Page 98 of Reaper Said Mine

“You saw all this in one session,” he says.

“I saw the beginning of it. I need the prior draft history to be sure.”

“Restricted.”

“I assumed.”

“You want access.”

“Yes.”

His eyes cut to mine. “You ask much.”

“I do.”

“Most people flatter me before asking much.”

“I can try that, if you want, but I suspect we’d both find it uncomfortable.”

He steps closer, and my awareness of the room begins losing ground to my awareness of him. The scent of him reaches me beneath the metal and incense, warm, dark, and unfamiliar in a way that has become dangerously comforting. His voice drops.

“You think I should trust you with restricted negotiation drafts.”

“I think you should decide whether you want pretty traps identified before or after they close.”

“That is not an answer.”

“It is absolutely an answer. It just isn’t decorated.”

He stares at me long enough that the guards by the door remember urgent business elsewhere without being told. The door opens, closes, and leaves us alone beneath the fading glow of my projected notes.

“Why help me?” he asks.

The question is quiet enough to hurt.

I look at the treaty clauses because looking at him makes the truth harder to organize. “Because another war here would kill people who have no seat at that table. Dockworkers. Refugees. Children in coolant-leaking schoolrooms. Merchants who just want to get through a corridor without becoming leverage.”

“And me?”

I breathe in slowly.

I smell Coalition incense, old smoke, and the dangerous edge of honesty.

“Yes,” I say. “And you.”

Gnash does not move, but something in his expression opens, just a fraction. It is not softness exactly. He is too guarded for that, and maybe I am too. It is the look of someone who has been bracing for a blow so long that kindness arrives like an unfamiliar weapon.

“My enemies will say you are compromised,” he says.

“They won’t be entirely wrong.”

His eyes flare.

I force myself to continue. “My feelings are involved. I’m not going to insult either of us by pretending otherwise. But compromised does not mean useless. It means I need to be more honest, not less. I can care what happens to you and still tell you when you’re about to make a mistake.”

A low sound leaves him, rough and almost disbelieving. “You have already done so more than once.”

“And I’m just getting started.”