Chapter 8 #2
My name in her mouth does unexpected damage, the intimacy of it folding into my chest. She stopped calling me “Lord Draven” when we're alone, and I didn't ask her to stop because I didn't want her to.
“I'll bring the food.” The words emerge rough, stripped of the measured neutrality I use for subordinates.
I leave before she can say any more. Before the tip of my cock pokes through the waistband of my pants.
The directive arrives through official channels before the kitchen has delivered Maeve's meal. My father's seal. Formal language. Command beneath every phrase.
The investigation into the enforcer deaths will be handled internally. The human medic's involvement is to cease immediately. All findings are to be reported directly to Lord Vorath before any action is taken.
He frames it as protection. The investigation is sensitive. Involving an outsider creates vulnerabilities. House Draven handles its own problems internally. This is how it has always been done.
Maeve has already identified the poison his internal methods missed for months. Removing her now would cost weeks. Would cost lives.
I send acknowledgment of the directive. Confirm compliance. That findings will be reported through appropriate channels.
The deception slides into place without resistance. I expected this moment to feel like betrayal. His blood, his house, his trust, however conditional it’s always been. Instead it feels like exhaling after holding my breath for years.
The cage door has been unlocked longer than I realized. I simply hadn't tried to push it open.
I don't examine what this ease implies. Don't calculate how many small surrenders preceded this moment, how many buried disagreements built the distance that makes deception feel like relief rather than rebellion.
There will be time for examination later.
Now, there is work to do.
Teshra intercepts me in the corridor outside the medical bay, her expression carefully neutral. “I thought you should be aware of your contract-holder’s brother.”
Tomás. The chaos of the investigation has pushed him from my thoughts entirely. The male whose debts brought Maeve into my compound, whose weakness set all of this in motion.
“How is he?”
“The withdrawal has run its course. He's eating again, sleeping through the night. Cooperative with the rehabilitation work.” She pauses, and something softens at the edges of her mouth. “He asks about her. Every morning. Wants to see her, or at least receive word that she's well.”
The brother who gambled away his freedom and hers, reduced to begging for scraps of information about the sister who saved him. There's a bitter symmetry in it.
“Tell him she's occupied with duties that serve House Draven. Nothing beyond that.” I consider the female waiting in the medical bay, the one who traded her life for a brother who didn't deserve the sacrifice. She’d want to know about her brother and it’s cruel not to keep her updated.
“I'll speak to Maeve myself. She should hear how he's progressing, and that he's been asking for her.”
Teshra inclines her head and retreats down the corridor. I file the conversation away, one more thread in a tapestry growing more tangled by the hour.
The knock on my office door arrives two hours later, and I know who stands on the other side before the panel slides open to reveal her.
She carries the scent of the medical bay's antiseptic wash and a sharper edge underneath, the focused energy of someone who has found a thread and needs to follow it before the trail goes cold.
“I need access to the pharmaceutical storage.” She doesn't wait for an invitation, stepping into my office with the same certainty she brings to everything, as though the space belongs to her as much as it belongs to me.
“The compound that killed Torvin wasn't synthesized from standard ingredients, and I need to cross-reference the restricted supply logs against the access records from the past eighteen months.”
“The pharmaceutical storage is in the restricted section.”
“I'm aware.” She stops three feet from my desk, and her unique scent carries to me. “That's why I'm asking instead of simply going.”
I should summon Veth to escort her, should assign any of the dozen guards available to provide the access she requires.
The investigation doesn't need me walking those corridors beside her, breathing the air she breathes, existing in a proximity that burns against my awareness like a brand pressed to bare skin.
I won't allow Veth, or any other male for that matter, anywhere near her.
“I'll take you.”
We descend through the compound's lower levels, her footsteps matching my stride despite her petite frame. She asks questions about security and access logs, her mind working through the investigation as my mind works through different calculations.
Vezra rounds the corner at the junction to the supply corridor, datapad clutched against her chest. The pale scar that curves from her jaw down her throat catches the corridor light, a souvenir from a smuggling interdiction gone wrong years before I took over enforcement.
Her gaze tracks from me to Maeve and back again, assessing. “My lord. I wasn't informed you'd be accessing the restricted levels today.”
“I don't require your coordination, Vezra.”
Her attention lingers on Maeve for a beat too long before she inclines her head and continues past us. “Of course.”
I watch her retreating back, wondering why she was down here.
“She doesn't like me.” Maeve's observation pulls my attention back to where it wants to be anyway. Her face, her scent, the warmth radiating from her body beside mine. “Most of your staff ignore me. She was assessing me.”
“Vezra assesses everything. She's good at her job. She's worked for me for fifteen years. I trust her.”
I catch Maeve’s frown as I open the pharmaceutical storage with my palm signatures, and the door seals behind us with a weight that makes the narrow space contract around us both.
Climate-controlled cases line the walls, their contents catalogued and monitored, and the terminal she needs sits at the far end like a destination that requires crossing a particular kind of distance to reach.
She moves past me toward it, and her shoulder brushes my arm in a contact that lasts less than a second.
Fabric against fabric, the barest graze of proximity, and the sensation cascades through my nervous system like a current that refuses to ground.
Heat floods through muscle and bone, and the scent of her arousal spikes in a signature so unmistakable that my fangs ache against my gums with the effort of keeping them sheathed.
Her heartbeat accelerates in a rhythm I can hear across the distance she's putting between us, her chemistry shifting toward the same want I'm fighting to suppress.
She doesn't turn, doesn't acknowledge what just passed between us, but her pace increases as she moves toward the terminal in a retreat that tells me everything her silence tries to hide.
“The access logs go back eighteen months, which should cover all three incidents.” Her voice holds steady through what must be sheer force of will, and she sits at the terminal with her back to me in a posture that offers either vulnerability or dismissal.
“Take whatever you need.”
She pulls up a file, frowns at the screen, and mutters under her breath. “Who designed this system? A sadist with a grudge against logic?”
The complaint is so ordinary, so human amid the tension strangling the air between us, that a sound escapes my chest. Not quite a laugh. Close enough.
She freezes. Turns. “Did you just laugh?”
“No.”
“That was a laugh.” The corner of her mouth curves, and the sight of it does damage I wasn't expecting. “I didn't think you could.”
“You're mistaken.”
“The most feared enforcer on Vahiri Prime.” She turns back to the terminal, but I catch the smile before she hides it. “Brought low by filing systems.”
I don't respond. Can't. The warmth spreading through my chest has no place in this room, in this moment, in the space between a monster and his property.
She returns to the access logs, her focus sharpening into professionalism. The moment passes. The tension doesn't.
“You don't have to stay.” Her fingers move across the interface, but the tension in her shoulders says she's tracking my position in her peripheral vision.
“You need authorization for some of these files.”
“So authorize them remotely.”
“I prefer to observe the process.”
She turns in the chair, and her dark eyes find mine across the narrow space with a directness that refuses to let me hide. “You prefer to observe me. The process is incidental.”
She's right, has been right about everything, has seen through every excuse I've constructed. She's a soldier who has learned to track every detail in her environment. I should remember that.
“I prefer to observe you.” The admission pulls from me.
Her expression shifts into something that isn't surprise because she already knew, has probably known since the first night I stood outside her door listening to her breathe. “Why?”
Because she disrupts my order. Asks questions I can't answer. Makes me feel things I have no right to feel. Because she looks at me like I'm not the monster everyone else sees.
“Be careful what you ask, female. I own you. You should fear me. I've killed more people than you have saved, have done things that would horrify you if I named them. I am the weapon my father built, and weapons don't stop being dangerous.”
She rises from the chair, and the distance between us shrinks from three feet to two to one, close enough now that her warmth radiates against my skin in a pressure I feel through every nerve. “I'm looking at you, and I see more than that.”
“What do you see?”
The question makes me vulnerable. It makes me weak, and yet I still want to hear what she has to say.