.
I sit on the opposite end of the couch. The cushion shifts under my weight. The distance between us is precise, the exact span we've silently negotiated over two weeks of sharing this space, close enough to be married, far enough to be strangers.
"The Elissa guilt is getting worse." She says it without inflection. A field report. An observation logged and filed.
"How do you know?"
"Because you're easier to read when you're hurting." She sets the datapad down and turns her head, and her dark eyes find mine in the low light. "Guilt makes you careless. You leave your emotional field open. You broadcast like a distress beacon, and anyone with half my training could pick up the signal from three corridors away."
I should be irritated by that. By the clinical dissection, the way she reduces my anguish to something measurable andtactical. But there's a precision to it that feels more honest than sympathy would. She's not pretending my pain matters to her because it's supposed to. She's acknowledging it because it exists and she can see it and ignoring it would be inefficient.
A pause stretches between us. The station hums its constant low-frequency note, the vibration that lives in the walls and the floor and the base of your skull until you forget it's there.
"What are you going to do about it?" she asks.
"I don't know."
"Figure it out." She picks up the datapad again. Scrolls. Doesn't look at me. "She deserves something. Even if it's just the truth."
The truth. The word sits in the air between us and it's heavier than it has any right to be. I've spent my entire adult life managing truth like a resource, dispensing it in careful portions, cutting it with omission until it goes down smooth. The idea of giving Elissa the raw, unprocessed version of what I did, the full mechanics of it, the choices and the calculations and the petty cruelty of choosing her specifically because she was open and trusting and I was angry at the woman now sitting three feet from me on this couch. The thought of laying all of that bare makes my throat constrict.
But Aura is right. She usually is, about the cold things. Apologies are performance. Elissa doesn't need me to feel sorry. She needs to understand what happened to her so she can stop wondering if she imagined it, stop second-guessing her own perceptions, stop blaming herself for trusting something that was engineered to be trusted. She needs the blueprint of her own destruction so she can see that the failure was in the architecture, not in her.
"I'll talk to her," I say. "Really talk. Not the apology version. The whole thing."
Aura nods once. Keeps scrolling.
I stare at the ceiling. The panels are standard-issue station gray, scuffed near the ventilation grille where someone before us must have stood on the furniture to fix something. The stain of a life lived in a small space. Evidence of someone reaching.
"It might destroy things with Zane," I say.
"Probably."
"He'll see it as disloyalty."
"He'll see it as whatever serves his anger." She sets the datapad down again, and this time she turns her whole body toward me. Legs folded. Hands in her lap. Giving me her full attention, which from Aura feels like standing in a spotlight mounted to a rifle. "But that's his calculation. Yours is simpler. Did you do something wrong? Do you have the ability to give the person you wronged some measure of clarity? Is the cost worth paying?"
"Is it?"
"I don't know. I'm not the one paying it."
Fair. Cold and fair, which is the only kind of fair that means anything.
I don't sleep well.When I do sleep, I dream about corridors that narrow the further I walk, and at the end of every one there's a door and behind the door is a version of Elissa before I touched her, laughing too loudly, and I can hear the sound through the metal but I can't open the door because my hands are the wrong shape. They've become something that only knows how to push and pull and turn dials that shouldn't be turned.
I wake up at 0400 with the taste of recycled air thick in my mouth and Aura's breathing steady beside me in the dark. She's on her side, facing the wall, and in sleep she looks younger. Less armored. The sharp architecture of her face goes soft in theabsence of consciousness, and I can see the human half of her heritage in the curve of her cheek, the slight part of her lips.
I need to talk to Elissa. Not tomorrow. Not when I've rehearsed it enough to make it comfortable. Soon. Before the guilt finishes calcifying into something I can live with, because I've watched that process in other men and I know how it ends. You stop feeling it. You file it under necessary costs. You become someone who sleeps soundly because you've reclassified your sins as strategy.
