What I feel after that is the need to see Mireya.
I find her in the study, going through the investigators' subpoenas with focused intensity, having found a problem and intend to take it apart systematically. She looks up when I come in and reads my face in the three seconds before I've decided what to show her.
"Sit down," she says.
"I'm fine."
"You're not. Sit down."
I sit. I push the Vaustren document across the desk. She reads it — fast, her eyes moving in the pattern I recognize as her processing-read rather than her comprehension-read, pulling structure before content — and when she looks up her expression is very still.
"He built you," she says. "Like a crop."
"That's one way to put it."
"Sevareth." She closes the document. "This is not something you did to yourself. You understand that."
"I made the choice to take the pact."
"Under conditions they engineered specifically to make it the only choice that felt like survival." Her voice is steady but her eyes aren't, not entirely. There's anger in there, the specific cold kind she gets when something has happened to someone she cares about. "That is not the same as choosing freely. You knowthe difference. You've spent enough time in interrogation rooms understanding how circumstances shape decisions."
I don't answer. I'm not ready to agree and I'm not going to lie to her.
She comes around the desk and sits on the edge of it next to me, close enough that our arms touch. Not a gesture she makes often — Mireya is deliberate about physical contact in the house, deliberate about what it signals, deliberate about everything. The fact that she's not being deliberate about this tells me more than anything she could say.
"I need to tell you something," I say.
"Tell me."
"I've been— " I stop. Start again. "Since you came back from the palace. I've been tracking your movements. Not Draevik's guards. Me, personally. I know where you are in this building at most hours and I've been finding reasons to be near you and I know how that sounds and I cannot entirely stop it and I'm telling you because you said you needed to know when my behavior was about fear instead of?—"
"I know," she says quietly. "I noticed."
"And?"
"And I've been letting you. Because you're not the only one who's scared. I just hide it in different rooms."
The fire pops. The investigators are somewhere in the east wing going through harbor records. The coalition's forces are tightening around the capital's political structure like a fist. And Mireya is sitting on the edge of my desk with her arm against mine and I am more afraid of losing her than I have been afraid of anything.
"I love you," I say.
It comes out simple. Not decorated. Not calculated. Just true, the way the financial discrepancy was true — something that was always there, that only needed someone paying attention tofind it. I've been building toward saying it for weeks and I didn't realize that's what I was doing until the words were already out.
She turns to look at me properly. Her amber eyes are soft and a little wrecked and entirely honest.
"I know," she says. And then: "Me too. In case that still needed saying."
"It didn't," I say. "But I'm glad you said it."
"Good." She leans her head briefly against my shoulder — one second, not more, which is Mireya's version of an embrace — and then she's upright again, back to being the person who has seventeen plans running simultaneously. But the second happened, and I felt it, and I file it in the same place I file everything that matters.
We sit like that for a while, her shoulder against mine, the investigation proceeding two wings away, the empire arranging itself around us into a shape that is going to require everything we have.
I'm not afraid of that. I'm afraid of exactly one thing and she's right here.
23
MIREYA
