I set the bread down. "He was in my way. I went around."
"He called you fuel. You apologized for existing in a corridor of your own home. And you smiled."
Your own home.
The phrase snagged somewhere. I pushed past it. "It wasn't a big deal. He's—you said he's a commander. I'm not going to pick a fight with someone who could break me in half."
"Why did you smile?"
"Because—" I stopped. Started again. "It de-escalates. It's a strategy. If you don't give someone a reason to—"
"What did you feel?"
The question landed between us like something dropped from a height. My hands went still on the table. The clinical woman packed her instruments and left the room.
"I was fine."
He set his cup down.
The stone table cracked. A single fissure running from beneath the cup to the edge nearest me, clean and precise, the sound of it sharp as a gunshot in the quiet hall. The cup settled into the new groove, intact. His hand was still on it. His expression hadn't changed.
"You are lying." His voice had dropped—not louder, lower, the way a fire burns hotter when you compress it. "Not to me. I can taste your anger from across the citadel. You are lying to yourself."
The silence that followed was the loudest thing in the room.
I went very still. Very straight. My hands folded in my lap, one over the other, the posture of a woman in a performance review. My chin lifted. My smile—God help me, I smiled. The automatic, accommodating smile that said everything was fine, nothing was wrong, I was handling it.
"I appreciate your concern. I really do. But I've been managing situations like that my entire life, and I know what I'm doing."
He looked at me the way you look at a wound that's been dressed wrong—with recognition, and something that wasn't pity but lived in the same neighborhood.
"Your anger is the reason the bond chose you." Each word placed with surgical care, as though he knew they'd cut and was choosing exactly where to make the incision. "You have a lifetime of fury compacted inside you like a coal seam. Layered. Dense. Under pressure so enormous it's changed the structure of what it is. And you will not let it breathe."
Coal seam. He'd chosen the one metaphor that would reach me—whether he knew it or not, whether the bond had fed him some fragment of who I was and where I came from. Coal country. The mines that honeycombed the mountains, the compressed remains of ancient forests turned to fuel by millions of years of pressure. The thing that powered everything and destroyed everyone.
My throat closed. My jaw locked. The grinding started before I could stop it, molars pressing together with the reflexive force of twenty-two years of swallowed words.
I changed the subject.
"Where have you been?"
The muscle in his jaw jumped. His eyes dropped to the cracked table, then came back to me. The ember-veins in his forearms flared once—bright gold, then dim.
"Away from you."
"Why?"
"Because I cannot be near you." The words were dragged out of him—I could see the cost of them in the tension of his shoulders, the set of his mouth, the way his fingers pressed flat against the table on either side of the crack he'd made.
He was fighting the same thing I was. From the other side.
"Three days," I said quietly. "You've been gone for three days because you can't—"
"I can taste your anger," he said. "I can feel your loneliness. I can feel—" His jaw snapped shut. The unfinished sentence hung in the air between us, and we both knew what it contained, and neither of us was going to say it out loud.
I stood. The chair scraped on stone. The bread sat half-eaten on the table. The crack in the stone surface glowed faintly, cooling, like the ghost of his restraint made visible.
"Thank you for explaining. The hierarchy. It's—useful to know."
