11. Chapter Eleven
Chapter Eleven
ZAVIN
The door slides shut behind me and I don’t move. The corridor stretches empty in both directions. Stone holds cold down here, the silence pressing in until I hear my own blood. Miro calls it a mistake while her scent tells me the opposite.
Her arousal is still in my nose. Still on my tongue, the way a flavor lingers after you’ve swallowed.
My receptors don’t lie. The female wants me.
Her mouth says mistake and every other signal her body broadcasts says more.
She is so truthful in her needs it undoes me, and I am too weak to stop myself from kissing her. I never should have done that.
Going back in there would be easy. Demand we finish what we started. She’d let me. She’d let me and we both know it.
I want her back.
Stupid. Too stupid. Having her means painting a target on her back. Knowing better doesn’t seem to matter. She might be smart but she’s also too trusting. Especially of me. The last thing I need are more consequences over my head. More failures of control.
Another death on my conscience — I will not be responsible for it.
Especially not hers.
Stalking away from her quarters takes everything. Every inch of me says go back. My claws won’t retract. My pulse sits in my throat like a stone I can’t swallow.
No one has ever been as truthful with me as she is.
That’s the problem. People don’t let their guard down around me.
Not my brothers. Not Resh. Not the operatives who report to me or the pleasure workers who pretend.
They all hold something back because they know what I am and what I’ll do with whatever they hand me.
She doesn’t. She looked at me like I was just a male who wanted her and then she told me the truth with her whole body, no calculation, no exit strategy.
Answering it took weakness I didn’t know I still carried.
Letting my guard down was the mistake. Knowing better doesn’t change it. Two decades spent learning exactly how dangerous vulnerability is, and the lesson evaporates the moment her mouth touches mine.
The anger surfaces. Not the cold kind I use.
The hot kind. The one that wants to put a fist through stone.
Breathing through it, counting the beats, locking my jaw — forcing the heat back down into my chest where it sits coiled and useless.
Emotions are intelligence that hasn’t been processed yet.
If I feel them in the open, someone will use them against me.
Someone always does. Control. Cold. That’s what I am.
Layer by layer, for two decades, that’s what I’ve made myself into.
For once in my life, I don’t want to be.
The freedom she gives me when her lips touch mine — that single second before she pulls away and calls it a mistake — it is the beginning and the end at the same time, and that has pissed me off more than anything in years.
Being born into this House wasn’t my choice.
Neither was the Sethrak name or the claws or the inheritance of violence that comes with both.
None of it was mine to decide. But I built myself inside those walls anyway.
Became efficient. Became effective. Became the male my father needed me to be because the alternative was irrelevance or death and neither appealed.
Now I’ve seen the alternative. Resenting the lack of freedom to reach for it. Resenting the need to close myself off to everything except threat and danger. For three seconds in that room I wasn’t threat and danger. Just a male kissing a female who wanted to be kissed.
Three seconds from taking her to bed. Not the controlled version. Not the calculated seduction performed a hundred times in the alcoves below. This one has no exit strategy. For one moment I imagine a life I could choose for myself. A different set of walls. A different purpose. Her.
Dismissing it takes effort. Those thoughts are dangerous in their hope and naivety. That kind of thinking will get her killed. Or worse.
Between her corridor and mine, nothing registers.
Not the junctions. Not the security panels.
Not the operatives who step aside when they see me coming.
Walking blind while my head replays her mouth and her scent and the sound she made when I pulled her against me.
Dangerous. I know better than to move through these halls without cataloguing every shadow.
Anyone who stops paying attention in the Warrens wakes up dead or doesn’t wake up at all.
But my mind is full of her and there’s no room left for threat assessment.
My quarters close around me. The lock engages. Standing in the dark, I let my claws extend, let the heat I’ve been suppressing surface along my jaw and throat until the air warms around me.
At least she called it when I was too weak.
She’s right. Whatever this is, it can’t happen.
She’s a human female with no House affiliation and no protection beyond what I give her.
She’s the person currently dismantling a mole who has already killed at least one operative and will kill again the moment it becomes convenient.
Fully clothed, I lie on the bed. The ceiling panels glow faint amber in the dark.
Watching them, I try to recall the last time someone saw past the performance and stayed.
The last female who looked at me like I was something more was gone before the next sunrise.
Father scrubbed her name from every record.
Searching for months taught me that searching was another way of bleeding.
The pattern repeats. Identical. Walking straight into it with my eyes open because for three seconds Miro’s mouth was soft and her hands were in my hair and she wasn’t lying about anything.
Sleep doesn’t come. Dawn does. The wall panels shift into their morning cycle, pale gold creeping across the stone.
At my desk before the light finishes its transition, I pull Selin’s files onto the display — the alternative is sitting in the dark replaying the taste of her mouth.
Access logs. Movement records. Junction reports.
Every scrap that crossed my desk in the weeks before she died.
Spreading them across the workspace, pulling up the authorization hierarchy Miro reconstructed, running my finger down the list of cleared personnel.
The names I trust fit on one hand. The names I don’t fill the screen.
The alert keyed to Miro’s corridor pings midmorning. Motion. Pulling the feed brings Kazren into view.
Standing outside her door reading the access panel.
He shouldn’t be there. He shouldn’t know she’s inside, and she is.
Alone. His hand is still at his side, but his head is angled toward the display.
The panel registers nothing. He doesn’t touch it or try to enter.
He simply studies it. Long enough to confirm occupancy. Long enough to know.
Kazren doesn’t do anything without reason. He doesn’t wander. He doesn’t check on colleagues. Every move is weighted. Every corridor has a purpose. He’s there because he knows she’s inside.
Then he walks. Disappears around the junction at the end of the corridor and doesn’t look back. The feed continues recording an empty hallway.
Almost closing it — then a secondary alert, timestamped earlier, buried under the first. Motion. Her door. The sensor flag I missed because my attention was already fixed on Kazren.
Pulling it, watching Miro exit the door she shouldn’t be able to unlock.
Stepping into the corridor like she belongs there.
Like she hasn’t just breached a room sealed at the highest clearance level.
Whether I’m horrified or impressed doesn’t matter — there’s no time to decide because the feed keeps running and my father enters the frame.
Every muscle in her body locks. Shoulders first, then spine, then the hands curling into stillness at her sides. She drops her gaze as my father’s attention settles on her like a weight finding its center. She walks past him. His head doesn’t turn. His eyes track her the whole way.
She disappears around the junction. The next feed shows a different camera, same corridor, and there she is. Back against the wall, knees half gone, folded into herself the way something folds when the structural integrity gives out.
And she never said anything. Sat across from me at her workstation and argued about authorization chains while carrying the knowledge that Sethrak had seen her. While carrying the feel of his eyes on her back.
Fury would be the appropriate response. Some part of me feels it. The larger part is something that sits behind my ribs like a second heartbeat, because she knew exactly what she was risking, and she did it anyway because she needed the buffer logs to finish the investigation.
A knock at my door precedes Resh entering.
“It’s a bit early for—“ I turn and frown.
“There’s a body in the lower stairwell.” His thermal signature is elevated along his jaw, the heat bleeding orange at the edges where stress lives.
“It’s Nyssa. Someone staged it to look like a fall.” His gaze catches mine and holds.
Nyssa. The name hooks into me and pulls. Her bruised wrists beneath translucent sleeves. The attendant whose grip was too firm, whose face I filed away for later. I added her contract number to the review queue without breaking stride and kept walking.
Three days ago.
For one long second the pulse beats in my fingertips.
I flagged her contract three days ago. “Show me.”