"Lydia.Little One. That's not an answer."
My palms were damp. I pressed them flat against my thighs beneath the table where he couldn't see, except he probably could feel the spike of something through the bond—the sigils on my wrist pulsing warm, broadcasting my internal state like a radio tower I couldn't shut off.
"Whatever works for you." I said it faster this time, the words tripping over each other in their hurry to get out and beaccepted. "You know this world better than I do. You know what makes sense. I trust your judgment."
"I am not asking what works for me."
He kept looking at me. Into the place where the woman was supposed to be, the place I'd emptied out so long ago I'd forgotten anything had ever lived there.
The anger arrived before I could name it. Hot, tight, located in my jaw and my shoulders and the space between my ribs—the same place it always lived, compressed and structural, load-bearing. I would have called it discomfort. I would have called it frustration, maybe, if I were feeling generous with myself. I would not have called it fury because fury was his word, his domain, and mine was supposed to be the one that smiled.
My jaw locked. I felt the teeth press together—molar against molar, the flat surfaces grinding. The sound was internal, private, the only violence I'd ever allowed myself.
"Fine." The word came out with an edge I didn't mean and couldn't retract. "I need to be able to leave my chambers whenever I want. No locked doors. No posted guards deciding when I can and can't walk through my own—through the corridors."
He picked up something from the edge of the table—a slender implement, dark metal, pointed like a stylus. His hand moved across the parchment. Not writing, exactly—inscribing. The tip left trails of gold fire in the dark surface, angular sigils forming with the same deliberate precision he brought to speech. Each stroke burned bright, dimmed, settled.
The clause sealed. Gold light flared and faded. It was done. Written into the architecture of the realm. Unbreakable.
Just like that.
No negotiation. Nobut what about safety concerns. Nolet's discuss this further. No counteroffer, no compromise, no quietundermining disguised as reason. He heard what I said and he wrote it down and the magic made it law.
The relief hit me so hard I almost swayed.
"I need—no, I want—access to the lower halls. The imps—the nesting pack. No guards. No escort. I go when I want."
The stylus moved. Gold fire. Sealed.
"And—" My voice dropped. Not a choice—a collapse of volume, the words sinking under their own weight as they approached the thing I'd carried longest and hidden deepest and never, not once in twenty-two years, said out loud to anyone who might have the power to do something about it.
"I need you to tell me when you're angry."
His hand stopped.
"Not—after. Not when I've already figured it out from the way the walls are shaking or the way the air tastes. Before. While it's happening. I need you to sayI am angryso I don't have to—"
I stopped. Swallowed. The room was very quiet. The silver light channels pulsed in their circuits around the walls, patient, unchanging.
"I grew up guessing." My voice was barely a sound. "Watching jaws, watching hands, reading the air in a room to figure out whether the next ten minutes were going to be safe. I got very good at it. I got so good at it that I can do it in my sleep—I can do it in a language I don't speak, with creatures I've never seen before, in a dimension that shouldn't exist. I read your soldiers the moment I entered the corridors. I read the hellion in under a second."
I looked at him. His molten eyes were fixed on me with an intensity that should have felt like examination but felt, instead, like being held.
"It exhausts me. The guessing exhausts me. So I need you to tell me. Even when it's hard. Even when you think I already know."
He was very still. Not the stillness of someone holding something back—the stillness of someone receiving something enormous and choosing to hold it carefully. The ember-veins in his forearms hadn't flared. His jaw hadn't tightened. He was simply, completely present in a way that cost him something—I could feel the cost through the bond, the effort of meeting what I'd said without flinching from it.
The stylus moved. The gold fire traced the sigils with a slowness that felt deliberate—each stroke precise, careful, as though the magic understood that this clause mattered more than the others and was taking its time to get it right.
The light flared. Sealed.
I pressed my palms against my thighs and breathed. My jaw ached. My eyes stung. The three needs sat on the parchment in gold fire—glowing, permanent, mine—and I stared at them and thought:I have never asked for anything in my life.
He set the stylus down. His hand rested on the parchment, beside the clauses, not touching them. His eyes hadn't left me.
"And what else do you want?" A pause so slight it barely existed. "Not need. Want."
I thought about my mother's kitchen. The phone calls that were never about me. Debbie writing my name out of the incident report. Mr. Kaplan's buzzer at two in the morning, and the way I'd saidof coursebefore I'd finished waking up. Arthur Bowen's chart with the empty emergency contact line—the line I'd wanted to write my name on and hadn't, because wanting to matter to someone wasn't a need, it was a luxury, and luxuries were for people whose lives had margins.
