"I know the feeling."
He almost smiles. "Yeah. I know you do."
We sit with that for a minute. The ventilation rattles. The cracked viewport holds.
"The Consortium delegation arrives in four hours," I say, shifting registers because the tender stuff makes my skin itch if I stay in it too long. Occupational hazard of being raised by a man who treated vulnerability like an arterial wound. "Aura Zalt is leading it."
"I read the briefing." Zane stretches his legs out, boots thudding against the deck plate. "Marriage alliance proposal. To Ethan."
"To Ethan," I confirm.
We both let that land. Ethan, who followed my orders on Sigma-9 with a precision that bordered on worship. Ethan, who carried Astra when she couldn't walk and watched me with those steady, loyal eyes that never once questioned whether I deserved loyalty. Ethan, bound to the Consortium through marriage. A leash dressed as a lifeline,or a lifeline dressed as a leash, and the politics tangled enough that I can't determine which from the briefing materials alone.
"You going to let it happen?"
"It's not mine to let or prevent. The proposal has strategic merit. Whether Ethan accepts is his choice."
"Since when do you let your people make choices you haven't already made for them?"
The question stings because it's accurate. I give Zane the look he deserves for it, the one that says I know exactly what he's doing and I'm allowing it only because he's blood.
"Since a woman I kidnapped and bonded against her will taught me that control is not the same thing as care."
Zane's eyebrows rise. "That's almost growth."
"Don't get used to it."
He laughs, low and genuine, and for a moment we're just brothers. Not syndicate heirs. Not men built on the scaffolding of our father's cruelty. Just two people who survived the same wreckage and somehow found their way to the same shore.
It won't last. It never does. But I've learned to value the moments that aren't supposed to exist.
The diplomatic receptionfills the secondary atrium with bodies and politics, both of which I find equally tiresome in large quantities. The space has been dressed for the occasion: ambient lighting calibrated to a warm neutral that flatters both Empri bioluminescence and human skin tones, the long tables laden with food curated to offend neither palate, the kind of expensive, careful staging that communicates wealth without aggression.
Astra stands beside me in charcoal silk that covers the healing wound at her shoulder. Her hair is pulled back, exposing the line of her throat where my marks are visible against her skin, the steady blue pulse of them broadcasting a claim that every Empri in this room can read and every human can sense without understanding. She stands like someone who belongs here. Six weeks ago, she stood like someone plotting her escape.
The progression from one posture to the other is the most terrifying thing I've ever witnessed, and I've watched men die at my feet.
Aura Zalt enters the atrium and the temperature of the room shifts.
She's beautiful the way certain weapons are beautiful. Precise, engineered, every element in service to function. Light olive skin that catches the warm lighting and turns it cool. Grey eyes that move across the crowd with a cartographer's discipline, mapping exits, threats, alliances, and dismissing each in turn. Black hair sculpted into severe architectural lines that frame her face like a statement of intent. She wears the Consortium's diplomatic colors, deep green and silver, and she wears them like armor.
I know her file. Trained from adolescence in anti-Empri countermeasures. Raised on Vantara-3, where the curriculum includes a module on recognizing and resisting Empri emotional manipulation. She views my species the way a virologist views a pathogen: with respect for our capabilities and a clear-eyed commitment to containment.
I watch her scan the room. Watch her eyes catch on the briefing materials visible on the display panel near the refreshments, where Ethan's name and service record are projected alongside the alliance terms. Watch the precise moment she processes the face attached to that name.
Her smile is small and sharp and knowing. Not cruel. Interested. The way you'd smile at a puzzle you've been looking forward to solving.
"She's going to be interesting," I murmur to Astra.
"She's going to be trouble."
"Same thing."
Astra gives me the look that means she disagrees but won't argue it publicly, which is its own form of agreement. I've learned to read her silences the way I once read threat assessments. With attention. With the awareness that what's unsaid carries more operational weight than what isn't.
My gaze is still tracking Aura when I catch the anomaly in her delegation.
He moves like smoke through the peripheral crowd. Olive skin with a quality I can't identify at first, a faint undertone that shifts in the atrium's variable lighting. Blue, almost, visible for a fraction of a second before the light angle changes and it vanishes. Hazel eyes that are busy, busy, busy behind a face so still it could be carved from stone. He stays in Aura's orbit without ever appearing to orient toward her, a shadow that maintains its own apparent autonomy while remaining fundamentally tethered to its source.
