Page 54 of Taken By the Alien Killer
“I’m fine,” Star protests, even as the doc salts a spray across the split lip and Star flinches. “Ouch.”
“Prescription,” the doc says. “Salt the men who did this, not the wound.”
“Working on it,” Star mutters, eyes sliding to me, and if pride could take physical form, it would be the weight in my chest.
CynJyn leans in the doorway, waggling her eyebrows. “You should see the other guys—oh wait, you can’t, because they’re space confetti.”
“Miss CynJyn,” Sneed says from where he has become the wall. “There is a difference between commentary and confession.”
“You would know,” she sings.
Wardrobe swallows Star the moment med releases her. Assistants with soft hands and hard schedules descend in perfumed clouds; fabric swatches bloom; beads think about falling to the floor. I track the swirl until Sneed cuts a smooth line across my gaze.
“Commander,” he says quietly. “They will devour her for an hour and spit her out in silk. Your presence is neither required nor desired.”
“Noted,” I say. “I will patrol the perimeter.”
“You will bathe,” he says, almost kind. “And then you will patrol. Your appearance frightens the upholstery.”
“Noted,” I repeat, and that almost-smile he had the audacity to hide a lifetime ago tugs somewhere near the corner of his mouth before he kills it.
The house spends the afternoon rehearsing being a fortress. Guards walk the old ghosts; kitchen staff prep for the return of appetite; a florist commits a massacre in the west salon and everyone calls it beauty. I take the routes my bones know: balcony, eastern stair, the long gallery with the portraits whose eyes learn nothing; the lower terraces where the salt off the sealicks the stone and the lemon is less bossy. Everywhere I go, somebody looks at my scars and pretends their eyes didn’t.
Kaspian appears in a corridor like a thought someone tried to edit out. He’s shaved, pressed, earnest. He stops a respectful distance away, hands easy, gaze steady.
“Commander,” he says.
“Your Grace,” I answer, because masks are cheaper than trouble.
“Thank you,” he says.
“For what.”
“For bringing her back,” he says simply. “I didn’t deserve it, but I’m grateful to be wrong about some things.”
“You aren’t owed my explanations,” I say. “But you have my respect.”
He nods, takes the compliment like a man who knows it cost something. “She’ll be torn in a dozen ways,” he says. “Make sure she survives the cutting.”
“I intend to,” I say.
We pass one another like ships, polite in narrow water. The rest of the day is duty with all the corners burnished off. I put on a clean uniform and a tighter silence. Staff nod. Guards recalibrate their personal borders around me, hating that they have to, grateful they don’t have to do it alone. Sneed is everywhere, not to be seen; Wynona and Martin are nowhere, which means they are everywhere else.
When night comes, it arrives in two parts: the lavender wash that turns the vineyards to ghosts and steel, and the deeper blue that eats the house whole. The estate’s lights glow like a town map; the cypress hold their own counsel; the chess tree waits in the courtyard, bark warm from the day and leaves rattle-speaking about weather.
I’m on the upper terrace when she slips past the guard posted there with a smile he will be embarrassed to remember.Bare feet. Soft linen. Hair down. She moves like she belongs to the stones; the stones agree. I don’t follow immediately; I have learned to be a shadow that arrives slightly late. When I step into the courtyard, she’s already under the chess tree, palm on the old scar where a storm peeled bark like paper years ago.
“You shouldn’t be here,” I say, because sometimes ritual is all we have.
“I live here,” she says, not turning. “That used to mean something different.”
“It still does,” I say.
She looks at me then, the dim making her eyes a darker green I only see when she’s telling the truth or lying well. “Med cleared me,” she says, deadpan. “Wardrobe tried to kill me with tulle. I escaped with minor losses and a plan to burn certain fabrics on principle.”
“Strategic victory,” I say. “Collateral: feathers.”
She laughs quietly and then breathes it away. “How many guards on the east wall?”
