Chapter 10 #2
“You will call me if anything even thinks about being interesting,” I say.
“I’ll scream poetry,” she promises.
I step back into the dim. The corridor smells like burned insulation and the nicer version of air this ship insists on wasting on nobility. My palm finds the cabin panel and I stand there for a heartbeat because sometimes a door deserves respect. Then I let it open and slip inside.
She hasn’t moved much. One arm is flung across the pillow in a declaration of territory; the other is tucked under her cheek like a truce.
I sit on the edge of the mattress and watch her.
The bruise at her jaw has gone from angry purple to something sullen; it will fade.
The cut at her mouth is swollen but clean.
I touch the corner of the sheet and pull it up another inch because the air feels colder in here than it is and my body believes in overkill when it comes to warmth.
“Hey,” she murmurs without opening her eyes. “Don’t leave.”
“I’m not,” I say. “I’m looking.”
“Creep,” she says, smiling very slightly.
“Yes.”
Her lashes flutter and then she’s looking up at me, still half asleep, still more dangerous than anything with a blade. “How bad?”
“Manageable,” I say. “CynJyn bribed the engines with a song. We’re threading the Sparrow. We will aim for a patrol’s blind shoulder and make friends.”
“Bounties,” she says, as if tasting the word. “We can buy CynJyn a church.”
“She is already building one,” I say. “Out of bad ideas and neon.”
“Good,” she whispers, then reaches up with a hand that shakes less than it should and hooks a finger in my collar, drawing me down until our foreheads touch. “You okay?”
“Yes,” I say, and feel the truth of it land in my bones like a weight I want. “Now. Yes.”
She kisses the corner of my mouth where the new bruise hides, and the ship chooses that exact moment to purr differently as CynJyn adjusts a burn. Star’s smile will kill me one day if the universe doesn’t first. “Go be heroic again,” she says. “I’ll be here, being very brave and sleeping.”
“Perfect,” I say, and stand. “Sleep.”
“Yes, Commander,” she murmurs, rolling back into the sheets like a wave.
Back in the cockpit, CynJyn doesn’t comment on my face, which is its own brand of charity.
She taps a coordinate and the stars smear, then snap, then smear again as we ease toward our rendezvous with men who have rules and guns and paperwork.
She hums. I count. We make a plan for what to say if the patrol asks who we are and why our ship looks like a parade mistake.
We rehearse how to hand them the data without giving them our throats.
We prepare for the kind of kindness that arrives in uniforms and the kind that doesn’t.
“Hey,” CynJyn says after a while, softer. “Listen.”
I do. At first it’s only the engine, the gentle hiss of air, the tick of a panel settling. Then I hear it—faint, stubborn, steady—the memory of a heartbeat under my ear and the promise I keep building out of it.
“I hear it,” I say.
“Good,” she says, and flips the last switch on the intercept. “Let’s go home by way of a little mercy.”
CynJyn’s voice fades back into the low murmur of systems and the friendly tick of cooling metal.
The cockpit’s glow narrows behind me. I carry that map of beacons and timings in my head, but I carry something else louder: the way she said sleep and meant stay.
I palm the cabin door and it seals me into dim and quiet and the particular warmth that’s become a new definition of home.
She’s awake. I know it before my eyes adjust; there’s a way the air changes when she’s looking at me—alert, amused, a little wary as if I’m a cliff and she hasn’t decided whether to jump.
The emergency strip throws a soft line of light along her cheek, catching the healing violet at her jaw and the split at her lip already knitting.
The citrus-clean scent this ridiculous ship favors lives here too, but her heat beats it back.
“Come here,” she whispers.
I do. The mattress dips. We lie on our sides, facing, our knees finding the old, easy fit and the new, dangerous one. I put my palm near her hip and not on it because I want the choice to be hers every time. She closes the distance by a finger’s width, touches my wrist. That’s all it takes.
“Talk to me,” she says, voice low and unadorned. “Really talk. Not the guard version. Not the church-of-duty version. The you I keep hearing in the cracks.”
I breathe once, the way they taught us to when the words don’t want to come.
“I fought,” I say. “After the war ended for everyone else. Underground. Under rules that were mostly pretend. I told myself it was for discipline. For practice. To keep the edge sharp in case the world remembered it still wanted to cut. It was a lie. I did it because peace felt like a coffin and noise was the only thing that made my thoughts stop chewing me.”
Her fingers tighten on my wrist, a small, fierce press. “You got hurt?”
“Often,” I admit. “I gave worse. It wasn’t sport.
It wasn’t noble. It was a way to be something other than a wall without the house having to know.
” I flex the hand that has broken too many jaws and mended around that truth.
“Last time, I didn’t stop when I should have.
They pulled me off with a shock staff. Barred me. I deserved the door that shut.”
She studies me like she’s reading a star chart. “You were trying to silence the noise,” she says softly.
“Yes.”
“I know something about noise,” she murmurs. “It’s loud in a palace too. It just uses nicer words.”
I huff a breath that almost smiles. “Then I filed the transfer,” I tell her.
“It was honor and it was cowardice and it was strategy, and it was the only thing I could think to do that didn’t end with me failing at my post and failing you.
I thought if I moved the board, the game would stop hurting. ”
Her mouth tilts. “You say game and I hear you losing on purpose.”
“I was losing,” I say, meeting her eyes and not looking away. “The moment you said he was coming, I lost something I had been pretending not to carry.”
She swallows, throat working. “I didn’t say it to hurt you.”
“I know,” I answer. “You said it because it was true, and because I was supposed to be the kind of man who could stand in truth without breaking. Some days I am. That day I wasn’t.”
“I thought you hated me,” she says, too fast, like she needs to get the ugly out before it metastasizes. “When you stepped back in the training room. When you didn’t answer. I felt stupid and small and… wrong.”
“Never,” I tell her, and the word comes out with more heat than I intend. “I have hated many things. You aren’t on the list.”
Her laugh is a short, disbelieving exhale. “You’ve got a list?”
“Of course,” I say, and let the edge soften. “Sneed’s lemon policies. The way the west tower elevator insists on stopping two centimeters shy of level. The sound Kaspian makes when he overthinks a joke. Peace when it asks too much. Silence when it asks more.”
She nudges my knee with hers, a small grin arriving like sunrise. “Add: the ceremonial air freshener in this absurd bed.”
“That one is moving up the ranks,” I concede.
She sobers. “I was lonely,” she says. “Not the dramatic kind. The quiet kind that makes you do loud things and call them fun. I had all the rooms in the world and none of them fit. I wanted—” She stops, and the old etiquette tries to come back and put its hand over her mouth.
She removes it. “I wanted you to look at me and see a woman. Not a treaty. Not your assignment. Not a child who keeps stealing your bishop.”
I feel the Bishop in my pocket like it turned to heat. “I saw a woman,” I say. “The moment I let myself. It was not a good day for discipline.”
She searches my face as if I might be lying to be kind. “I was afraid I’d never be enough,” she says in a rush. “That I’d be too much in all the wrong ways and not enough in all the right ones. For my parents. For the continent. For the line. For you.”
There’s a funny burn in my chest I only ever got on the worst days in the fighting, when a man would say hold and everyone would, and then nobody could tell if they were brave or just out of choices.
“You are enough,” I say, careful, steady.
“For all of it. For me, you are precisely enough, and that has nothing to do with crests or lands or the weight of other people’s plans.
If I had been allowed to choose a word before I knew language, I would have chosen you. ”
She blinks hard, inhales like the cabin ran out of air and just remembered how to make more. “Okay,” she whispers. “Okay.”
We breathe in the same small room with the ship humming its indifferent lullaby.
She tilts her head, studying me the way a person studies a cliff path and decides to trust their feet.
“Tell me something light,” she says, and the corner of her mouth lifts.
“A private joke. I need one that doesn’t taste like lemon. ”
“The first time you beat me,” I say. “At chess.”
Her eyes flare. “Which one? Because there have been several, sir.”
“The first,” I insist. “You were fourteen, you had jam on your fingers, and you moved the knight like it had wheels.” I let the taste of that afternoon bloom—the courtyard light, the smell of hot stone, her hair a riot and her laugh louder than propriety.
“I could have taken the bishop two moves back. I didn’t. I wanted to see what you’d do.”
“You spotted me?” She sits up, scandalized. “You smug giant.”
“You found the line anyway,” I say, and my own laugh escapes, low, a sound the bed absorbs. “You set the trap and then you watched me walk into it and made the exact same face you make at fireworks.”
“You mean triumph,” she says, preening, then softens. “You kept the bishop.”
“I did,” I admit. “It lives in my pocket more than it lives on any board. It smells like your perfume and poor decisions.”