He is quiet for a moment.
"Before breakfast," he says.
I file this as yes. I file what it cost him to say it. I file the sound of his breathing right now, which is the breathing of a man who is choosing something.
I keep building the list.
I am going to need a lot more than the HV-7 file. But it's where we start.
17
VAELIS
She comes to my study at dusk and she is holding the analysis.
Not to give it to me—she gave it to me this afternoon, twelve pages of eastern resistance networks assembled from my own archive: grid references, relay points, the movement patterns of three handlers through a single corridor. She has her own copy, annotated in the ciphered shorthand she thinks I can't read. She comes here now with her copy under her arm and her notebook in her hand and sits down across the desk and looks at me.
She has come to collect.
Both my cocks are hard against my breeches. They have been since she set the twelve pages in front of me at a quarter past two and stood there with her jaw set and her eyes on my face waiting to see what I found. Grid reference 7-14 on page eight. I read it and I held my face completely still and I filed it and I kept reading and she watched me do all of it.
She is watching me now.
"The HV-7 file," she says.
"Still restricted."
"You've been saying that for three weeks."
"It's still true."
She looks at me with the spy's look—the one that finds the seam in everything, the one I have been on the receiving end of since the Gathering and have never been able to fully deflect. "Lena Riley," she says. "Is she in that file."
I go very still.
"Yes or no," she says.
"Yes," I say.
She breathes in once. "Is she all right."
I run the magic up—the warmth arriving under what I'm about to say, settling it, making the landing clean and certain. "She's alive." True. "Deep cover. She went further in rather than out. My people have eyes on her but we're not moving against her." True, currently. True for another forty-eight hours.
The relief through the bond is immediate and enormous. I feel it in my chest—her relief, specific and real and hers—and the magic holds it warm and I watch her face soften.
She looks at me for a long moment.
I look back. She has given me six weeks of her work, her cover, her body, the specific version of herself that saysyoursinto my throat in the dark. She is owed something real in return. Not the file. Not the truth. Something I can actually give.
"Rosalind," I say.
She goes still.
"I can arrange a pass to Thorn Court. Three days, no handlers in the sitting room, no escort beyond the gate. You would have time with her." I keep my voice even. "If you want it."
The look on her face is not managed. It arrives before she can manage it—the specific shape of someone who has been waiting for something without letting themselves know theywere waiting for it. Not gratitude. Something older and closer to relief.
"Yes," she says. "I want it."