Chapter 12
He shouldn't have gone back again the next day to see the girl. She was, after all, nothing to him. The night before had been pure impulse.
He told himself that on the way there. He told himself that standing outside the door. The words were accurate. They were also meaningless, the way a blade is meaningless to a man who keeps picking it up anyway.
Impulse was fine. Doing things because he wanted to do them. That was part of the way of being true to himself. Being the warrior he was.
Warriors acted. They didn't explain themselves, didn't apologize, didn't trace the lineage of every decision back to some buried feeling. You wanted something, you moved toward it. That was clean. That was honest.
Going back the next day felt like he needed something.
That was different. That was the part that sat wrong, lodged behind his sternum like a splinter too deep to pull.
He did not need a human female.
He'd catalogued it carefully. The way she smelled — warmer than Vampyren, softer, something almost edible that he refused to examine.
The way she held eye contact longer than most warriors did.
The way she hadn't flinched from him, even when she should have.
None of it added up to need. Need was for the wounded. For the weak. He was neither.
He repeated this while he walked the corridor. He was fairly certain he believed it.
She had just come back from the work she did, something she'd requested, working with the leaders. He'd have understood the request if she was vampire but she was human.
A human requesting proximity to command. There was boldness in it, or desperation, and he hadn't decided which. Both could look the same from the outside. He knew that better than most. He'd spent years letting others read boldness into what was, sometimes, something rawer and less admirable.
He assumed she was searching for her friend.
The other girl. Candy. Pan had her, which meant she was alive — his brother was brutal but not careless with things he'd claimed. Still. Alive and well were not synonyms, and Alek understood this from personal history he didn't revisit often.
It bothered him to know he'd tell her if he knew anything at all about the other girl.
He didn't examine why. Examining it would require sitting with a version of himself he wasn't ready to acknowledge — one that had already, quietly, made certain decisions about this human without consulting the part of him that was supposed to be in charge.
It bothered him that he'd been looking.
He'd told himself it was operational. Information discipline.
Knowing where Pan's assets were was tactically sound, had nothing to do with a pair of eyes watching him in a corridor, nothing to do with wanting to have something to offer her the next time he appeared at her door like a man with no particular reason to be there.
And that he'd found nothing.
Pan was good at disappearing. Always had been.
Even as children he'd had that quality — present and then not, occupying a space and then vacating it so completely you'd question whether he'd ever been there.
Alek had nothing to bring her. He didn't like that.
He didn't like what it meant that he'd even noticed the absence of something to give.
It bothered him that she knew things and that she told him.
She'd been careful about it. Not performing trust, not trading it for something — just offering it, plainly, like it cost her nothing, like she hadn't done the math on what it meant to hand information to a Vampyren warrior in an occupied ship.
Either she was reckless or she'd already made her own quiet decisions about him.
He wasn't sure which unsettled him more.
And that he listened.
He'd listened. Not tactically. Not processing for command value. He'd listened the way you listen to someone whose voice you find yourself wanting to hear again, which was a thought he immediately put down like a weapon in a room where weapons weren't allowed.
It bothered him that the leaders hadn't seen fit to tell any of the militia units what they knew.
That was the anger he was permitted to have. Clean, military, appropriate. Command withholding operational intelligence from units in the field was a failure of structure, the kind of arrogance that got warriors killed, and he could be furious about that without it touching anything else.
The Lucian were on Earth.
He'd heard it from her first. A human servant, ears open while the powerful talked past her like she wasn't there. She'd told him without hesitation, her voice steady, her eyes finding his.
And they were beginning to mass for attack.
He stood in the corridor a long time after she told him. Not because of the tactical implications, though those were severe. But because she'd looked at him like he was someone she trusted with the thing that frightened her.
He didn't know what to do with that. He suspected, and this was the part he'd never say aloud, that he was going to have to figure it out.