Chapter 9
nine
. . .
The cold Thorne felt on his walk back to his own apartment was wrong.
He was accustomed to the cold. He was the cold. But this wasn’t just his regular baseline cold. This was an absence of warmth. Her warmth. And it felt wrong. His body had already cooled to its normal, ambient temperature, and it made him miserable.
He was thinking about her face. He hadn’t stopped thinking about it since the moment she’d walked away from him.
He thought about the way she’d stepped into his space and tilted her chin up.
Her lips had parted, and her eyes had gone dark and certain.
His body had committed to the trajectory of her mouth and was just about to close the space between him when she’d stepped back and closed the door between them.
For a moment, one blessed moment, he was sure she’d wanted him to lean down and bridge the space between them. He had been certain of it.
You imagined it.
That was the cleanest explanation. He’d been projecting his own want. Manufacturing reciprocity. He’d imagined the intent in her eyes. Imagined the way her weight had shifted onto her front foot, closing the distance. He’d imagined—
His comm went off.
His feet froze, and he yanked the comm from his jacket. The screen read CALLOWAY, P. on the dedicated channel, the one he’d programmed to go off at maximum volume and the one he still checked four times an hour since the moment he’d pressed the comm unit into her palm.
He pressed his thumb to the unit, and her voice coming through was thin and reedy, barely sounding like her. “Thorne, I need you to come back.”
He was already moving.
He ran the distance to her quarters in minutes, his stride eating ground and frost crackling under his boots with every step, spreading in a fine lattice across the cobblestones behind him.
The streets were dark, the festival shuttered at this late hour, and the market lane was empty. He saw none of it.
Then his hand was on the latch of her door, the biometrics reading his fingerprints and unlocking before his boots stopped moving.
Phoebe was standing in the doorway to her bedroom, her face pale, holding something in her shaking hand. Her body was still, her shoulders locked, chin level. She held out her hand.
He crossed the floor and took the item she was offering, forcing himself to ignore the desire to pull her into his arms. She was scared. Terrified. And the overwhelming need to protect her was at war with his duty to remain the professional guard.
He couldn’t control the frost, though, no matter how much he might try. Ice bloomed across the floor and up the vanity mirror before he could stop it. Delicate, lacelike fractal patterns spread from a perfect circle around their feet and made their way across the room as he read the note.
Thorne ignored the frost just as he ignored his need to wrap Phoebe in his embrace.
He opened the card and read the message while Phoebe’s voice filled the air from the sound chip embedded inside.
He recognized it and his stomach dropped even further.
This wasn’t a recording taken at one of her concerts.
These were private sounds. Anxious hums she ran alone backstage and sometimes on their walks back to her apartment.
These were sounds no audience member could hear from their seats; sounds she made when she was alone.
Someone had been close enough to capture them.
He closed the card, and the recording stopped.
“Where was it?” he asked.
“Here,” Phoebe said, pointing to a spot on her vanity table.
“Is there anything else that doesn’t belong here?”
She wrapped her arms around her body and shook her head.
“Anything missing?”
She looked around, her eyes glazing over. Her voice was thin when she answered him, “I don’t… I don’t think so. I’m not sure. Should I—”
“We can determine that later. Right now, we’re getting you somewhere safe. You’re not staying here tonight.”
She didn’t flinch, didn’t argue. That alone would be enough to show him how scared she was.
“Okay,” she said. “Okay.”
“Get your coat and try not to touch anything you haven’t already touched since you returned.”
Phoebe nodded, and Thorne made a call to headquarters. Before he had finished his report, other officers had already arrived and begun the work of investigation. He placed his hand around her elbow, the first time he’d ever deliberately touched her, and guided her toward the door.
“Where are we going?” she asked.
“All guest quarters are full for the festival.” He said the words before he’d fully considered what they’d cost him. “You will stay at my apartment.”
She looked at him.
The look lasted long enough that he noticed his own breathing, his own hands, and the frost still following in fractals on the floor behind him. Whatever she found in his face was enough. She nodded and said, “I’m ready.”
The walk to his apartment was silent. Close.
The air was simultaneously sharp and sweet between them.
He offered his arm, and Phoebe looped her elbow through his.
They walked this way through the village, closer than they had ever been, and Thorne was conscious of the press of her body against his with every step.
His building was quiet. He keyed the lock and stepped aside, allowing her into the apartment first. He watched her see his home for the first time and imagined what she saw through her eyes.
Clean lines. Spare. Everything in its place with tactical precision.
An external world organized against his internal chaos.
But the living showed through the order.
The reading chair by the window held a wool blanket worn soft from years of use, the nap rubbed thin at the edges where his hands rested.
Plants occupied every surface that could hold them with frost-tolerant varieties from six different Alliance worlds, their leaves dark green and silver, their soil carefully tended.
The small act of cultivation that contradicted every assumption people made about him.
The fireplace stood empty. No heat source was needed for him, but the stone was soot-darkened from the previous tenant's use, and he'd never cleaned it.
He liked the evidence of warmth, even inherited warmth.
The bookshelves held scores of books, their spines cracked and pages dog-eared, stacked horizontally where the vertical space ran out.
The wide window by his reading chair faced the Eternal Pine's distant glow, and the bioluminescence from the tree painted a slow-moving pattern across his ceiling.
On his desk sat a small collection of handwritten pages.
A spike of alarm rang through him, sharp and immediate. He crossed the room in three strides and swept the pages into the desk drawer, closing it with more force than the action required. His hand stayed on the drawer for a half-second too long.
When he turned, she was taking a deep breath in.
He watched her chest expand on the inhale, her eyes half-closing, her head tilting back a fraction the way it did when she found a note she liked.
He assumed his apartment smelled like him.
Peppermint, frost, and something mineral-clean that he could not smell himself but that she'd described once, absently, on a walk home, as winter morning.
She breathed it in, and her shoulders dropped a fraction.
It was the first time her body had loosened since he arrived at her apartment.
He'd given a hundred security briefings. Cleared a thousand rooms. None of it had prepared him for Phoebe Calloway standing in his living room.
He cleared his throat, which had suddenly become stuck.
"The bedroom is through there." He opened the door to his bedroom. "There are clean sheets on the bed. Extra blankets in the trunk."
She walked to the doorway and stopped. Then she turned back toward him.
The distance between them was the width of a hallway and nothing at all.
The Eternal Pine's glow through the window caught the gold in her earrings, the line of her jaw, the dark shine of her eyes.
She was still shaken. He could see it in the set of her mouth, the careful control of her breathing, but something else was moving through her now, something his truth-sense was picking up as a low, steady signal beneath the fear.
She reached out, and her fingers closed around his wrist. Warm. Not pulling, just holding. His whole body went still.
His truth-sense opened on the contact before he could stop it. Fear. Gratitude. Want. All three at once, layered and tangled, and he could not tell which one was driving her toward him.
That was the problem.
She was frightened. She was reaching for the nearest solid thing. He had been the nearest solid thing for someone else once, and he knew how that ended.
He caught her hand and held it for one breath. Then he moved it away from his wrist and let go.
He stepped back.
"Get some sleep."
Her lips parted. Closed. She nodded once and turned into the bedroom.
He closed the door between them.
The couch was too short for him by six inches.
He lay on his back with his feet hanging over the arm and listened to her move through his bedroom on the other side of the wall.
The creak of the bed frame when she sat.
The soft thud of her boots, one then the other.
The small sound of her security comm placed on the nightstand within arm's reach the way he'd told her to.
The rustle of sheets. The slow evening of her breath.
His apartment smelled like her now.
He pressed his thumb against the spot on his wrist where her fingers had been. It was still warm.
He had pulled away because it was right. She was frightened. She was in his home because her home had been violated. She was reaching for him because he was solid and safe and there, and he would not mistake that for anything else.
His truth-sense, quiet in the dark, disagreed.
Thorne lay with both of those things and did not sleep.