And under both of those, the oldest fear, too plain to dress up. She'd had two husbands already hand her back. I'd spent my life learning the exact shape of what I was good for, andgentlehad never once been part of it.
Chloe shifted, burrowed, and jammed both feet flat between my thighs.
They were freezing. Two slabs of ice against the most defenseless part of me, and I came up off the bed with a sound nobody in the arena had ever gotten out of me.
"Stars—"
"Mm." She didn't open her eyes. "You're warm. I'm keeping these here."
"They're like river stones."
"Mm-hm." She wriggled them in deeper, smug, then cracked one eye at me. "You're thinking so loud you woke me up, and it's not even properly light. What's the matter with you?"
"Nothing."
"You've got the face." She propped her chin on my sternum and looked at me, rumpled and unbothered and close enough to count the freckles the sun had put across her nose. "You're lying in bed next to a naked woman and you've still found something to brood about. That's almost impressive."
I didn't have a clean way to ask it, so I asked it roughly. "Do you regret it? Last night."
The teasing slid off her face. What came up under it was careful, guarded, and for a breath I braced for the answer I had coming.
Then she leaned up and kissed me, slow and morning-soft.
"It was the best last night ever," she said against my mouth.
Last.
She kept putting that word in front of things. Last night. As if she'd already gone through and decided which things she didn't get to keep.
I wanted to tell her there was nothinglastabout it, that I'd torn the whole calendar up in the dark while she slept. I kept my mouth shut. Keeping her wasn't mine to swear to yet, and I'd sooner take my own hand off at the wrist than promise her something and let her watch it be untrue.
She must have felt me start to sink. Chloe turned the moment before it could turn on her. She sat up, swung a leg over, and settled astride me with her hands flat on my chest and that grin sliding back into place, the one that had undone me the first night.
"Stop thinking," she said. "You've got one job this morning, blacksmith. Give me the best last morning ever."
I put my hands on her and gave her everything I had and didn't think about anything at all, for a good while.
I went into town after, once she'd fallen asleep again. There was a thing I had to do before the nerve went out of me.
I'd decided it somewhere in the night, with her heartbeat under my hand. I was going to walk into the Agency office and tell Nezara to put me down for the rest of it. Zarcal's trial had a stretch of days left on the rolls before the placement closed and the transport came due.
It was a simple request: Strike his name, write mine. Let the clock run toward me instead of toward a ship.
I didn't know if she'd let me. Frankly, I didn't know if Nezara could, or if the rules bent that way at all. I knew only that I'd rather stand in that prefab box and make a fool of myself than lie next to Chloe one more night and know she would be gone in a blink.
It wasn't claiming her. I told myself that the whole walk in, past the shuttered market stalls and the wood-sled ruts, the morning mist still burning off the street. It was only keeping a door open. A male can hold one open for someone without asking to walk through it.
The office was waiting for me, the off-world prefab crammed in between the apothecary and the cider house, looking wrong against all that dark timber. There was a paper fixed to the door.
Agency office closed. Reopening in seven days. Take urgent matters to the courthouse.
I read it twice.
Relief went through me first, shameful and quick. I didn't have to say it out loud yet, didn't have to stand in front of Nezara's watchful eyes and find out how the words sounded coming out of me.
Then the cold came in behind it.
The office was shut for seven days, and the clock did not pause with it. Somewhere a transport kept its own schedule, and the one door that might close this thing in Chloe's favor was barred for a week. And I stood in the street with the fix in my mouth and nowhere to put it.
