Page 135

I climbed out after him, reaching for my own clothes, and found myself watching him get dressed with the same interest I'd tried and failed to hide earlier. He caught me at it once, just a flicker of his eyes finding mine over his shoulder, and didn't say anything about it. He didn't need to.

Getting dressed while still wet was a struggle and next time I was definitely bringing towels. I was working the button on my pants when he crossed the space between us. He stopped close enough that I had to tip my head back to find his face, close enough that the cave's glow caught the line of his jaw and softened it.

Neither of us said anything.

He bent down, unhurried the way he did everything, and kissed me.

His hand slid to the back of my neck first, fingers warm against my skin, and he drew me up into it slow enough that I felt every inch of the distance closing, like he wanted me to feel the choice happening rather than just the result of it.

It wasn't practiced or complicated. His hand found my jaw first, warm and careful, like he was giving me every chance to step back before he closed the last of the distance, and I didn't step back. I stood there in a glowing cave, in a life I still hadn't fully learned and let someone kiss me like it was the simplest, most obvious thing either of us had done all day.

He pulled back after a moment, unhurried about that too, and didn't say anything. Didn't need to explain it or ask if it had been alright or fill the space with words. He just reached down, found my hand the same way he had in the tunnel, and started walking us back toward the surface like nothing about the last thirty seconds required discussion.

I let him lead, my fingers curled inside his, and spent the whole walk back trying to work out what I'd just felt.

Nobody had ever kissed me before. Not once, nobody had ever done anything as small and unremarkable as pressing their mouth to mine like it belonged there. I turned the memory over as we walked, looking for the part I had missed, but there was nothing else to find. It had made me happy, and the feeling settled warm in my chest, uncomplicated enough that, for once, I didn't need to understand it any better than that.

I kept waiting for the part of me that catalogued threats and exits and worst outcomes to say something about it, the way it said something about everything else. It stayed quiet. Whatever this was, it hadn't registered as a risk at all, and I didn't know what to do with a feeling that hadn't come with a warning attached.

I didn't have a category for it yet. I decided, walking through the glow of moss and drifting light with my hand in Halver's, that I didn't need one today.

Chapter Sixteen: Need to Know

Corian

Our yard held two kinds of quiet before sunrise. One belonged to the house, still asleep, curtains drawn, nobody moving behind the windows. The other belonged to Jade, and it was not quiet at all if a person knew how to listen to it.

I heard her before I saw her. Even breathing, counted under her breath, the kind of rhythm a person built after a lifetime of doing the same thing. By the time I rounded the shed she was already at forty push-ups, back straight as a drawn bowstring, palms flat against the packed dirt.

I stopped at the fence line and didn't announce myself.

She wore the training vest instead of a shirt, sleeves of an old jacket knotted around her waist. Sweat had already darkened the collar of the vest, dark hair scraped back tight enough that not a strand of it moved when she dropped and rose, dropped and rose. Ashter lay coiled near the fence post in solid form, chin on his paws, one ember eye tracking me the moment I arrived and staying there.

He didn't get up. That told me more than the eye did.

I had come out here to talk to her. I had been rehearsing what I wanted to say ever since I watched her go quiet, and it had nothing to do with the noise in the tavern and everything to do with what Silvaria had said in front of half the room. I had the words worked out while I walked from the house, or at least I thought I did. Somewhere between the door and the fence, most of them had disappeared.

Something had shifted in her since yesterday, and I hadn't worked out what. She'd come back from wherever Halver had taken her looser through the shoulders than she'd been in days, laughing properly at something Alex said over dinner, letting Nykos steal food off her plate without the usual token protest. Whatever had happened out there, it had done her good.

He had been good for her.

With me, she'd stayed careful. Polite in the specific, measured way she used to be with all of us before she'd stopped, answering when spoken to and volunteering nothing else, like some old habit had resurfaced overnight and settled only around me. I'd told myself it meant nothing. Watching her now, spine straight and untouchable, I wasn't sure I still believed that.

She hit fifty and rolled straight into sit-ups without pausing for breath.

I leaned against the fence rail and watched, because interrupting a person mid-set to apologize for something felt like the wrong kind of ambush, and because some part of me, the part I didn't examine too closely most mornings, was in no hurry to end the reason I had for standing here watching her.

A month ago I would have argued against her placement.

Not to her face. Not even loudly. I had gone to Janus with the file in hand and asked whether command understood what they were doing, folding an unknown Apex into a squad that had spent most of their life learning to move as one body.

I had been wrong about the risk. I understood that now.

She finished the sit-ups and rolled to her feet in one motion, wiping her face against her forearm, and started on the fence line sprints without a break long enough to notice me.

I let her run three lengths before I understood I was going to be standing here a while.

The sun cleared the eastern wall somewhere during the fourth length, throwing long shadows across the yard, and still she didn't stop. I crossed my arms, uncrossed them, found nowhere better to put my hands, and settled for gripping the top rail instead.