Chapter 7
seven
. . .
The festival was waking up around them.
Vendor stalls groaned open along the market lane, their shutters cracking through thin crusts of overnight ice. Strings of lights flickered on one section at a time, blue-white and amber.
Thorne walked one step behind Phoebe and did not look at the back of her neck.
He looked at the rooflines. He looked at the vendor hauling a crate of crystallized fruit. He looked at the string of lights over the spice merchant's awning. His peripheral vision tracked the slip of her scarf anyway.
She was quiet this morning. She had been quiet since her door.
He had not slept. Then he had filed a requisition for additional surveillance nodes, reread the rigging report twice, written three lines in his notebook, and deleted them.
The bakery windows were already fogged with Kaelor's warmth when they arrived. Through the condensation, shapes moved. Ember's quick efficiency behind the counter, the bulk of Kaelor pulling trays from the oven, the smaller figures in the booths.
He held the door for Phoebe and followed her inside just long enough to confirm the space. Kaelor caught his eye over the women's heads while Ember pulled Phoebe into a hug. The Cinnamite's amber eyes were warm and steady.
In the corner booth, Ivy was curled over coffee and what looked like a candle-making sketchbook, her dark, wavy hair half-braided with small crystals that caught the bakery's warm light.
Rynlor was at the counter picking up a tea order, one hand braced on the wood, his golden glow dimmer than it should have been at this hour.
He said something casual to Ivy over his shoulder.
The kind of nothing-remark designed to bridge a distance without closing it.
She answered with a brightness that sat a half-step above genuine, her hazel-green eyes lifting from the sketchbook and landing on his face with an attention she immediately redirected to her coffee.
Thorne's truth-sense flagged both of them. Rynlor's distance was performed. Ivy's lightness was constructed. He didn’t comment. Not his business. Not his jurisdiction.
Phoebe squeezed Ivy's shoulder as she passed the booth, and Ivy's smile at the contact was genuine.
Phoebe reached the counter and ordered from Ember. "Em, tell me you have the brown sugar ones from last year. Tell me they still exist."
"I made a double batch because I had a feeling." Ember was already reaching for a paper bag. "Kaelor said you'd want them with the cardamom butter."
"Kaelor is a mind reader, and I love him."
Kaelor's laugh rumbled from the back. "I am not a mind reader. You ordered them eleven times last season."
The bakery held her. Warm, easy, real. The usual polish she wore like stage makeup was gone, and here she was just Phoebe. Three seconds of it. That was all he allowed himself.
He turned and walked back into the cold.
The rehearsal space smelled of old wood and peppermint late that afternoon.
The peppermint was his. The old wood was the amphitheater's backstage infrastructure.
He stood in a rehearsal room located behind the main stage.
It was windowed along one wall with a view of the market lane, furnished with a battered piano, folding chairs, and a music stand that had seen better days.
The late afternoon light came through the windows in long, pale bars and laid itself across the floor.
Thorne walked Phoebe through some of the upgraded measures recently put into place.
"The dressing-room threshold has a secondary scan layer now. It pings my comm directly on any entry. Lock codes rotate every twelve hours. I will provide the updated code before each performance."
She stood three feet from him with her coffee from Ember's bakery warming both hands. He looked at her. She looked back. Her eyes were steady, dark, and focused on him.
"Okay." She held his gaze for another second.
Through the rehearsal space windows behind her, the market was filled with people, and the sound of a carol drifted from someone's stall, probably a Cinnamite vendor, by the warmth in the melody.
The sound was distant. The world outside was bright and busy.
None of it registered. She was standing three feet from him, and her eyes had dropped to his mouth.
She looked away first. Took another sip of coffee.
"Thank you," she said. "For being thorough."
He did not trust himself to answer. He nodded once, turned to finish his sweep of the room, and listened to her set the coffee down behind him and start warming up.
The song came out of nowhere.
She was humming while he checked the window latches along the far wall.
It was something low and bluesy, a melody that curled in on itself and resolved in unexpected places.
Her voice was half-volume and unguarded.
The sound someone might make alone in their own kitchen rather than performing for an audience.
"What is that?"
He heard himself ask it before he could stop himself.
She looked up from the piano bench where she'd settled, one hand resting on the keys without pressing them. "An old Earth carol, but the arrangement's mine. 'Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.' You know it?"
"No."
"Right. Obviously not, or you wouldn’t have asked." A half-smile. "Come here. I'll show you."
He should not have gone over there. He had things to do. Things to check. He went anyway.
She made room on the bench. He shouldn’t have sat down.
Standing behind her shoulder was already closer than he should have been.
But then she patted the bench next to her, and he sat down next to her, close enough that when she leaned forward to point at the opening phrase on the sheet music, her shoulder brushed his arm through his uniform and the contact hit him like a small electrical event.
"It starts here." She sang the first four bars. Her voice was patient and warm, and his truth-sense opened on the sound and found the same pure heat he'd felt during her empty-house soundcheck. "The trick is this interval. It drops where you'd expect it to rise. Try it."
He tried it. His voice came out low and formal and slightly too precise, his Mentharian accent clipping the words into something rigid.
She pressed her lips together. Her eyes were bright.
"You sing the way you talk."
"I am aware."
"It’s like you're filing a report in song."
A laugh broke out of her, startled and delighted, her head tipping back. The sound landed low in his chest and stayed there. He stared at her. She covered her mouth with one hand, still laughing, and the hand was shaking slightly, and her eyes above it were crinkled at the corners.
"I'm sorry," she said, not sorry at all. "I'm sorry, that was— You have a gorgeous voice, Thorne. You just need to let it breathe. Here, listen."
She sang the phrase again, slower, and leaned in to correct his pitch.
Her breath landed warm on his jaw. She smelled like Ember's coffee and the amber-vanilla of her perfume and something underneath both that was only her.
His eyes did not drop to the way her mouth moved.
His eyes stayed on the sheet music. This cost him more than any security protocol he had ever enforced.
"Now you."
He sang it again. Looser this time, the tightness in his voice unlocking a fraction.
"Better." She pressed a key on the piano, matching the note. "Again."
He sang it a third time, and she joined him, her voice wrapping around his in a way that made the small hairs on his forearms stand up under his sleeves. Two voices in a cold rehearsal space, finding each other.
"Okay," she said, "my turn to learn something. Teach me a song you know."
He did not know why he had offered it. The Mentharian harmony was formal, old, a traditional song with a countermelody sung at ceremonies he'd stood at the edge of his entire adult life. He sang the first eight bars, and her hands went still on the sheet music.
Her lips parted. Her fingers froze mid-turn on the page.
The look on her face was unguarded wonder.
"That's beautiful." Her voice was barely above a whisper. "Sing it again."
He started once more, and she came in on the melody a few beats later, their voices braided together. His precision and her warm phrasing met in the middle.
She stared at him when it ended. He stared back.
"You could teach these songs to others," he said. "The festival has never had anything like your voice bridging traditions."
She went quiet.
"A choir. Ivy would join in a heartbeat," she said. "Ruby too, probably. I could build something for a dozen voices from a dozen worlds." Her eyes were focused somewhere past the window, seeing it. "A Frostfall choir."
She was still close enough for him to count the small gold earrings climbing her ear.
Close enough that when she lifted her chin to test a phrase, her throat was inches from his mouth, and the line of her jaw caught the light in a way that made his pulse do something no Mentharian training manual had equipped him for.
She picked up her coffee from the edge of the piano, and the sheet music shifted. She reached for it at the same moment he did, and their fingers met over the same line of text. Her warm thumb rested against his cold fingers.
Neither of them pulled away.
Her warmth hit him like a struck chord. His body had no defense. Her thumb rested on his skin, and his truth-sense opened on the contact and read only her.
Frost crept along the edge of the sheet music. Delicate crystals formed on the paper beneath their joined hands, spiraling outward from the point of contact in lace-fine patterns.
He did not breathe. He did not move his hand.
Then his peripheral vision caught movement.
Someone was standing on the maintenance gantry that ran above the rehearsal space ceiling. That space had been closed to non-crew since the break-in of her dressing room. But there was a figure there, standing at the rail and looking down at them through the dark.
Thorne's hand left hers, and the frost on the sheet music cracked.
"Stay here."
He was on the gantry stairs in seconds. The metal rang under his boots. The figure did not run, but turned toward him with an open, cooperative expression and both hands visible. By the time Thorne reached the landing, he had already identified the face.
The journalist. The same man who had approached Phoebe on the path several evenings ago. His press credentials were visible on his coat, and an apologetic half-smile was on his face.
"Officer." The man took a step back from the rail. "I didn't realize this area was restricted. I'm working on a behind-the-scenes piece on the headliner experience. The production angle."
Every word passed Thorne's truth-sense as technically accurate. Still, none of it settled right.
The sentences were shaped too well. Each one was precisely true, while revealing nothing. The man wasn't lying; he was constructing.
"The area is restricted," he said. "Your backstage credentials do not extend to maintenance gantries. I will be revoking your backstage access pending review."
"Of course. I completely understand." The journalist raised both palms, still pleasant, still cooperative. "I apologize for the confusion. It won't happen again."
Every word rang true. And the man's eyes, as he passed Thorne on the narrow stairs, moved toward the rehearsal space below where Phoebe was visible at the piano with the sheet music in her hands.
Thorne escorted the man to the exterior door, and the journalist thanked him warmly, leaving without protest. Thorne filed a formal report on his comm while walking back. He restricted the journalist’s credentials before he even reached the rehearsal space.
Phoebe was standing when he returned. Her coat was over her arm, her bag on her shoulder. The sheet music sat alone on the piano.
"What happened?"
"A journalist was in a restricted area." He kept his voice level. "The one who approached you for an interview. I have revoked his backstage access."
She nodded, and her face shifted. Not fear, exactly, but calculation. Caution.
"That's the one I agreed to sit down with," she said. "He seemed professional enough."
"Has the interview already been scheduled?" The question came out colder than he intended.
"Not yet, but I—"
"I will be present."
Her eyebrows rose. "It's an interview, Thorne. Not a security threat."
"Your security detail is non-negotiable for the duration of the safety review. That includes scheduled meetings with credentialed personnel."
She studied him. He kept his face neutral and did not say what he wanted to say, which was Do not be in a room with that man without me.
"Fine," she said. "You can stand in the corner and look intimidating. You're good at that."
She picked up her coffee and walked past him toward the door. She paused at the threshold.
"Thorne?"
"Miss Calloway."
"The harmony. The Mentharian one. Will you teach me the rest of it?"
His hands were fists at his sides. The frost was forming on the inside of his gloves where she could not see it.
"Yes. Of course."
He walked her to her dressing room like normal.
He did his usual thorough sweep of the room and listened to the lock engage as she closed the door behind him.
He walked back to the rehearsal space. The room had settled into silence, and the sheet music she'd left on the piano stand was still laced with a hint of frost.
He stood there and looked at it.
He did not touch it. He did not move it. He left it exactly where it was, frost and all, and locked the room behind him.