I use the time well. I review the terms Zane has laid out, the defense pact provisions, the research-sharing framework, the specific language around shared intelligence on the 7 Protocol. Talia walks me through the anomaly research parameters, and I note the places where she's careful with information and the places where she isn't, because both tell me something useful. Ky sits beside me and says nothing, but I feel him recalibrating, pulling himself back together the way he always does, brick by brick, until the wall is smooth again.
Then the door opens.
I smell him before I see him clearly. Something expensive and deliberately chosen, a cologne designed to project control and taste, layered over the clean-soap sterility of someone who's been in a holding cell and made certain to erase every trace of it before walking into a room where impressions are weapons.
He's tall. Lean in the way that suggests efficiency rather than deprivation, a body maintained as a tool rather than displayed as an ornament. Dark hair, cut precise. Clean-shaven. The kind of face that's handsome in a way that works for him strategically, features arranged to inspire trust, approachability, the sense that you're talking to someone reasonable. Someone safe.
The eyes give it away.
Grey. Cool. They sweep the room the way mine did when I entered, cataloguing exits, threats, power positions, who's sitting where and what it means. They land on Zane first, and something passes through them that I can't quite read. Then Talia. Then Ky, a brief pause, recognition of what my brother is, what they share. Then me.
They hold.
I've been assessed before. By politicians, by military commanders, by men who thought they could read me and discovered too late that I'd been reading them first. But this is different. Ethan Eames looks at me the way I imagine a locksmith looks at an unfamiliar mechanism. Not with force. With patience. With the quiet certainty that everything opens eventually if you understand how it's built.
I look back at him the way I look at everything: as if I've already decided what it's worth, and I'm waiting for it to prove me right.
Two predators at the edge of the same clearing. Neither of us moves first.
"Ms. Zalt." His voice is measured. Warm in a way that feels engineered, each syllable carrying exactly the right amount of deference and confidence. "I've heard a great deal about you."
"I doubt that." I stand. Not because courtesy demands it but because I want him to see me at full height, shoulders back, every line of my body communicating that I am not a woman who receives people from a seated position. "You've heard what the Consortium allows people to hear. The rest, you'll have to earn."
Something shifts in his expression. Not quite a smile. An adjustment, the way a calibration clicks into place when the initial setting proves inadequate. Good. He's already recalculating. I want him recalculating.
"Shall we?" I extend my hand.
Formal introduction. Standard. Expected.
His fingers close around mine.
It's subtle. So subtle that anyone without training would miss it entirely, would simply feel a vague warmth toward this man, a pull toward openness, a sense that he could be trusted. The push comes through the sustained contact like a current through water, not a blast but a steady pressure against the edges of my mind. Trust me. Like me. Lower your guard. It's professional. Controlled. The kind of manipulation a half-Empri does reflexively through touch, the same way most people blink.
I shut it down.
Hard.
Not with force. With architecture. The mental partitioning my mother spent years teaching me, the walls that don't resist so much as redirect, turning his push into empty air, a hand reaching for a door that isn't there. I feel the moment he registers the absence of effect, the subtle stutter in his composure as his ability meets nothing, finds nothing, gets nothing.
"Don't." I say it low enough that only he hears. My hand still in his, my eyes locked on his face.
His pupils dilate. A fraction. Involuntary. The kind of physiological response that even a decade of operational training can't fully suppress, because it isn't social. It's biological. Surprise. Real surprise, surfacing through every layer of control he's wearing.
I let go of his hand. The absence of contact severs whatever channel he was attempting, and the air between us clears like a room after a ventilation purge.
For a moment, no one else in the chamber exists. Just the two of us and the fact that I did something he didn't expect, and he hasn't decided yet whether that makes me a threat or a fascination.
I already know which one I am. I'm both.
"Please sit, Mr. Eames." I gesture to the chair across from mine. "We have terms to discuss."
He sitslike a man who's spent time in rooms where the wrong posture gets you killed. Spine straight but not rigid. Hands visible on the table. Relaxed enough to signal confidence, composed enough to signal awareness. Every choice deliberate. I wonder if he's been this way so long that he's forgotten what his natural posture looks like, or if this is his natural posture, and everything about Ethan Eames was built for exactly these kinds of rooms.
"You've been briefed on the proposal," I say. Not a question.
"Broadly." His grey eyes haven't left mine. "Marriage alliance. Defense pact. Shared intelligence. I'm the currency being exchanged."
"That bothers you?"
