Chapter 2 #3
The soft girl is gone. Whatever's growing in her place has my fingerprints on its foundations, and I don't know if that makes me the worst thing that ever happened to her or the catalyst for something she needed to become. Both options make me sick. Both options are probably true.
The quarters feel smaller when I return. The window shows the same stars. The diffuser still pushes its green scent into the air. The bed is still comfortable. None of it registers.
Tomorrow is the contract signing. The formal commitment.
I will stand in a room with the Zalt Consortium's representatives and the Torrence leadership and I will put my name on a document that binds me to a woman who can see through everything I do.
A woman my abilities can't touch. A woman who looked at me across a negotiating table with eyes like polished stone and gave me absolutely nothing to work with.
I should be strategizing. I should be mapping angles, identifying leverage, building the profile that will let me navigate this new arrangement the way I've navigated every arrangement before it. Become what's needed. Become what's useful. Become what survives.
But the thing about Aura Zalt, the thing that terrifies me and relieves me in equal measure, is that none of those strategies will work.
I can't sense what she wants. I can't mirror what she needs.
I can't find the fracture and press. She's sealed against me, perfectly and completely, and what that means is that whatever happens between us will have to be real.
Real.
The word sits in my mouth like an unfamiliar food.
I've spent so long being what other people need that I've lost track of what's underneath.
Who is Ethan Eames when he's not reading the room?
When he's not adjusting his posture and his tone and the precise calibration of his smile to match the desire he senses?
When the mirror has nothing to reflect, what does it show?
I don't know.
I should be terrified. I am terrified. But there's something else in there too, something that lives in the same space as the fear and doesn't cancel it out so much as coexist with it.
Relief. The exhausted, bone-deep relief of a man who's been holding a weight he forgot he picked up, and someone just told him he's allowed to set it down.
I sit in the desk chair Zane occupied an hour ago. It's still warm. I press my palms flat on the desk surface and feel the cool composite under my skin and I try to think about tomorrow. The contract. The commitment. The woman who will be my wife and who I cannot deceive.
I get as far as imagining her face, that controlled blankness, those dark eyes that gave me nothing, and something in my chest does a thing I don't recognize.
Not desire, though that's there too, low and inconvenient and persistent.
Something quieter. Curiosity, maybe. The first honest curiosity I've felt in years, directed at a person rather than a problem.
Who is she when she's not resisting me?
Does she know?
The hours pass. I don't sleep. I lie on the bed that's too comfortable for what I deserve and I stare at the ceiling and I think about masks.
About the moment you've worn one so long that your face reshapes itself to fit.
About the possibility that underneath all of them there's nothing.
About the possibility that there's something, and it's worse than nothing, because then you have to reckon with having buried it.
The chrono on the wall ticks past midnight.
The door chimes.
I'm on my feet before the sound finishes.
Not because I'm expecting anyone, but because unexpected visitors at midnight have meant violence in too many chapters of my life for the response to be anything but immediate.
I cross the room in three strides, position myself to the hinge side of the door out of habit that's older than memory, and hit the release.
The door slides open.
Elissa Torrence is standing in my doorway.
She's in training clothes, the fitted grey that Venn's students wear, and her pale skin shows nothing.
No bioluminescence, no colors, just the flush of exertion or emotion high on her cheekbones and the red rims around her eyes that say she's been crying or fighting it for a long time.
Her hands are at her sides. They're shaking.
Small tremors that she's trying to control and can't, and the sight of those shaking hands does more damage than anything Zane said this afternoon.
"I need to talk to you," she says. Her voice is steady for exactly four words before it isn't. "Before you marry her. Before you disappear again. I need to know."
She stops. Swallows. Her throat moves and I can see the effort it takes, the way she's marshaling herself the way Venn must be teaching her, pulling the pieces together by force of will.
"Was any of it real?"
The question hangs in the recycled air between us. Green diffuser scent and the distant hum of life support and the stars turning slowly past the viewport behind me, indifferent witnesses to the smallest, most devastating reckoning of my life.
She's waiting. Hands shaking. Eyes red. The soft girl gone and something fiercer standing in her place, demanding answers from the man who taught her that answers can be weapons.
I open my mouth.
I have nothing.
Not nothing as in I won't answer. Nothing as in, for the first time in my life, I don't know which face to wear. There is no desire to read, no need to mirror, no angle to calculate. There is only a girl I wounded standing in my doorway asking me for the one thing I've never been sure I possessed.
The truth.
And the worst part, the part that will keep me awake for whatever hours remain before dawn and the contract and the new cage I'm walking into, is that I don't know the answer.
I don't know if any of it was real. I don't know if I'm capable of real.
I don't know if the man who brought her coffee and made her laugh and let her trust him was a performance or a person, and the fact that I can't tell the difference is the most honest thing about me.
She's still standing there. Still shaking. Still waiting.
The ghost I can't outrun. The sin I can't confess. Standing at my door, demanding answers I don't have.