Chapter Twelve #3
“I know.” He picked up a caramel wrapper from the desk, examined it with the focused attention of someone treating garbage as evidence, and set it back down.
“Someone had to. The wrappers prove sustained intellectual effort, by the way. Not gluttony. There’s a distinction.
One is professional dedication. The other is a character flaw I refuse to acknowledge despite overwhelming anecdotal evidence. ”
I crossed to the desk. Picked up a wrapper, gold foil, crumpled. I turned it over. The back was blank. No message, no coordinates, just the faint impression of where someone’s thumb had pressed too hard while unwrapping.
I set it back down.
“Get some sleep.”
Zephyr shrugged. He had heard the instruction, processed it, and filed it under “things other people care about that I have no plans to implement.”
“I’ll sleep after the conclave.” His tone was light, but I knew Zephyr was deflecting something serious.
“Sleep is a renewable resource. I’m rationing.
It’s an efficiency measure. You can file a complaint with the relevant department, which is me, and I will take it under advisement with the seriousness it deserves, which is none. ”
“Sleep doesn’t work that way.”
“It works exactly the way I tell it to work.” He crossed his arms. The ink on his knuckles had dried to something that looked almost deliberate, like war paint applied by someone who considered defiance a recreational sport.
“I have a system,” he continued. “The system has protocols. One of those protocols is ‘sleep when the work is done,’ and the work, as you can see from the comprehensive color-coded annihilation on that board, is not done. It’s merely entered a new phase, which I’m calling ‘operational deployment,’ and operational deployment does not accommodate napping.
Napping is for people who have the luxury of not being surrounded by men who want to kill them. ”
I stepped closer.
Close enough that the unbique scent of him hit with the intensity of near-field aromatherapy. Close enough that I could see the fine lines at the corners of his eyes, the way his lashes cast faint shadows on his cheeks when the light hit them from this angle.
Close enough that the air between us got thinner, the way it always did when I decided that personal space was a concept I was no longer interested in honoring.
Zephyr did not step back. He tilted his chin up. Held the eye contact. His throat worked once—a swallow, small, deliberate—and then his expression settled into something that looked like curiosity with a warm undercurrent I didn’t have a name for.
“It’s not a complaint.” My voice dropped. Lower. The tone I used when the person in front of me was Zephyr Kontos and the distance between us was measured in inches rather than feet. “It’s a request.”
He held my gaze. For a long moment. Long enough that the church bells rang somewhere in the distance, the sound carrying through stone and old wood and the narrow space between us where something warm had taken up residence and showed no signs of leaving.
“I’ll consider it,” he said.
“I’ll take it.”
The smile he gave me was small, warm.
“That’s optimistic.” The dryness was back, full strength, the blend of sarcasm and affection that meant he had decided that being difficult was more fun than being compliant.
My mouth almost curved.
Almost. The muscles moved, a fractional shift, and then I controlled it, because control was what I did and smiling at Zephyr in a library full of caramel wrappers was several exits past control and heading rapidly toward something I wasn’t ready to name.
I left him there. Amid the binders and the wrappers and the color-coded annihilation of Alexios Romano’s financial architecture, standing in the wreckage of his own productivity with ink on his knuckles and turquoise sparkles on his toes and the absolute certainty of someone who had decided that belonging here was not a question, but an answer.
The door closed behind me with a soft click that sounded final.
In the corridor, the palazzo hummed around me—old pipes settling, the distant click of a thermostat adjusting, the soundtrack of a building that had been standing for four centuries.
I did not go back to the study. Did not pick up the phone. Did not do any of the things a man in my position should have been doing with seven days until a conclave and a rebellion brewing at his back.
I stood in the corridor. Listened to the quiet. The silence that happened when Zephyr was working behind a closed door and the only sound was the rapid percussion of keys and the occasional, muffled sound of a man who had just found something interesting and was now enjoying the hell out of it.
The lighter clicked in my hand. Open. Held. The small orange flame danced against the dark corridor, and I watched it for a count of three before snapping it shut.
The conclave sat in front of me like something physical, and beside me, a five-foot-five blond with a conspiracy wall and a brain that moved faster than most people could speak and the absolute conviction that sleep was something that happened to other people.
I could work with that.
I’d have to.