I laid it out fast and light and from the side, so the shape of the ask wouldn't land until it was already sitting in the room. The trial with Zarcal was finished. Everyone in town knew it. Zarcal himself, poor wrecked sweetheart, knew it.
Really, all I needed was a switch. I'd be doing the Agency a favor, even, sparing everyone the paperwork of a third failed placement. Match me to Lorkin instead. Two signatures and a tidy little happy ending, and Theeodus could get back to his backlog.
Out loud, I made it small. "How does a person go about changing a placement?"
"Changing?" He blinked at the word.
"Tidying one up." I gave his stack of forms a sympathetic look, like the two of us were on the same side of all that paper. "The Zarcal match is finished. I'd like the file to say so. And then to say something else."
"Something else?"
"Yes."
He didn't reach for a pen. "Placements aren't changed. They complete, or they fail and the bride waits for the next intake." He recited it; there was no other word for it.
"So fail it." I leaned an elbow on the counter. "Quietly. Today. And match me up with Lorkin."
"I can't fail a placement because you'd like me to. Besides, this is already your third placement." He lined the forms up, though they were already straight.
"Nezara would have had it stamped before lunch."
Wrong move. Whoops. Something pinched in his face: he knew to the inch how far short of her he fell, and he didn't love hearing it from a human draped over his counter. "Nezara isn't here. I can't change a contract like that. There's a process. There are forms."
There was a process, and I wanted to set it on fire.
He dropped his voice a note. "Placements don't switch. And before any of that, there's the contact clause."
"The what?"
He wouldn't look up from the forms. "If a bride is found to have been with someone other than the male she's contracted to." Pink climbed his neck. "That isn't a failed placement. It's a breach of contract."
"And a breach is..."
"Different." He squared the stack that didn't need squaring. "The bride would be removed. Of course, we investigate these claims seriously, we wouldn't just remove someone on one man's word, but the removal would be permanent. Infidelity is unacceptable."
He must have read something on my face since he didn't wait for me to ask any follow-ups.
"She would be sent home." His words were quiet. Gentle, even. "There's a transport already inbound. I believe it's the one you will be put on if your contract with Zarcal proves unsuccessful."
For a second the little office went far away and too bright, Theeodus's worried face at the wrong end of it, and I set a hand flat on the counter to keep myself upright without showing it.
Then the words landed, all of it, the part I'd been so careful not to look at. What I'd been doing with Lorkin every night for days wasn'ttemporaryand it wasn't harmless. It was no longer just a private matter between the two of us. On the Agency's paper, it was the one unforgivable move. It was a one-way seat with my name on it.
What a freaking joke.
I'd spent my whole life certain I was the kind of woman a man had fun with and handed back. Twice over on this planet alone. And the one time somebody had wanted to keep me, wanted me so badly he forgot how to be careful about it, that was the nail in my coffin.
It wasn't the failing that got me. It was being wanted. I'd have laughed if my throat had cooperated.
"I know you are no longer staying with Zarcal." He found his pen at last. "I'll need your current lodging, for the file."
"The blacksmith's end of town, lately." The smile came up on its own, bright and easy. "He helped me after Zarcal's… episode. Have you met the man? Fixed a winch for me once, grunted at me twice, and I'm fairly sure he'd sooner eat his own anvil than hold a conversation." I shrugged, fond and dismissive. "We're barely roommates. He's just being kind."
He wrote something down, and I worried that I'd said too much.
But it came out easily. Every word of it was me taking the best thing that had ever happened to me and shrinking it down to nothing, in a cold little box of an office, to save my own skin. Lorkin would have understood. He'd have told me to lie bigger.
And then, because the universe has a sense of humor, and it is not a generous one, the light in the doorway changed. Ashadow filled it, ducking, because the door was built for people my size and not for him.
