Chapter 10
Ethan
The silence where she used to be is the loudest thing in the room.
I lie in the dark of our quarters, staring at the ceiling where recycled air hums through the vents, and I keep reaching for it.
The empathic space where Elissa Torrence existed for nearly a decade.
The steady, readable pulse of her trust, her affection, her quiet devotion that I cultivated like a crop I intended to harvest. It's gone.
Not muted, not distant. Gone. She's learned to wall herself off from me completely, or she's simply stopped feeling anything in my direction, and I'm not sure which possibility is worse.
I'd forgotten what true blindness feels like.
A decade surrounded by humans whose emotions I could taste like weather patterns, and I'd grown fat on the information.
Lazy with it. Elissa's hurt had always been a thing I could monitor, adjust for, manage.
Now there's nothing. Just the flat, human silence of a person who has decided I don't deserve access to her interior world.
She's right. I don't.
Beside me, Aura breathes. Slow and even, though I know she's awake.
I can feel her the way I can feel all Empri, that familiar resonance of a mind built like mine, but hers has always been different.
Guarded in layers I haven't fully mapped.
What I can read is surface calm over something warmer, something she's choosing not to hide anymore.
She rolls toward me. Her hand finds my chest in the dark, palm flat over my sternum, and the contact sends her emotional register straight through my skin.
Concern. Steady, unsentimental concern. And underneath it, a thread of something I'm learning to recognize as tenderness, though she'd sooner airlock herself than call it that.
She sits up. The ambient light catches the sharp lines of her face, the deliberate architecture of a woman who was built to be a weapon and chose to be a person instead.
She swings her legs over the edge of the bed and pads to the small galley unit.
I hear the hiss of the coffee system, the ceramic click of a mug being pulled from the rack.
When she comes back, she presses the mug into my hands and sits cross-legged on the mattress facing me, watching me drink with an expression that doesn't need empathic ability to read.
She can see how I'm doing. She doesn't need to taste my emotional state to know that I'm sitting in the wreckage of my own choices and finding no angle that makes it look better.
"You've been awake for hours," she says.
Her voice carries that particular edge of someone stating facts rather than asking questions—the tone of a woman trained to assess situations and render judgment without sentiment.
The coffee mug settles warm in my hands, a counterweight to the cold certainty in her words.
"Staring at the ceiling won't change what happened. "
It's not a question, and it's not quite a command.
It's an observation delivered with the precision of someone who's spent a lifetime reading people the way I read emotions.
Aura doesn't need my abilities to know that I've been lying here cataloging failures, running through scenarios where different choices might have led to different outcomes.
She can see it in the tension of my shoulders, the way my hands have gone white-knuckled around the ceramic.
"I know," I say. The admission costs something, not much, but something. "I know that too."
She sits up. The ambient light catches the sharp lines of her face, the deliberate architecture of a woman who was built to be a weapon and chose to be a person instead.
She swings her legs over the edge of the bed and pads to the small galley unit.
I hear the hiss of the coffee system, the ceramic click of a mug being pulled from the rack.
When she comes back, she presses the mug into my hands and sits cross-legged on the mattress facing me, watching me drink with an expression that doesn't need empathic ability to read.
She can see how I'm doing. She doesn't need to taste my emotional state to know that I'm sitting in the wreckage of my own choices and finding no angle that makes it look better.
"The Torrences will know by now," she says. "Elissa won't have kept quiet."
"No." The coffee is bitter, station-standard, nothing like the imported blends Zane keeps in his office. It tastes like penance. "She won't."
"What are you going to do?"
I set the mug on the narrow shelf beside the bed. Look at her. This woman who married me knowing exactly what I am, who heard my confession and didn't flinch but also didn't forgive, who is still here in this bed choosing to hand me coffee instead of a knife.
"Face it," I say. "What else is there?"
She nods. Once. Like that's the only answer she would have accepted.
The summons comes three hours later. A single line on my personal comm, stripped of pleasantry, stripped of pretense.
My office. Now.
Zane Torrence's communication style has always been efficient, but this is something else. This is a man who doesn't trust himself to write more than four words without saying something he can't take back.
I dress. Station-standard clothing, nothing that could be read as armoring up or dressing down. Aura watches from the doorway of the washroom, her hair still damp, her arms crossed.
"I'm coming with you."
"No."
"Ethan."
"This is between me and them." I seal the collar of my shirt. My hands are steady, which feels like a lie my body is telling on my behalf. "I hurt their sister. I don't get to bring backup."
"You're my husband." She says it like she's testing the word, turning it over, checking its edges. "That makes it my business."
"Not this time."
Her jaw tightens. I can feel the flare of her frustration, hot and immediate, but she doesn't push. Aura Zalt has never been the kind of woman who repeats herself. She makes her position known and then she lets you choose wrong.
I'm choosing wrong. I know that. But some debts have to be paid alone.
The corridor outside our quarters is quieter than usual.
Either the station's daily rhythm has shifted, or the word has already spread far enough that people are avoiding the routes I'm likely to take.
I suspect the latter. Veridian-7 runs on gossip the way it runs on recycled oxygen, and the fall of Zane Torrence's trusted intelligence asset is exactly the kind of story that travels through bulkheads.
I count my steps. Forty-seven to the junction.
Left turn. Another thirty-one to the administrative wing.
The gravity generators pulse faintly through the soles of my boots, that subtle wrongness that never quite feels like standing on real ground.
A decade on this station and I've never gotten used to it. My teeth always know the difference.
Zane's office door is open. Not a courtesy. An instruction.
I walk in.
They're both there. Of course they are.
Zane behind his desk, hands flat on the surface, the posture of a man who has organized his anger into something architectural. Precise. Load-bearing. His face gives nothing away, which is more frightening than rage would be. I've seen Zane Torrence angry. This isn't anger. This is judgment.
Dexter stands to the left of the desk, leaning against the bulkhead with his arms crossed and his bioluminescent marks doing something I've never seen before.
Flickering. Not the steady glow of calm or the bright pulse of aggression, but an irregular, stuttering pattern that reads like a system trying to decide between two modes.
His body wants to hurt something. His mind is holding the leash, but the leash is fraying.
The room smells like cold metal and Zane's particular brand of filtered air, the extra scrubbers he installed after his daughter was born. Cleaner than the rest of the station. Sterile in a way that makes my own breathing sound obscenely loud.
I don't sit. They haven't offered, and I wouldn't accept if they did.
"My sister told me what you did." Zane's voice is ice, the kind that burns. "What you admitted to doing."
"I know."
"You manipulated her. Used her. Made her believe something that was never real so you could leverage her emotions for intelligence access."
"Yes."
I don't elaborate. I don't qualify. Every instinct I have is screaming at me to contextualize, to explain the operational necessities, the 7 Protocol intelligence I gathered through her proximity, the lives potentially saved by the information I extracted from the emotional trust she gave me freely.
I could make a compelling case. I'm very good at compelling cases.
But Elissa's face in that corridor, the moment her walls went up and I became blind to her for the first time in a decade, is still carved into the back of my skull. She doesn't deserve the indignity of having her pain rationalized.
"Did Aura know before she married you?" Zane asks.
"Yes."
"And she married you anyway." His voice carries something almost like curiosity, the sound of a man examining a contradiction he can't quite resolve.
"Yes." I hold his pale, ice-blue eyes. Don't flinch. "She knows exactly what I am. She married me anyway."
The silence that follows is a physical thing. It has texture. Weight. It sits in the room like a third Torrence brother, taking up space, breathing contempt.
Dexter's marks flicker brighter. The light catches the planes of his face, and for a moment he looks less like the middle Torrence sibling and more like something his ancestors engineered specifically for violence. His hands, still crossed over his chest, have gone white at the knuckles.