It takes longer than it should. That's new.
I get to the safe house. I handle the safe house. I don't let the shadows handle it for me. I walk back to the warehouse district and I find Mireya sitting on a crate helping a woman feed her child and I sit down next to her, and the Maw goes quiet the second I'm within arm's reach of her, and I hate how much I need that.
In the morningshe finds me in the study.
I've been here since I left the warehouse. I haven't slept. The reports are here, but I haven't been reading them — I've been sitting with the knowledge of what I did last night and trying to understand where the line was and whether I crossed it and whether, if I crossed it, I would have known at the time.
I don't hear her come in. That's new too. I usually hear everything.
"You're scaring me," she says.
Not dramatic. Not accusatory. Just honest, sitting down across from me like she's settling in for a conversation she's been building up to, and something about the honesty of it cracks the carefully held composure I've been sitting behind all morning.
"I know," I say.
"What happened last night. After the warehouse."
Her face says: I already know some of it. I need you to tell me the rest.
"I let it in," I say. "The Maw. I let it help."
"How much."
"Enough to be effective." A pause. "More than I have before, I think. The boundaries were — less clear than usual."
She stops. Not horrified — processing, which is somehow both better and harder to bear than horror would be. "Were you in control of what you were targeting?"
"Yes. The people in those buildings were Maerath operatives. I didn't—" I stop. "I didn't hurt anyone who wasn't there to hurt others."
"Okay."
"Mireya—"
"I'm not saying what you did was right," she says carefully. "I'm saying I understand why, and that the fact that you can still answer those questions means you were still in there, making those choices." She holds my gaze. "But Sevareth. The part where you can answer those questions is getting smaller. I see that."
I do understand it. That's the worst part.
"What happened last night," I say, "frightened me." And I never say that. I have said I was afraid once in my life, in a safehouse with her, and that cost me something. This costs more. "Not what I did to Maerath's people. What I felt doing it. There was a moment when it felt — when I couldn't find the place where I ended and the Maw's appetite?—"
I stop. I can't finish the sentence. What I cannot say out loud is that for a few seconds last night, the Maw's hunger and my own felt indistinguishable — and those seconds were not frightening. They were a relief. The specific relief of putting down something heavy that you've been carrying so long you've stopped noticing the weight. That is the part I cannot tell her. That is the part that tells me how much ground I've already lost.
She reaches across the desk and puts her hand over mine. Doesn't say anything. Just puts her hand there and holds it,warm and steady, and the thing in my chest that's been wound tight since Tanner's Row finally, very slowly, begins to loosen.
"I'm not going to let you disappear into it," she says quietly. " Whatever it takes."
I turn my hand over and hold hers back. I don't have words for what I'm feeling, so I don't try to find them. Some things are better held than named. This is one of them.
19
MIREYA
He doesn't make it easy, the wound he took on the third night.
He comes in late — I've been awake, reading by the window, telling myself I'm not waiting for him — with his coat held carefully and his left arm not moving the way it should. He thinks I don't notice. He has a decades of practice not showing injury and I have four years of reading the things people try to hide, and we are evenly matched on this particular turf so no ideas what he was expecting.
"Sit," I tell him.
"It's nothing."
