She sees me shaking and doesn't comment on it. She pulls my head to her chest and rests her chin on my hair and holds me the way you hold something that might break if you acknowledge how fragile it is.
I close my eyes. Her heartbeat against my ear. The rise and fall of her breathing. The warmth of her, real and present and chosen.
It's terrifying. It's honest.
It might be love.
And that, more than the Torrence brothers' judgment, more than the 7 Protocol bearing down on all of us like a wave that hasn't crested yet, might be the most dangerous thing I've ever let happen.
Chapter 11
Aura
The summons arriveswhile I'm watching him sleep.
He does it differently now. Before the Elissa confession, before the reckoning with the Torrences, Ethan Eames slept like a man who'd trained himself to do it efficiently. On his back, arms at his sides, breathing regulated, a machine powering down to minimum function. Now he sleeps on his side, turned toward me, one hand extended into the space between us as though reaching for something even in unconsciousness.
I hate that I find it beautiful. I hate that the word even surfaces. But there it is, rising through the layers of training and counter-training my mother installed in me like so much psychological firmware, the truth I can't seem to delete: I find my husband beautiful when he isn't performing, and I want to keep looking at him, and wanting that feels like the most subversive act I've ever committed.
My comm lights up. The Consortium seal, gold and geometric, rotating slowly on the screen.
I know what it says before I open it.
The Consortium Council requires the presence of Aura Zalt and her registered consort for formal recognition proceedings. Your attendance is expected within the standard transitwindow. Accommodations have been prepared. The Council Chair extends personal regards.
The Council Chair. My mother. Extending "personal regards" the way a surgeon extends a scalpel.
I read it twice. Set the comm down. Look at Ethan's sleeping face and feel something tighten in my chest that I refuse to name.
Ky findsme in the communication bay two hours later, while I'm reviewing transit routes and trying to pretend I'm not dreading this.
My brother moves like he always does, with the particular grace of someone who exists between two biological imperatives and has learned to let neither one win. Half-Empri. Half something else. The result is a man who reads rooms the way I read people, with an accuracy that has nothing to do with empathic ability and everything to do with growing up as the imperfect product of a political coupling.
He sits beside me. Doesn't speak for a long time. His eyes, that telltale blue that marks him as partly ours and partly not, are fixed on the transit charts I've been shuffling without purpose.
"Mother has been watching the reports," he says finally. "The Elissa situation. The data vault incident. All of it."
"Of course she has."
"She's concerned about your attachment."
I look at him. "My attachment."
"To him." Ky's voice is careful in the way that means he's delivering someone else's message and doesn't agree with it. "To the marriage being real."
The word lands between us like something dropped from height. Real. As if the bruises on my hips aren't real. As if theway I held him last night while he shook apart in my arms wasn't real. As if the slow, terrifying process of learning to want someone who was designed to manipulate want is something that can be filed under performance.
"This was supposed to be a strategic arrangement," Ky continues. "Mother doesn't approve of it becoming personal."
"Mother doesn't approve of most things I do."
"This is different, Aura." He turns to face me fully, and the worry in his expression isn't political. It's familial, which makes it worse, because Ky's worry has always been the reliable kind, the kind that means the threat is real and proximate. "The Council is watching. If they decide the marriage has compromised your objectivity, they'll reassign you. Pull you off the alliance entirely. And him..."
He doesn't finish. He doesn't need to. I know what the Consortium does with Empri who've outlived their strategic utility.
"I understand the stakes," I say.
"Do you? Because the woman I know, the one Mother trained, would never let herself." He stops. Starts again. "You care about him."
