"Between?" I ask, as if I don't already know.
"You and one of my people. Not me." He glances at Talia, and something passes between them that I recognize. Not just affection. Territory. "I'm spoken for. And a leader bound by marriage alliance becomes a tool of that alliance. I need to remain autonomous."
"Practical," I say. "Who, then?"
"Ethan Eames."
The name settles into my chest like a coin dropped into deep water. Sinking slow. I let it sink.
"Your advisor," I say. "The embedded operative. The one currently in your holding cells."
"Yes."
"The half-Empri who spent a decade infiltrating your father's inner circle, whose true loyalties remain, by most assessments, unclear. The one facing tribunal for crimes against the syndicate." I tilt my head. "That Ethan Eames."
Zane doesn't flinch. "That one."
"You're offering me a traitor as a husband."
"I'm offering you the most well-connected intelligence asset in three sectors as a husband. What you do with him is yourbusiness. What this alliance does for both our organizations is mine."
I let silence fill the space between us. The chromatic panels above shift from indigo to deep violet, casting the room in the color of something dying. I hear the faint pulse of the station's gravity generators through the floor, a vibration more felt than heard, settling in the back of my teeth like a low-grade headache.
I've read Ethan Eames's file. Every version of it, the official Torrence dossier, the Consortium intelligence brief, the fragments we pulled from black-market data brokers who trade in secrets the way other people trade in weapons. A decade of embedded work. Contacts in organizations that don't officially exist. Knowledge of the 7 Protocol that goes deeper than anything the Torrences have shared publicly. His psyche profile reads like a warning label: high intelligence, high adaptability, emotional regulation that borders on pathological. Empri heritage gives him abilities that make him a walking security breach in any room he enters.
He's either the most dangerous man on this station or the most useful. The file suggests both. My training tells me that's a perfect opportunity.
My instincts tell me it's a perfect trap. The kind of opportunity that comes wrapped in too much shine, too much logic, too muchsense. Alliance building masquerading as mercy. A way to bind the Zalt Consortium to Torrence interests while appearing to do the opposite, offering them a hand up when he's actually offering them a collar they'll put on themselves.
Both can be true. Both usually are.
This is what my mother taught me: that the best negotiations are the ones where both parties believe they've won. That power moves in layers, each one convincing itself it's operating on a different plane than the others. That sometimes the person sitting across from you isn't your enemy or your ally, they'rejust another player calculating odds in a game where everyone's bluffing about what they actually hold.
I lean back in my chair, letting the silence stretch long enough for Zane to feel its weight. He doesn't flinch. Good. A man who flinches at silence is a man with something urgent to hide, and Zane Torrence strikes me as someone who's learned to keep his urgencies locked down so tight they don't register on instruments.
"I'd like to meet him," I say finally, my voice pitched low enough that only those closest can hear, which means only the people in this room, which means this is calculated for privacy rather than projection. "Before I respond to your proposal. Before any contracts are drafted or signatures contemplated. I need to assess him myself."
It's not a demand. It's barely even a request. It's the kind of statement that doesn't need inflection because the power structure is already understood. I'm the Zalt heir. I don't ask for things. I indicate requirements. Zane Torrence would be foolish to interpret this as anything else.
"I expected you would," Zane says, and nods—slow, deliberate, the kind of acknowledgment that suggests he's already accounted for this variable in whatever larger calculation he's running beneath the surface.
I don't smile. Smiling is a tell, and tells are leverage in the wrong hands.
Beside me,Ky's hand shifts on the table. A small movement. No one else would notice. I feel his attention on the side of my face like heat from a vent, and when I glance at him, his hazel eyes have taken on the faintest blue undertone. The tell. The one he's spent his entire adult life trying to suppress, that flicker of hishalf-Empri nature surfacing when stress pushes past whatever internal walls he's built.
"Aura."
One word. My name in his mouth carrying the weight of everything he won't say in front of strangers.Don't do this. You don't have to do this. There are other ways.
"Not now." My voice is quiet but carries no room for argument.
He subsides. His eyes fade back to hazel, the blue retreating like a tide pulling back from shore. His jaw tightens and stays tight.
Ky has always been the softer one. The one who sees people where I see positions on a board. The one who hates what he is enough to bury it so deep that most days even I forget he carries the same genetic markers that make men like Ethan Eames so dangerous. My brother looks at a proposed marriage alliance and sees his sister chained to a stranger. I look at it and see access. Leverage. A key to every locked door the Consortium has been pushing against for years.
I love him for worrying. I can't afford to let it matter.
They bringEthan Eames to the negotiation chamber forty minutes later.
