"Like I deserve worse."
"You probably do." No point softening it. He'd taste the softening and it would mean less. "But that's not up to me."
He turns to look at me, and the light catches the wet in his eyes.
I've seen Ethan Eames do many things. I've seen him charm a room into compliance. I've seen him lie with such precision that the truth looked clumsy by comparison. I've seen him break a man's leverage in a negotiation so cleanly that the man thanked him afterward. I've watched him move through the world like it was a game he'd already won, and I married him knowing that, choosing it, wanting the monster because the monster was mine.
I have never seen him cry.
The tears don't fall. They sit in his grey eyes like something held at the edge of a cliff, trembling, deciding. His jaw works. His throat moves with a swallow that looks like it costs him everything.
"Why did you let it happen?" His voice is barely there, stripped of every frequency he usually uses to shape a room. Just the raw sound of him, unmodulated, uncontrolled. "You could have stopped her."
"Because I wanted to see."
"See what?"
I let the question sit between us. Let the silence fill with the hum of the station and the faint tick of the hull expanding and contracting in the temperature differential of space.
"If you'd take it. If you'd let her hurt you without fighting back."
He holds my gaze. The tears still haven't fallen. Suspended. Refusing to resolve.
"You did." My voice comes out quieter than I intend, and I let it. Some things are supposed to be quiet. "You let her have her moment."
"Did I pass your test?"
"It wasn't a test." I reach out and touch his face. My thumb finds his cheekbone, traces the ridge of it where the bone sits close under the skin, and I feel the heat of him and the slight tremor that runs through his jaw and the dampness at the corner of his eye that my thumb barely skirts. His skin is so warm. It always surprises me, how warm he runs, as if something inside him is always burning. "It was proof. That you're capable of letting someone see the worst of you and not running."
He leans into my hand. Just barely. A fraction of an inch that I feel in the shift of weight against my palm, and that tiny yielding cracks something in my chest that I thought I'd reinforced well enough to hold.
"And now?"
I pull my hand back slowly. Stand, and offer him mine.
"Now we go home. Our home." His fingers close around mine, and I pull, and he rises with a stiffness that tells me thedeck was as cold against his body as it was against mine, that he's been sitting here in the chill and the starlight processing what it feels like to be brought to his knees by a woman he wronged, and that the processing isn't finished and won't be for a long time. "And we figure out what's next."
He's standing now. Close. His hand still in mine, his fingers warm and slightly unsteady, and the stars behind him are indifferent to everything that just happened in this room.
I married a monster. I watched the monster kneel. I watched a human woman do what no Empri could, turn his own senses against him by simply refusing to be read.
The monster is becoming something else. Something that bleeds, something that stays on its knees when it could fight back, something that cries in front of the only person it trusts enough to be ruined by.
I'm not sure what that makes me. The woman who watched and chose not to intervene. The woman who stood in a monitoring station and let it all happen because the proof mattered more than the mercy. The wife who wanted to see exactly how much damage her husband could absorb before she'd go to him.
I tighten my grip on his hand and lead him toward the door. His steps are slow but steady. He doesn't let go.
Whatever he's becoming, I chose it. Whatever I'm becoming alongside him, I chose that too.
The corridor is quiet as we walk, and neither of us speaks, and the silence between us is nothing like the silence Elissa wielded. This one is warm. This one is full. This one holds everything we don't need to say because we both already know it, and the knowing is enough, and the walking is enough, and the going home together after the worst has been laid bare is enough.
For now.
Chapter 10
Ethan
The silencewhere she used to be is the loudest thing in the room.
