The corridor outside our quarters is quieter than usual. Either the station's daily rhythm has shifted, or the word has already spread far enough that people are avoiding the routes I'm likely to take. I suspect the latter. Veridian-7 runs on gossip the way it runs on recycled oxygen, and the fall of Zane Torrence's trusted intelligence asset is exactly the kind of story that travels through bulkheads.
I count my steps. Forty-seven to the junction. Left turn. Another thirty-one to the administrative wing. The gravity generators pulse faintly through the soles of my boots, that subtle wrongness that never quite feels like standing on real ground. A decade on this station and I've never gotten used to it. My teeth always know the difference.
Zane's office door is open. Not a courtesy. An instruction.
I walk in.
They're both there.Of course they are.
Zane behind his desk, hands flat on the surface, the posture of a man who has organized his anger into something architectural. Precise. Load-bearing. His face gives nothing away, which is more frightening than rage would be. I've seen Zane Torrence angry. This isn't anger. This is judgment.
Dexter stands to the left of the desk, leaning against the bulkhead with his arms crossed and his bioluminescent marks doing something I've never seen before. Flickering. Not the steady glow of calm or the bright pulse of aggression, but an irregular, stuttering pattern that reads like a system trying to decide between two modes. His body wants to hurt something. His mind is holding the leash, but the leash is fraying.
The room smells like cold metal and Zane's particular brand of filtered air, the extra scrubbers he installed after his daughter was born. Cleaner than the rest of the station. Sterile in a way that makes my own breathing sound obscenely loud.
I don't sit. They haven't offered, and I wouldn't accept if they did.
"My sister told me what you did." Zane's voice is ice, the kind that burns. "What you admitted to doing."
"I know."
"You manipulated her. Used her. Made her believe something that was never real so you could leverage her emotions for intelligence access."
"Yes."
I don't elaborate. I don't qualify. Every instinct I have is screaming at me to contextualize, to explain the operational necessities, the 7 Protocol intelligence I gathered through her proximity, the lives potentially saved by the information I extracted from the emotional trust she gave me freely. I could make a compelling case. I'm very good at compelling cases.
But Elissa's face in that corridor, the moment her walls went up and I became blind to her for the first time in a decade, is still carved into the back of my skull. She doesn't deserve the indignity of having her pain rationalized.
"Did Aura know before she married you?" Zane asks.
"Yes."
"And she married you anyway." His voice carries something almost like curiosity, the sound of a man examining a contradiction he can't quite resolve.
"Yes." I hold his pale, ice-blue eyes. Don't flinch. "She knows exactly what I am. She married me anyway."
The silence that follows is a physical thing. It has texture. Weight. It sits in the room like a third Torrence brother, taking up space, breathing contempt.
Dexter's marks flicker brighter. The light catches the planes of his face, and for a moment he looks less like the middle Torrence sibling and more like something his ancestors engineered specifically for violence. His hands, still crossed over his chest, have gone white at the knuckles.
"I should kill you for what you did." His voice is quieter than Zane's. Closer to the surface of something vast. "Not because Elissa is innocent. She's not a child. She made her own choicesand she'll reckon with them in her own way. But because you used our family's trust. You used our home."
"I know."
"Then why shouldn't I?"
It's not rhetorical. He's asking. I can feel the genuine calculation behind it, the part of Dexter Torrence that has killed before and would kill again if the math worked out. He wants a reason that holds weight. Not an apology. Not remorse. A reason.
"Because killing me destroys the alliance," I say. "Because I'm more useful alive than dead in a recycler. Because." I meet his eyes. Hold them. Let him see that I'm not performing contrition, that what I'm about to say is the coldest, most pragmatic thing I've ever meant. "I'm the best source of intelligence on the 7 Protocol you'll ever have. And they're coming. Whether I'm alive or dead, they're coming."
Dexter holds my gaze for a long time. His marks pulse once, twice, then settle into something steadier. Not calm. Controlled. A decision made with the body before the mouth confirms it.
He looks at Zane.
Zane hasn't moved. His hands are still flat on the desk, and I realize he's pressing down so hard that the tendons stand out along his forearms. Anchoring himself to the furniture because the alternative is standing up, and if he stands up, he's not sure what happens next.
"You live," Zane says. Each word placed with surgical precision. "You work for us. You remain married to Aura Zalt because the alliance matters more than what you deserve. But you will never be alone with Elissa again." His eyes are cold, but something beneath them burns. The protective fury of a man who built his family from wreckage and will not watch it be dismantled. "You will not speak to her, approach her, or exist in her presence without witnesses. If you violate this."
