Page 56 of Taken By the Alien Killer
Her head tips. “Of course he did. He’s a good person. It’s very inconvenient.”
“Very,” I agree.
We listen to the lemon trees argue quietly with the cypress about how to smell like evening. The chess tree creaks. My mind inventories cameras again; the blink pattern holds. Her fingers play with mine like they’re a puzzle with a prize. It’s almost nothing. It’s everything.
“Tomorrow,” she says, and the word tastes like a knife we both plan to use carefully. “There will be fittings. Meetings. Speeches about legacy. Mother will tell me the story about hergrandmother’s veil and how it blocked out the sun but not the gossip. I will nod in all the right places and be ridiculous in the wrong ones.”
“Tomorrow,” I say. “I will stand where I’m told and walk where I’m not. I will count doors. I will find quiet corridors. I will make a map of exits no one else knows. I will take a meeting with my conscience and tell it to wait until after.”
“You and your conscience,” she murmurs, leaning closer. “Make friends.”
“We are negotiating,” I say dryly.
She laughs, a small sound that slides into the leaves and stays there. “If I ask you to meet me here tomorrow night, will you?”
“Yes.”
“If I ask you to stop me at the altar, will you?”
I turn my hand in hers and place my thumb at the base of her fingers, feeling the pulse jump. “If you ask me to, I will burn the aisle,” I say quietly. “But I will not take from you the chance to choose your own courage.”
Her mouth curves into something fierce and grateful. “Good answer.”
Bootsteps scuff at the far end of the courtyard—the measured cadence of a guard doing his best not to ruin a moment he knows is above his pay grade. Star squeezes my hand once, twice, then lets go. The night sucks the heat away from skin like a jealous thing.
“Back in the cage,” she says softly.
“For now,” I answer.
“For now,” she repeats. “Walk me to the door, Commander.”
“Yes, my Lady,” I say, because some words are masks and some are knives and some are long, quiet promises you keep in public while you plan in private.
We walk side by side across the stones. Our hands don’t touch. Our shoulders almost do. The house inhales us like we’repart of its ritual and, for the moment, we let it. Under the chess tree, the dark holds the press of her fingers in mine a second longer than it should and I carry that heat with me into the corridors, a small, defiant ember in a place that loves water.
CHAPTER 11
RAYEK
The garden pretends it doesn’t know me. Neat gravel, hedges cut to attention, the fountain whispering secrets to leaves because water thinks it’s better than stone. I stand in the shade of a cypress whose roots have been negotiating with masonry since before I was posted here and watch the path unspool like a leash.
They come into view at the bend—two silhouettes built for a portrait. No hands held. No scandal. But the air between them is threaded like a line you could tune a harp with. Kaspian carries a small brass thing cupped like a bird. He says something I don’t catch. His laugh is clean and practiced, a blade that’s been honed to harmless. Star tips her head back and laughs too.
It goes through me where armor can’t reach. Not a cut. A slide. A memory of knives. My lungs forget to work and then overcorrect. I give the cypress my shoulder and try to look like part of the scenery.
He winds the toy and sets it on the fountain’s lip. The thing flaps badly, earnest as a child. She laughs again, brighter for the failure, citrus-bright like the oil that leaps from the peel when someone tears it with their nails. The sound reaches me across trimmed grass and hot stone and thirty paces of distance wepretended was duty. It lands under the scar that runs from my brow to my cheekbone and makes it ache like weather.
“Move,” I tell myself, and my boots obey. The path behind the hedge cuts away toward the lower terrace; I take it with the care of a man walking out of a church he didn’t belong in. The gravel grinds under my weight. My claws curl in, then out, then into fists. I unmake them because habit says a guard’s hands are only weapons when the house needs them.
By the time I reach the stair that drops toward the river, my jaw hurts from clenching things that don’t have teeth. I take the steps slowly because every fragment of this place has its own rhythm and I refuse to be the man who breaks it just because something in him is breaking.
Inside, the day performs its duties. I walk the posts I could patrol blind. Kitchen staff ferry trays that smell like broth and garlic and patience. The lemon wax on the banisters has been refreshed; the house likes to shine when it thinks it’s winning. I keep my eyes forward. If I don’t, I will glance toward the west corridor where the light throws chessboard shadows and remember a girl with jam on her fingers taking my bishop on purpose.
Kaspian passes me once, alone, hands in his pockets like a man who learned not to fidget. He nods. I return it. Polite. Civil. Nothing to write in a report. He keeps walking because he is not a fool.
The day eats itself. Evening throws long bars of shade across the floors. The house changes temperature the way a body does when it’s deciding to sleep. I stand a last watch at the east balcony and pretend my heart isn’t measuring footsteps that aren’t approaching. After, I turn down to the guard wing, thumb the plate on my door, and let the room’s old heat meet me.
The quarters smell like oil and folded cloth and the clean, unsentimental air of a place where men finish shifts and don’tsay so. My desk remembers my elbows. The holo slate waits where I left it: blank, patient, blue.
