“You didn’t move your hand,” she says.
“No.”
“She noticed.”
“She was meant to.”
Celeste’s mouth does a complicated thing that is almost a smile and almost grief and settles on something between the two that I don’t have a name for and don’t need one.
“A house,” she says again.
The second time she says it, the word has changed. The first time was a response, a woman answering a vulnerability with a matched vulnerability. The second time is a declaration. She isn’t answering me anymore. She’s deciding.
“With a yard.”
“With a yard.”
“And a door that stays open.”
“And two loud children.”
She puts her hand over mine. The warmth of her fingers, the crest ring cool against my skin, the pulse I can feel in her wrist with the smaller, faster ones running underneath it.
“Then we walk in,” she says. “We hold the door. We come out. And we build it.”
I turn my hand under hers. The maps spread around us. Thedead man’s switch glowing on Julian’s tablet in the other room. The hour. The army.
And on the floor of our quarters at midnight, a yard. A door. Two loud children. The most dangerous thing I’ve ever wanted, which is the ordinary life on the other side of the war, and the woman carrying it, already there.
Chapter
Ten
The request comes through Dalton, of all people.
He brings it to me while the compound is down and the halls are mine, because he’s human and awake and I’m the only command he can reach in daylight. Maximus is in the field with Erik, walking the northern approach to the estate, due back at dark. Catherine asked Dalton last night, at the end of his rounds, in the polite voice she uses for the staff, and Dalton brings it to me because I’m here, and because, I suspect, he’d rather I be the one who says no.
“She wants to train,” he says. “Physical conditioning. Basic self-defense. Her words were, ‘I spent three hundred years unable to stop anything that was done to me. I would like to stop being that person.’”
“And she asked for me.”
It isn’t a question. The request has my name in it before Dalton opens his mouth again.
“She asked for you,” he confirms. “A woman. A fighter. Her words were that she has only ever been handledby men, and she’d like to learn from someone who knows what it’s like to fight her way out of a room instead of being carried out of one.”
I add it to the file I keep on the file she’s building.
It’s a good reason. It might even be true. That’s the problem with Catherine. Everything she says is a good reason, and every part of it might even be true. And this one is aimed with a precision that makes my jaw tighten, because it’s built so that refusing it means I’m afraid of her, and agreeing means I’m inside her reach, and the construction is flawless.
I stand in the empty hall with the daylight sealed behind the shutters and I think about a woman in a locked wing asking, gently, for me by name.
“Tell her yes,” I say.
Dalton’s eyebrows climb. He’s too professional to say anything, and too human to keep it off his face.
“Dusk.” Catherine won’t surface before then. None of them do, except Maximus and me, and the immunity that lets us walk through noon is not a thing she carries. “The training floor. Just us.”
We meet at dusk.The guard Marcellus posted after the corridor incident walks her down and takes the door, and Catherine steps onto the training floor in borrowed workout clothes with her hair tied back, and stands at the edge of the mats, polite, unsure she’s allowed on them.
