I open to page one.
The work is the work. I was trained for this. I am good at this. I read the first line and something settles in my chest.
I do not have a word for what settles. I'm going to call it: myself. Myself settles.
I work for three hours. He doesn't come in. Around midmorning a steward brings food and I eat without looking up.I make notes. I find gaps in the documentation—the secondary communication records aren't in the archive he gave me access to, which means another conversation, which means asking for something—and I make a note and keep reading.
The door opens around noon.
He stands in the doorway without coming in. The cold of him reaches me across the room, and the bond warms at proximity the way he said it would, and my body has an opinion about his proximity that I am firmly not acting on. I look up from the file.
"You need the secondary communication logs," he says.
"I was going to ask."
"I'll pull them." A pause. "I'm glad you're working."
He says it the way he says everything—flat and certain. And the warmth that arrives in my chest at those words is immediate and involuntary and exactly what the intelligence briefing on omega bond dynamics warned me it would be. The approval response.Your handler says well done and it goes in your bones.Except he is not my handler and this is not approval and I know exactly what it is and it still works.
"That warmth," I say. "The one I'm feeling right now. That's the bond, isn’t it? The one that makes me dependent on you.”
"Yes."
"Can you turn it off?”
"No."
"Can I?”
"No." He meets my eyes. "It runs in both directions. It's not a lever I hold."
I look at him for a long moment. I believe him. I don't know yet if I should.
"The secondary logs," I say. "Today."
"Today."
He goes.
That nightI don't go to his rooms.
I sleep in my own room for the first time in I don't know how many days. The bond pulls—low and constant, from his direction, not painful, just present—and I lie on my back in the dark and breathe and think.
Amplifies what's already present.Find what's in a thing and make it larger. The sphere shimmered twice before I did anything, and I kept my face neutral and filed it, and I have been thinking about what that means ever since. If his magic works on feelings the way it works on everything else—and I have no reason to believe it doesn't—then everything I felt for six weeks was mine. Made larger, made unavoidable, the edges sharpened. But mine.
This is the question I've been not-asking since I put everything in the drawer.
Because if the wanting was mine, thenyourswas mine. Andpleasewas mine. And the begging was mine. And the crying was mine. And the memory of his mouth between my thighs that I have visited six times today without intending to—that hunger is mine. It was mine before he amplified it and it is still mine now that the heat is gone, which means the heat wasn't the point, the heat was just the moment I ran out of ways to pretend my body isn’t meant for his.
I have been a spy in his court for thirty-eight days.
I have been his since before I crossed the boundary.
I don't know what to do with that yet. The drawer is closed. I'm going to go back to the files tomorrow and do the work I came here to do and I'm going to let myself have the answer inpieces rather than all at once, because all at once would finish me.
I know what I am.
I am still a spy.