Chapter 23
SEREYA
There were books in his rooms.
Sereya noticed them while the medic cleaned the graze at her hairline. Bound books on a wooden shelf, their spines worn where someone had pulled them out again and again. A family weapon hung beside them. The grip was dark with use.
She had expected more screens.
“Look at me,” the medic said.
Sereya did. The female passed a small instrument before her eyes, checked the results, and made her move the injured shoulder.
“Bruising. You'll feel it more after you've slept. The cut is shallow.” She glanced toward Dhomhes, who occupied most of the doorway. “Warmth. Food if she can manage it. Rest. Call if the headache worsens or she feels sick.”
“I'll stay,” he said.
“I had worked that part out.”
Sereya laughed unexpectedly. It pulled at the bitten place inside her cheek.
The medic left them alone.
Dhomhes took off what remained of his coat. The armor along his shoulders was still raised, and the cloth caught on it. He pulled too hard. Another strip tore free.
He stood with it in his hand. Sereya could still hear the sound he'd made when Burk cut her.
She had never heard anything like it from him.
Even now he kept looking from her face to the dressing, as if he needed to check again.
He reached for a clean shirt.
“Don't put another one on just to ruin it.”
He looked at the torn coat in his hand.
“A sound financial argument.”
“I have them occasionally.”
He draped the coat over a chair and made tea in the small kitchen. She watched him warm the pot. Such a plain thing to do. Water, cups, a spoon. Her hands began shaking again.
When he came back, he put the cup on the table and sat beside her.
“Closer,” she said.
He moved. She tucked her feet beneath the blanket and leaned against his arm.
“I don't want to be alone tonight.”
“You won't be.”
“And I don't want to be quiet either.” She swallowed. “If I wait until morning, I might decide I can keep it all put away.”
“Then tell me.”
Sereya stared at the tea. A leaf floated near the rim. She followed it through a slow circle before she could make herself speak.
“Naliese.”
Dhomhes remained still.
“Naliese Tehvarr. That's my name. The one she put on the message.” She tried it again. “Naliese Tehvarr. Only daughter of Premier Alden Tehvarr, of Callis.”
For a moment she expected someone to come through the door. Six years of rules had not left her just because she had broken the largest one.
Dhomhes took her hand.
“I'm listening.”
She told him about the house first. The columns, the roof terrace, the dining room where her father practiced speeches while her mother corrected the figures in the margins.
“Everyone thought she was reading the household accounts. She let them. My father used to wait until they'd gone and ask her how badly he'd done.”
“What did she say?”
“That depended on how badly he'd done.”
Dhomhes smiled, and for a moment her mother was someone who had been funny, someone who had been alive before she became the reason Sereya woke in the dark.
She told him about her brothers. The solemn one who tried to advise her about everything, and the younger one who climbed out of his lessons through a window and never understood why the instructor kept catching him.
“He used the same window.”
“A flaw in the plan.”
“He insisted it was the best window.” Her smile wavered. “I don't think I've said that aloud since he died.”
Dhomhes's thumb moved over her fingers.
She watched it while she told him the rest.
She had been fifteen. There was a meteor shower, and she had stolen sweetwine from a reception tray and taken it to the roof. The sky had been full of falling light. For a little while she'd thought the flash below her was a reflection.
“Then there was smoke coming through the stairwell. I couldn't get down the way I'd come.”
He let her stop. Let her drink tea that had gone almost cold.
“I used the service stairs. They were outside. I thought everyone would be in the garden.”
Her fingers tightened around his.
“There was no one in the garden.”
She could still see the open doors. She would always see them, she thought. The difference tonight was that there was someone beside her while she looked.
“The Korvath syndicate wanted my father's coalition broken. He wouldn't give them what they wanted. They killed my family to make sure the people who came after him would.”
“And someone got you out?”
“A member of the household guard found me near the outer wall. I wasn't hiding properly. I was just standing there.” Her throat closed. “I didn't make a sound.”
“You were hurt.”
“I wasn't. Not then. They were hurt. They were dead, and I was standing in the garden following the rule about not crying where anyone could see.”
Dhomhes turned toward her.
“You were fifteen, and your house was burning.”
“I should have—”
“What?”
She opened her mouth. Nothing came out.
He waited, then touched the edge of the blanket where it had slipped from her shoulder.
“If Tivek told you that story, what would you tell him?”
She looked at him sharply.
His eyes held hers.
“I wouldn't blame him.”
“No.”
Her face crumpled before she could turn away.
He gathered her against him when she reached for him. This crying had sound in it. She hated the sound, tried to swallow it, and couldn't. Dhomhes's hand stayed warm against her back.
Nothing fell apart because he heard her.
When she could sit up again, he passed her a clean cloth and refilled the tea.
The government had hidden her. New records, new history, a name selected from a list because it was common enough not to be remembered. She had tried to be grateful. She was grateful. Being grateful hadn't made it easy to answer to someone else.
“There's money,” she said. “An estate. But to reach it I have to prove who I am, and every time someone explained the process I could see another place my name would have to go. Another office. Another person.”
“We can look at that. When you're ready.”
“I don't want it tonight.”
“Then we won't look tonight.”
The simplicity of that almost made her cry again.
The program had been a lawful way off-world. A chance to go so far that the old danger might become someone else's news. She hadn't expected to be chosen by anyone. She had hoped to find work wherever the ship left her.
Then Roemary had sat beside her.
“She learned how I took my tea. Asked whether I'd slept. Saved me a seat.” Sereya looked at the cup in her hands. “Little things.”
Dhomhes did not try to interrupt the memory with himself.
“She told me things about her family. Things that made it sound as if she was lonely too. I don't know whether any of them were true.”
“Some might have been.”
“Does that make it worse?”
“I don't know.”
She was grateful he didn't pretend he did.
“One night she told me whoever I'd been before, she would have liked that girl too. And I believed her.”
Sereya looked down at her hands.
“I told her about the roof. My name. Everything. She held me while I cried.”
For a while she could hear only the hum beyond the window.
“It wasn't horrible the next morning,” she said eventually. “That would have been easier to understand. She just started reminding me how much she knew. How careful she was being for me. What a good friend she was.”
And there had been errands, and apologies Sereya made for things she hadn't done, and little humiliations she endured because causing a scene might make someone look too closely.
“Then tonight she told me to deliver Adryel. As though it was one more thing to carry.”
“You refused.”
“I nearly didn't. There was a moment when I thought about agreeing just to get her thumb away from that message.”
“But you didn't.”
Sereya set down the cup.
“You now know everything she knew. More, actually. I want you to understand I know what I've just done. I chose to tell you.”
His hand closed around hers.
“Thank you.”
She looked at him for a long time.
Then he said, “Before you trust me with anything else, there's something I should have told you.”
Her stomach tightened.
“A protected-identity notice came through before the landing. It told me your public records had been replaced after the deaths of a political family. It did not give me your birth name, their names, or who killed them.”
“You could have asked for more.”
“Yes.”
“Did you?”
“No.” He let her examine his face. “I restricted the notice. I kept it out of the ordinary reports. But I still began by knowing something about you that you hadn't chosen to tell me.”
She remembered the early conversations. His careful questions. Her certainty that every pause concealed an assessment.
“Were you investigating me when you sat with me?”
“At first I was trying to understand whether you were in danger, and whether you knew more about the people around you than you were saying.”
She took her hand out of his.
For once she wanted him to fill the silence, to offer an explanation she could reject. He sat with his empty hand on the blanket.
“You asked me to be your mate, and still let me worry about what you might find. Every time I came here.”
“Yes.”
“You could have told me what you already knew.”
“I should have.”
“And then?”
“I was already burning for you. I used the questions to avoid admitting why I'd stopped. I told you about my body's response that afternoon. I should have told you about the notice too.”
Her eyes stung.
“I should have told you about the notice sooner,” he said. “I don't want keeping your name unread to become an excuse for what I did keep from you.”
She pulled the blanket closer around her shoulders. She still wanted him beside her. That made the anger harder to speak, not less important.
“I want to see the notice.”
“I'll bring it up for you.”
“Tomorrow. And if you need another record about me, you ask before you request it.”
“I will.”
“No more tests,” she said.
“No more tests.”
“If you want to know something, ask.”
“And you may tell me it isn't mine to know.”
She nodded.
“I don't know which name I want,” she admitted. “Naliese is mine. But she's also fifteen in that house. Sereya has lived six years since then. Some of what she did was worth keeping.”
“A great deal of it.”
“Sereya for now. Even here. I want to hear it without feeling as if I'm lying.”
She turned her hand palm up on the blanket. He waited until she reached for him, then lifted it.
“Sereya.”
Her shoulders eased.
“Yes. Like that.”
His armor had begun to settle. As she watched, a ridge rose again along his shoulder.
She touched it with one finger. He drew a slow breath.
“Does that hurt?”
“No.”
She traced the warm edge a little farther.
“That may make concentration difficult,” he said.
Her hand stopped. “Oh.”
There was a moment in which they simply looked at each other. Then, to her astonishment, she laughed.
“I've been crying all over you.”
“I noticed.”
“I have blood in my hair.”
“A little.”
“And your body thinks this is the moment?”
“It has been suggesting moments for some time.”
She laughed again. He smiled, and the sight of it made her want things that had nothing to do with being safe.
She leaned toward him. He brushed his mouth over her forehead, beside the dressing, and rested there.
“When you've slept,” he murmured, “we'll talk about physical mating. What to expect before we try it.”
“You intend to give me a briefing?”
“A very good one.”
“I'll bring questions.”
“I was counting on it.”
She was still smiling when exhaustion finally caught her. Dhomhes helped her to bed, turned down the lamp, and began to straighten.
She caught his hand.
“Here.”
“I'll be in the chair.”
“That's not here.”
He looked at the place beside her, then at her face. She moved over.
He lay down on top of the cover, close enough for her to rest her head against his shoulder. For a while she listened to his breathing and the distant machinery. Once his comm stirred against his wrist. He checked it, answered with a few touches, and put his arm back around her.
“Still here?” she whispered.
“Still here.”
She slept before she could ask again.