Page 23 of Taken By the Alien Killer
Everything concerns the household with him. I hook the towel over my shoulder and stand where I don’t have to look up or down to meet his eyes. “You have it.”
“My thanks.” He folds his hands, long fingers intertwined just so. The wind lifts and chooses to skip him. “I will be succinct. There has been… comment.” He chooses the word as if selecting a knife. “Regarding your comportment.”
“From whom.” I keep the words flat.
“From sources whose discretion I will protect, as is my charge.” He lets the pause hang, then continues with that silk-on-bone cadence that makes nobles feel massaged and soldiers feel checked. “You are exemplary in your duties. You have performed under duress with commendable restraint and lethality when required. However.” The word lands with the gentlest little thud, like a child putting a glass down hard enough to make you look. “Your attachment is becoming inappropriate.”
The towel tightens in my fist. I tell my hand to let go; it doesn’t. “Define your term.”
“It is visible,” he says, and the bluntness shocks me more than venom would have. “To those trained to see, to those who love the target of it, and—unfortunately—to those who wish to make narrative of it.” He tilts his head toward the estate as if it were a chorus. “Applause is not the only thing that carries at a garden party.”
“I have not?—”
“I am not accusing you of a breach,” he says quickly, palms open now, then closes them again because he doesn’t like showing his hands. “I am advising you of a perception. Perception becomes risk. Risk becomes incident. Incident becomes history. I arrange against history where I can.”
“You arrange against people,” I say, and my voice goes rough around the edges where I don’t want it to. “You arrange us like dishes.”
“Dishes do not bleed,” he replies, and for one instant I see the spine under the etiquette. “I am not your enemy, Commander. I am the vector by which long-term necessities make themselves known in the short term. The Baron has spoken with you. Now I speak. Your proximity will be adjusted in the schedule. Camera lines will alter. Duties will be rotated such that unchaperoned contact is minimized. If you cannot accept these adjustments—ifyou find the burden incompatible with your sense of self—there are other placements you may consider within the planetary structure.”
“Placements,” I repeat. The towel is going to rip if I keep holding it like this.
“It would be wise,” he says softly, and the softness is the hardest thing he’s thrown. “I am not in the habit of warning twice.”
Heat rises beneath my skin, a pulse beating in my horns like I’ve stood too close to a generator. For one ugly second I want to close the space between us and put my shadow across his careful shoes and see what his posture looks like when the script is gone. I want to tell him that my honor is not a thing he can arrange like flowers. I want to remind him what I am when there aren’t walls or cameras. The part of me that earned these scars uncoils.
I stand very still instead.
“You have delivered your advisement,” I say, each word placed like a brick. “We are finished.”
“As you wish.” He bows a fraction, so proper it makes the impulse to break something travel up my spine like static. “I am, as ever, grateful for your service to this family.” He glances once toward the training room door, where the corridor beyond runs toward the deep interior of the house, and he is gone, the slate tucked back into the curve of his arm, the wind deciding again that he is not subject to it.
The arena empties in a way noise cannot explain. The broken drones look like small animals that trusted the wrong hand. I set them in their cradles one by one, because even wreckage deserves order, and wipe the scuffs from the floor because I was taught to leave a space cleaner than I found it. My hands shake less by the time I finish. The shaking moved somewhere interior, where I can’t see it.
On the walk back to the barracks wing the light shifts imperceptibly into evening. The cypresses throw longer shadows along the parapet; the sea pushes a colder breath up the cliff; the house switches scents again, from day-floral to the night blend that wants to smell like quiet. I pass three guards who pretend not to notice I’m stripped to the waist because they prefer their lives unmarred by commentary. I pass a corridor where a laugh curls and dies. I pass the service door to the kitchen and hear a pot sing as it settles on stone.
In my quarters I wash until the water runs cold and the sweat smell leaves, and then I sit at the small desk that has held more weapon oil than ink and wake the slate. The glass greets me with the Chamberland crest and a row of icons I have avoided pressing for too long. I pressRequests.The menu blooms.Reassignment.The form opens with polite cruelty.
Name. Rank. Unit. Duration of current post. Reason.
I type in a language that was not the first one I learned but became the one I use for anything that needs to be legally binding.Rayek of Vakut. Senior Protector, Household Guard—Chamberland. Ten standard years, nine months, sixteen days. Operational efficacy at risk due to conflict of interest. Request immediate transfer to planetary defense garrison—Akura Central—or nearest frontline assignment where service can be rendered without degradation of performance.
The form asks for supporting detail. I give it the minimum permitted by regulation and no more. I am not confessing to a slate.
Routing preferences:Chain of Command; copy to Seneschal per protocol; copy to Baron per courtesy.The last field is a biometric. I set my palm in the square. The slate takes heat, ridges, scars, the old burn along my lifeline that a medic once called a “signature no one can forge” and meant as comfort. It blinks green.
The cursor sits atSubmitlike a blade held out flat for inspection. I think of the Baron’s map on the ceiling and how he looked at it like a father and a king at once. I think of Sneed’s polish and the spine behind it. I think of Kaspian placing a shore under a tree and meaning it. I think of Star in the training room, eyes gone raw, voice gone steel, hand reaching for the one safe thing she could ask to touch. I think of pulling back like retreat was a virtue.
It isn’t courage to stay where you will fail. It’s ego or stupidity.
I breathe the wind coming through the vent until I can taste the sea again. I put my thumb against the glass.
The slate chirps, soft as a bird. The request packet folds itself into encrypted lines and leaves, a bright point sliding down the connection, gone into the network’s black like a star that decided to fall.
I sit in the quiet afterward with my hands suddenly empty.
Morning findsme where duty puts me: one pace behind and half a step to the left, wearing silence like armor. The estate wakes in layers—kitchen steam and citrus polish, the soft click of service drones along baseboards, the far thrum of the coastal road—and over it all the measured murmur of schedules Sneed has combed straight. I have slept little and trained hard. It doesn’t matter. My body knows how to be a wall even when the mind keeps pulling at the mortar.
The first visit is to a civic exchange hall whose windows drink in the sea. Ladies with pins like small constellations greet Star and Kaspian at the threshold; their perfume is powdered floral, their smiles practiced into gentleness. Kaspian makes the correct courtesies, a bow that breaks exactly where tradition tells it to, a handshake that never lingers. Star’s voice rides theroom like light—warm, a little wry, the kind of tone that lifts people into their best selves without them noticing. I track the perimeter while she asks a woman in a cobalt suit how the storm shelters held last season and if the water purifiers we delivered are calibrating clean. When the answer wanders toward flattery, Star nudges it back to facts. I pretend the pride I feel is professional.
