I am still here.
I am also, at two in the morning, thinking about his mouth on me and pressing my thighs together and hating myself for it, and the hatred doesn't stop the wanting, and probably nothing ever will, and this is information.
I close my eyes. I breathe. I let the bond pull and the marks settle warm at my throat.
In the morning I get up and go back to the workroom and I do not look at his door as I pass it.
I take note that I want to.
13
CLAIRE
I'm at the east corridor window when he comes out of his study.
My old observation point—best sightline to the dead drop location, the place where I spent the first week cataloguing foot traffic and memorising the guard rotation and feeling very professionally competent. I come here sometimes now for the same reason people return to the site of an accident: it remembers who I was before I knew better. The spy who walked in through a door someone held open for her and thought she was the one doing the holding.
He stops when he sees me. I turn around.
"I want the secondary communication logs," I say. "You said today. That was three days ago."
He looks at me. The pause he always gives me—the one I used to read as calculation and now read as something else, which is its own kind of problem. "The access review takes time."
"You gave me the primary archive in twelve hours." I hold his gaze. "The secondary logs are a different tier. I understand that.But you run your own intelligence entirely—if you wanted those files pulled, they'd have been pulled. You're stalling."
"There are operations currently active in the eastern territories." A beat. "Exposure risk."
"Then redact the active operational details and give me the network map. I can work around redactions. I can't work around nothing."
He looks at me for a long moment. The cold of him reaches me from six feet away—the court magic, the bond, the specific temperature of him that my body has had strong opinions about for six weeks—and I note it and stand still.
"The secondary logs," he says. "Tomorrow morning. Redacted as I see fit."
He gives it to me like it costs him nothing. The thing I've been asking for three days, in thirty seconds of corridor conversation. I know a concession when I'm looking at it, and what I didn't expect was how small it would feel—how clearly I can see the shape of it now, stripped of the professional satisfaction I thought I'd feel. He gave it because I asked. He was always going to give it because I asked. I came here to extract intelligence from an enemy lord, and what I have instead is a claiming bond and an approved research request and the warmth arriving in my chest right now that I know, clinically and precisely, is the dependency response to his concession.
I hate this. I am aware of everything it is and it works anyway.
"Thank you," I say.
He nods. Moves toward his study.
"Vaelis."
He stops.
I have been rehearsing this for three days, which is also information—an intelligence operative who needs three days to compose four sentences. "I'm going to your rooms tonight. Notbecause of the logs. I want to be clear about that." I hold his gaze. "My body has been making this argument since the heat broke and I've been refusing it, and tonight I'm done refusing. That's the whole reason. I need at least one thing in this court to be completely honest."
Something moves in his face. There and gone.
"All right," he says.
I walk past him down the corridor without looking back and I hear him follow at a distance that tells me he's letting me lead. He's always letting me lead. He has been letting me lead since the Gathering and I kept arriving at the same place anyway, and I cannot decide if this reflects better or worse on me professionally than being dragged.
His rooms.I sit on the edge of the bed—not in it, not performing anything—and he comes in five minutes after me and crosses the room and stops. The cold of him settles everywhere. The bond warms the way he said it would.
I look up at him.
"I know what you've been doing," I say. "The patience. The not-touching first. Holding still and letting the wanting build until I'm the one who reaches." He says nothing and I keep going. "I've been watching you run this since the Gathering. I know the shape of it. I came down the corridor anyway. I am telling you this because I have been a field operative for three years and I know exactly what a controlled approach looks like, and knowing doesn't stop it from working, and I cannot make that stop being true."