Chapter 3 #2
"The stallion also did not have testimony that could bring down a Kleotrian prince.
" Davn held his gaze. "I don't care what the neighbors think, Rhaezon.
Neither do you. What you care about is the woman, and whether you can keep her alive for six weeks in a house that has not had a woman in it for ten years.
The answer is yes. You know the answer is yes. "
Rhaezon's hands were still at his sides.
"It will require a cover story," he said.
"It will require the truth, arranged in a particular order. Bonded pair. Political alliance. It doesn't have to be personal or romantic. You have navigated worse fictions."
"I have not navigated fictions that required a human woman to share my name."
Davn looked at him for a long moment. Whatever he saw in Rhaezon's face, he did not comment on it. This was the architecture of their friendship — the things they did not say bore as much weight as the things they did, and both of them trusted the structure.
"Go talk to her," Davn said.
Rhaezon pictured the human in his mind. Talk to her. Explain why being bonded is… necessary.
She had looked at him in the hold. Not through him, not past the scar tissue, not at the safe middle distance most people found when they couldn't avoid looking at him. She had looked at him. Her eyes had moved across his face, and she had smiled.
Irrelevant. Completely irrelevant. She is a witness. She is a logistical problem requiring a structural solution. Her smile has no bearing on anything.
He thought about the strand of dark hair that had fallen across her face when she leaned forward in the conference room, and the way she had tucked it back; how it had fallen again within thirty seconds as though it had a standing appointment with that exact spot on her freckle-kissed cheek.
That is not part of the operational assessment.
"Rhaezon?"
He blinked. Davn was watching him. Rhaezon could tell he'd noticed something and was deciding whether to mention it. The calculation took less than a second. Davn didn't mention it.
"I'll tell Sethan to get a transport prepared," Davn said. He picked up the blade, slid it into the sheath at his back in one motion. "You should tell the human."
"She has a name."
The words left his mouth before he authorized them. They hung in the air between the two of them — too specific, too deliberate, carrying a weight he hadn't intended. Davn's pale eyes rested on his face for a beat and he raised an eyebrow.
"November Lachlan." Davn walked past him toward the cargo bay door. "You should tell November Lachlan."
He was gone before Rhaezon could respond. The door sealed. The cargo bay settled into its mechanical hum. Rhaezon stood against the bulkhead with his arms crossed and his scales showing and his left wing twitching.
Six weeks. Contract. Testimony. Annulment. She goes home.
He moved through the transport corridors toward the quarters where the rescued were being temporarily housed. She had been assigned a small cabin on the port side — private, minimal, functional rather than comfortable.
The image surfaced unbidden: her face in the hold.
Not the fear that lived on every other face in those cells, the shrinking back, the shielding of eyes from a figure too large and too scarred to be safe.
Her. Looking at him. Taking inventory. Assessing him.
Smiling at him. A small thing that had somehow left him off balance since the moment it happened.
Irrelevant. Her composure under duress was relevant only insofar as it indicated she could withstand the pressure of testimony. The warmth of her gaze was a neurological artifact of human expressiveness and bore no tactical significance.
He told himself this.
He told himself this again as he rounded the corridor.
He told himself this a third time as he stopped in front of her door, and by the third telling the repetition itself had become an indictment.
He had the terms prepared in his head. A formal arrangement: she would reside at the Vaethari Hold under the public fiction of a political bonding which would not necessitate a mating mark.
Private quarters, complete autonomy within the grounds, access to staff and resources.
He would maintain distance appropriate to the arrangement's political nature.
She would be under his protection — his name, his security, his sovereignty — for exactly six weeks.
At the conclusion of the tribunal, arrangements would be made for the bonding's dissolution and her return to Earth or wherever she wanted to go. Clean. Finite. Structured.
He had rehearsed the phrasing. He had accounted for objections.
He had prepared responses to questions about safety, privacy, and the specific cultural weight of what he was asking her to pretend.
He had even, in the private chamber of his own mind that he did not examine too closely, prepared himself for the possibility that she would say no, and had already begun constructing the logistics of an alternative that did not exist.
He knocked.
A beat of silence, and then footsteps on the cabin's metal floor.
The door opened.
She stood in the frame. She had washed her face — the grime from the hold was gone. Her skin was warm brown under the corridor's flat lighting, and there was that strand of dark hair that had escaped whatever arrangement she'd attempted and fell across her forehead.
She was composed and she looked at him the same way she had looked at him in the hold.
Clear. Unafraid. Waiting. Not for rescue, not for answers, but for whatever came next, as if she had learned that the next thing came whether you were ready for it or not and you might as well face it standing up.
His rehearsed words were ordered. His terms were precise. The logic was airtight and the delivery was prepared and his mouth opened to begin—
"So, you're here to propose, huh?"
His mouth opened, but he'd forgotten how words worked.
"Well, you don’t have to look so grim about it. I’ll say yes.”