Chapter 30
THIRTY
The prison smelled of recycled air and regret.
Davn walked the corridor alone. His boots made no sound on the composite flooring — a habit so old it had stopped being deliberate and had become simply the way he moved through the world.
The overhead lighting panels cast everything in the same flat, institutional white that every detention facility in every system seemed to agree was the appropriate color for holding people who had run out of options.
He had been in enough of them to know. On both sides of the bars.
He had not told Rhaezon where he was going.
He had not told November. He had left the Vaethari Hold before dawn while they slept in the groundskeeper's cottage with their limbs tangled together and the mate bond so fresh he could practically smell it from the barn.
He had packed nothing. He had taken the first transport off Aelthar without booking passage in advance, which was sloppy, and he knew it was sloppy, and he had done it anyway.
Three transports. Fourteen hours. One security checkpoint where the guard looked at his face — the white skin, the black stripes, the wrongness of his coloring that made every Kleotrian who saw him look twice and then look away — and waved him through without comment.
Even prison guards did not want to stare at an albino Kleotrian for longer than necessary.
It had been useful his entire life, being the thing people preferred not to examine too closely. It was useful now.
The detention level was four floors below ground.
Alliance maximum security. A place where the lighting never changed because the occupants were not meant to track the passage of time.
A guard escorted him to the entrance and left him there.
His credentials — Free Worlds Alliance rescue network, ten years of service, classified clearance level — got him through the first three doors.
His name got him through the fourth. The duty officer had looked at the visitor log, looked at Davn's face, looked at the cell assignment, and waved him through.
Some decisions were above his pay grade. He made it anyway.
Cell block seven. Long corridor. Eight cells, seven empty. The occupied one was at the far end.
Davn stopped walking.
His hands were at his sides. They were still. He had learned stillness through immersion, through necessity, through the understanding that movement invited attention, and attention invited consequences. He was still now. His breathing was even. His face showed nothing.
He looked at the cell.
The occupant sat on the floor with his back against the far wall, long legs bent, his arms resting on his knees.
The orange of his skin was vivid even under the flat institutional lighting — deeper and more saturated than average, the black stripes wider and more defined than any Kleotrian Davn had seen in the decade since he had last seen this one.
Royalty among their people ran to stronger pigmentation.
It always had. The man on the floor wore it the way he wore everything: as though it had been designed specifically for him and he had graciously consented to carry it.
The structured garments were gone. He wore the same grey detention uniform as every other prisoner on this level.
It should have diminished him. It did not.
He occupied the cell the way he occupied every room Davn had ever seen him in — completely, as though the space had been built around him rather than the other way around.
Prince Dáinn looked up from the floor.
The amber eyes — cool, calculating, the amber of assessment rather than warmth — moved over Davn with unhurried precision taking in the white skin, the inverted stripes, the face that was the same angular Kleotrian bone structure as his own but rendered in negative.
Something shifted behind those eyes, and Dáinn smiled.
It wasn't his political smile — the wide, practiced instrument he deployed at summits and negotiations and formal dinners where the future of entire species was being traded over the second course.
Not the warm social smile that meant nothing, cost nothing, and bought him everything.
This smile was different. Slower. It started at one corner of his mouth and spread as if it had been waiting a long time to arrive.
He rose from the floor in a single fluid motion as if not even a prison cell would make him graceless.
He crossed to the plasma bars and stopped close enough that Davn could see the faint lines at the corners of his eyes that had not been there ten years ago.
Evidence that even princes aged, even the ones who seemed built to outlast everything around them.
Dáinn wrapped his hands around the bars, ignoring the sting of the electric current running through them.
His fingers were long and unmarked by labor or consequence.
He leaned forward until his face was inches from the gap between the metal.
The smile widened. It reached his eyes, which was rare and equal parts significant and dangerous.
"Davn."
The voice. Smooth, unhurried, the tonal musicality of their shared language threading underneath the common tongue and giving every syllable weight.
The voice that had talked its way into alliance chambers and out of accusations and through every closed door between itself and what it wanted for as long as Davn had been alive.
"It's been a long time."
The amber eyes held Davn's. Whether what they found behind Davn's stillness was reunion or threat or opportunity or all three, the smile did not say.
"Nice to see you… little brother."