“I don’t,” I say, holding his gaze now. “That’s kind of the problem.”
He shifts his weight, fingers tightening around the handle of his tool until the metal gives a faint, strained creak. “You think you’re different now.”
I tilt my head slightly. “Different from what.”
“From the rest of us,” he snaps. “Like you don’t have to follow the same rules.”
“I follow the rules.”
“You don’t bow like the rest of us.”
That almost makes me laugh, though I don’t let it surface fully. “I didn’t realize posture was part of the contract.”
His expression darkens further. “It is when he’s watching.”
There it is.
I don’t react to the name he doesn’t say, but something in my chest tightens anyway, recognition sliding into place alongside everything else I’ve been tracking.
“He watches everyone,” I say.
“Not like that.”
I hold his gaze a second longer than I should, then look away, reaching for the next plant and pressing my fingers into the soil again. “Then maybe you should be asking yourself why you’re so interested in where he’s looking.”
That lands harder than I expect, and Fenrix steps closer, close enough that I can hear the shift in his breathing, the slight hitch that tells me I hit something real.
“You’re going to get yourself killed,” he says quietly.
“Eventually,” I reply, not looking up. “That’s kind of how this place works.”
He studies me like he wants to say more, like something is sitting just behind his teeth that he hasn’t decided whether to say or swallow, but the moment never resolves, because the air shifts before he can make the choice.
It happens immediately, not dramatic or loud, but unmistakable once you’ve learned to recognize it, the space tightening like a line pulled too taut, every movement in the garden sharpening by a fraction as awareness ripples outward.
Fenrix goes still.
So do I.
I don’t look up right away. I let my hands keep moving just long enough to preserve the illusion that I’m responding to the work rather than the presence, then I straighten slowly and turn.
He’s already there.
Not entering. Not arriving. Standing, as though he has always been part of the space and everything else has simply adjusted around him.
Verr does not announce himself, because he doesn’t need to. The guards have already shifted, their posture subtly recalibrated, and the workers nearby have found urgent reasons to focus entirely on their tasks, their attention carefully redirected anywhere but toward him.
I wipe my hands against the cloth at my waist and incline my head just enough to acknowledge him. “Sir.”
His gaze settles on me and does not move, does not flicker, simply rests there with the unsettling precision of something being measured.
“Continue,” he says.
No one stops.
No one had.
That is the point.
