Decker
The supply room door swings shut behind me, and whatever just happened in there doesn’t stay behind it.
I make it as far as the equipment desk before I catch myself standing there with the airway kit in my hand, no memory of the walk. I sign it back out properly. The clerk doesn’t look up. I go find something else to do with my hands.
The afternoon runs long in the ops corridor. I pull the depot manifests Zoe flagged in her report and cross-check them against the gate logs, twice, and both passes tell me nothing the first didn’t. My attention keeps sliding off the page, circling back to a woman at a shelf with a clipboard.
Get it together.
I’m on my way to return the manifests when Riven falls into step beside me.
I didn’t hear him coming. Nobody hears Riven coming; that’s the whole design of the man. Lean, dark hair kept short, a scar through one eyebrow that reads like punctuation. He walks with an unnerving stealth even when he has no reason to.
“You’ve worked with Crowe.” He doesn’t ask when a statement does the same job.
“Twice.” I keep walking. “Both times he delivered.”
“Both times he was paid,” he says. “The Guild doesn’t let its people freelance for nothing. If Crowe’s answering to Faine now, someone above him signed off on it.”
“Or he’s not answering to anyone. Just working the angle himself.”
“The Nightshade Guild doesn’t have operatives who work an angle themselves.” Flat, like a thing he’s tired of correcting people on. “I was one of them. There’s no such thing as freelance inside that place. There’s only who’s watching, and how closely.”
I should have a response for that. The jobs I worked with Crowe were the kind that don’t get written down, and I’ve got opinions about how carefully he plays a room.
I open my mouth to say as much, and what comes out is nothing, because for about two seconds the corridor isn’t the corridor.
It’s a supply shelf and a woman not stepping back.
“Decker.”
I blink. Riven’s stopped walking. He’s looking at me the way he looks at everything—assessing, patient, giving nothing away about what the assessment turns up.
“Crowe plays it close,” I say, picking the thread back up a beat too late for it to look natural. “Doesn’t mean he’s not straight with the information. Means he decides what you get, and when.”
Riven holds my eyes a second longer than the sentence needed.
“Noted,” he says.
We walk the rest of the corridor without talking. At the junction he peels off toward the map room without another word, and I stand there working out that I don’t actually know whether I answered his real question or just the one I remembered him asking.
He noticed it.
Of course he did. Men like Riven notice when people they’re working with drop the ball.
And I don’t drop the ball. Not ever.
Until now.
I skip the dining hall. I get as far as the doorway—the smell of onions, the clatter of trays, too much talking—and I turn around before anyone waves me over.
I go back to my quarters, call the kitchen for a tray, and eat standing at the window, which isn’t so much eating as putting food near my mouth while I stare at a ridgeline I’ve looked at a hundred times and don’t see once.
The light’s going by the time I sit down with the file again.
I check the details a third time, and they still don’t click into place in my head.
What clicks is the memory of her not giving me ground in that room.
Most people, without meaning to, put a little more space between themselves and something my size.
She leaned in. I could swear she did. And I wanted her to.
I close the file.
I open it again, because closing it the first three times hasn’t fixed anything.
I skim the page with her background details. Grace Sangrey. Parents deceased. Taken into the system after the death of her mother. One sister, Serenity, location unknown. Lost to the system. Both taken, only Grace came out.
I try to tally that with the person who killed Samien. Doesn’t compute. Nothing does.
The bear’s been sitting on this all day, low and patient, and every time I put the case in front of him, he goes looking for another gap in the story.
That’s new. He’s never been patient with a suspect before.
Suspects get the sharp version—hackles, weight forward, the read that comes back fast because it has to.
This isn’t the sharp version, and I can’t explain why I feel this way around a woman I’m supposed to be building a case against.
I pull the schedule instead of arguing with him about it.
“Grace Sangrey,” I realize I’ve said it out loud.
Her name’s on tomorrow’s line. Provisioning run, 0700, a stretch of road I’ve driven before. Two hours out and back. She’ll be alone the whole way, nobody checking on her until the gate logs her return.
She asked for that line. Said she’d be fine on her own.
Why would she do that?
I go back to the file. Viktor’s margin notes flag a string of events that stand out as red flags. At least they do to him. And to the tracker in me.
The bear’s already found a dozen reasons they don’t add up.
Proof. You need proof.
The file may carry weight with the council elders, but I don’t trust anything I haven’t seen with my own eyes. Not somebody’s report of somebody’s report.
Covering bases. Keeping it iron-tight.
That’s true. It’s just not the whole of the truth, and I know that too.
The bear is still. Something settled in him today in that room. Something that pulled her scent in, held it, memorized it.
I sit with the file closed under my hand and plan my next move. Go down there tomorrow. See what she’s up to. Because her wanting that trip feels off. That’s what I should be focused on. Not the bear looking forward to seeing her again. To catching that sweet scent.
I sit there a while longer, turning it over, and I don’t manage to talk myself out of the fact that my bear is content in a way that’s wrong.
Tomorrow morning, I’ll be on that road.
I just hope I can hold on to the right reasons why.