Chapter 29
TWENTY-NINE
He needs you.
Her heart seized. A full stop, a skipped beat, a silence so complete she heard blood roaring in her ears. Then it kicked back to life with a violence that hurt her ribs, slamming against her sternum like it was trying to escape her chest and go without her.
She was on her feet before the second heartbeat.
No calculation. No risk assessment. No practiced architecture of self-protection sliding into place, no careful weighing of outcomes, no quiet internal voice reminding her that people who needed her always left, that vulnerability was a door that only opened one way, that she'd already survived this wound and could not survive it twice.
None of it.
She grabbed the portrait off the easel — dry, finally dry, twenty hours of forced patience rewarded — wrapped it in the protective cloth she'd bought for exactly this purpose, and strapped it to her back.
She grabbed her bag. She was out the door in the time it took the message to fade from her screen.
The transport office was three levels down, staffed by a Callexian with too many arms and not enough patience.
"Destination?"
She gave the coordinates of Skarreth's estate. The Callexian's multiple eyes blinked in sequence, a wave of disbelief rolling across a face designed for it.
"That sector's locked. Crimson Ledger enforcement action. No civilian traffic."
"What's the closest you can get me?"
The Callexian pulled up a nav chart. Four arms worked the console while two more gestured at the holographic display, sketching the boundaries of the interdiction zone. "Here. Relay station at the sector's edge. After that, you're in contested space. No escorts, no guarantees, no refunds."
"How fast?"
"Express burn? Seven hours. But you'd need —" The Callexian named a price that made Octavia's stomach drop. She'd spent most of her remaining funds on paint.
She looked at the canvas strapped to her back. She looked at the nav chart, at the red zone pulsing around Skarreth's coordinates, at the small icons representing Ledger ships that meant weapons and soldiers and every rational reason not to do what she was about to do.
She pulled her last credit chip from her bag and set it on the counter.
"Express burn."
The Callexian processed the transaction with the resigned efficiency of someone who had long stopped questioning the decisions of desperate travelers. A boarding pass materialized. Gate 14. Departure in forty minutes.
Octavia took the pass and climbed three levels to the gate with the painting on her back and little else — no plan, no weapon, no extraction strategy, no safety net.
She was flying into a war zone carrying a portrait and the accumulated weight of every sketch she'd ever hidden under a mattress, every truth she'd ever swallowed, every time she'd left before someone could leave her first.
The rational part of her brain cataloged every variable.
She was unarmed. She had no military training.
She had no contacts in the sector beyond a butler's emergency frequency that might already be compromised.
She was carrying a painting into a battlefield, which was so absurd it bordered on insane.
If Voss's people intercepted the transport, she'd be captured.
If the Ledger interdiction held, she'd be turned back.
If she somehow reached the estate and it had already fallen, she'd be walking into a ruin.
The artist part of her brain — the part that had looked at a beast in a moonlit maze and seen a man in pain, the part that had spent her entire career stripping comfortable lies off canvas and never once applied one to herself, until now — said, with absolute certainty:
This is the most important thing you will ever do.
Not the gallery shows. Not the "Masks and Faces" series.
Not the critical acclaim or the solo exhibitions or any of the work she'd built her identity around.
This. A portrait strapped to her back, a transport heading into hostile space, and a man who believed he was unlovable bracing for a fight he might not survive.
She boarded the transport, found her seat, and buckled the harness over her chest, adjusting the canvas carrier so the painting pressed flat against the seatback, protected by her body.
The engines engaged. The free port fell away beneath her.
Through the viewport, stars smeared into streaks as the transport hit burn speed, and Octavia pressed her paint-stained hand against the glass — the same hand that had hovered inches from a beast's muzzle in a hedge maze, that had traced fangs with her thumb, that had gripped obsidian shoulders while he kissed her like she was the first honest thing he'd touched in seven years.
She was done observing. Done protecting herself from the world by experiencing it through a frame.
She was going back. Not because she was brave or reckless, but because she had painted three portraits of the same man and the third one was the true one, and he deserved to see himself the way she saw him.
And because he needed her.
And for the first time in Octavia Tate's life, being needed didn't feel like a cage.