Chapter Four
DRAZEX
Ididn't sleep. The admission settles into my bones, and I bury it beneath the morning's first tasks before it can take root.
I've survived assassination attempts, family betrayals, and two decades of my father's lessons on the fatal nature of attachment. The impulse that pulled me to her door in the darkest hours, standing in the corridor outside her quarters with no purpose and no explanation, won’t undo me.
She heard me. I'm certain of it. A soldier learns to track every sound in her environment, and she's a soldier down to the marrow of her bones.
She lay in that bed and listened to me breathe on the other side of the door, and she didn't call out, didn't demand explanation, didn't do any of the things a normal person might do when a predator stations himself outside her room in the dead of night.
She waited. And eventually, I left.
The memory scrapes against my thoughts as I pull up the morning's security feeds, cycling through compound activity.
Patrol rotations are nominal, and someone has logged and verified supply deliveries.
Korrel on third shift perimeter, steady as always.
Two decades of service and the male has never missed a rotation.
A flag on the holding cell report draws my attention. The Thesskan merchant who defaulted on the shipping contract has been talking. He isn't confessing or begging, but offering information about House Korvan's movements in the lower sectors in exchange for consideration.
My father's rules are clear. Debtors who can't pay are processed and made examples of. Fear is currency on Vahiri Prime, and mercy is counterfeit that devalues the entire economy. The Thesskan should be sent to the labor pools by week's end.
The merchant has connections. Trade routes that thread through territories we've been trying to map for months. Knowledge that could benefit House Draven far longer than whatever lesson his breaking would teach.
I flag the file for standard processing.
This isn't the first time my instincts pull against my father's methods.
The enforcer last month comes to mind. Vorath wanted him disciplined for a minor lapse in judgment.
I argued for reassignment and lost, then watched the male's spirit crack under punishment that taught nothing except fear.
The supplier two seasons back could have been cultivated into an asset, but Vorath turned him into a corpse in a canyon no one visits now.
Small divergences and buried disagreements have accumulated into a pattern I haven't examined because examining it would require acknowledging what it means.
I close the file. My father built House Draven into what it is. The methods work.
The thought settles wrong in my chest.
I ignore it.
The holding cells are quiet, their occupants learning the patience that captivity teaches or breaking against its walls.
The feed from the visitation room loads before conscious decision carries me there.
She's already inside.
The timestamp reads 0600, dawn by the compound's artificial cycle, and Maeve Vance sits across a metal table from her brother. Her hands rest folded in her lap, her spine straight against the chair's unforgiving back. Tomás looks worse than his file photos suggested. Eighteen months of gambling debts and bad decisions have sharpened the bones of his face until he resembles a male being consumed from within. His fingers twitch against the table’s surface, and his body betrays the tremors of whatever substances he’s been denied since we took him.
The audio feed carries their words into my office.
“I'm sorry.” His words crack on the second syllable, splitting open to reveal the wound beneath. “Mae, I'm so sorry, I didn't mean for any of this to happen, I thought I could fix it, I thought if I could win enough to cover the first debt then everything would be fine...”
“Stop.” Her tone holds no anger and no accusation. The single word lands heavy, weighted by exhaustion so deep it has become its own kind of calm. “I didn't come here to listen to apologies, Tomás. I came to tell you what happens next.”
“What happens next is they kill me.” He laughs, and the sound holds no humor, only the jagged edge of hysteria pressing against whatever composure he has left.
“Or sell me to the mines, which is the same thing with extra steps.
Mae, you shouldn't have come. You should let me rot. I'm not worth this.”
“You're my brother.” The words cut through his spiral, precise as a blade. “You're an idiot who makes terrible decisions, but you're my brother, and I will not let you die in a mining pit because you couldn't walk away from a card table.”
He stares at her. The trembling worsens, spreading up his arms until his entire body vibrates, emotions he cannot contain breaking through every barrier.
“What did you do?” His whisper barely carries. “Mae, what did you do?”
“I made a deal.” She does not look away from him. Does not soften the truth with comfortable lies. “I work for House Draven until your debt is cleared. My skills, my training. That's the arrangement.”
“You sold yourself.” Horror bleaches what little color remains in his face. “For me. You sold yourself to them for me.”
“I made a practical trade.” The correction carries no heat. “A combat medic is worth more than a gambling addict. The math was simple.”
“The math.” He shoves back from the table, the chair scraping against stone. “You're talking about math while you're, what, property now? A slave? Because of me?”
“Because of your choices.” She rises to meet him, and though she is smaller, though he has the advantage of height and the frantic energy of panic, she holds the space between them without yielding an inch.
“Your choices put you here. My choice gets you out.
That's how this works. That's how it's always worked.”
“It shouldn't.” Tears track down his face now, the breakdown he's been holding back since she entered finally cresting its banks. “It shouldn't always be you cleaning up my messes. It shouldn't be you sacrificing everything while I make the same stupid mistakes over and over.”
“You're right.” The agreement stops him mid-breath.
“It shouldn't. But it is. So here's what you're going to do, Tomás.
You're going to survive. You're going to stay alive and stay out of trouble and let me work off this debt.
And when it's done, when we're both free of this place, you're going to make different choices.
Better ones. Ones that don't end with your sister trading herself to alien crime lords.”
The silence stretches between them, heavy with everything neither of them can say.
Then Tomás crosses the distance and pulls her into an embrace that collapses the remaining structure of his composure.
His shoulders shake. His face presses into her hair.
The sobs that tear through him belong to a child who has finally, catastrophically, understood the cost of his actions.
She holds him. Her expression, visible over his shoulder to the camera's unblinking eye, carries no tears and no softening.
Only the tired endurance of someone who has held others through their grief so many times that the motion has become automatic, a reflex written into muscle memory by repetition.
She should be furious. She should rage at him for the choices that dragged her across three star systems to bargain for his worthless existence with the only currency she possessed.
Instead, she stands in a holding room surrounded by enemies and holds her brother together while he falls apart, and the quiet patience of it catches somewhere beneath my sternum where it has no business lodging.
I close the feed.
The morning continues with reports to review, communications to answer, the endless machinery of House Draven's operations requiring attention and direction. I bury myself in the familiar weight of responsibility, letting the work fill the spaces where unwanted thoughts might otherwise take root.
She's an asset. A skilled one, perhaps more skilled than I estimated, but an asset nonetheless.
Whatever peculiar gravity drew me to her door last night, whatever compulsion made me stand in the corridor breathing the same recycled air while she lay awake on the other side, I will not indulge it further.
Discipline is the foundation upon which everything else is built.
Without it, I am nothing but the monster my father raised me to be.
The emergency communication shatters my resolve before midmorning arrives.
“Lord Draven.” Vessl, one of my senior enforcers, and the strain in his words tells me everything I need to hear before he continues.
“We have a situation. Krel took a plasma hit during the Sector Twelve collection.
Internal damage, severe. Transport is bringing him in now, but the backup medic says it's beyond his capability.”
“Status of our medical staff.”
“Primary medic is across the city handling the Thornton situation. Backup is here, but this is beyond routine treatment.”
I'm already moving, the door to my office sliding open as my mind cycles through options and finds them wanting.
Veth is competent within his limitations, but plasma burns with internal involvement require expertise he doesn't possess.
The primary medic is forty minutes away at minimum. Krel does not have forty minutes.
This is the third serious injury in as many weeks. Three enforcers down during routine operations. Three incidents that should not have happened, but that question is for later. Now, only the immediate problem remains, and the solution that presents itself.