Page 60 of Taken By the Alien Killer
“—Ahem.”
It cuts like a blade through silk. We rip apart as if burned. I slide down the wall; he steadies me without looking, a habit that hurts more than the stone. The room snaps back into armory: racks of weapons glinting in civil rows, the inventory reader still beeping its idiot metronome, the stink of oil suddenly loud. My slate lies on the floor, the transfer notice still glowing up at us like a snitch.
Sneed stands at the top of the narrow stair that overlooks the armory, lean and immaculate, slate tucked against his ribs like a prayer book. He does not descend. He does not smirk. His face is a master class in not having an expression. Only his crest spines are a fraction flatter than usual, a micro-tell I clock and hate myself for knowing.
“Seneschal,” Rayek says, voice scraped raw into something official. He drops his hands away from me like I’m fire, steps back so fast the air between us cools by degrees. Shame rolls off him in hot waves he can’t entirely hide. He turns, shoulders locking into the posture of a soldier about to be shot for the record, and in the split-second before armor finishes sealing over his face, I see him put himself away.
“Commander,” Sneed replies, bland as tea. “Lady Star.”
I want to bite him. I want to laugh in his face. I want to grab Rayek by the front of his shirt and drag him back because I am not done, we are not done, we just started. “Do you ever knock,” I ask, and it comes out too steady to be anything but dangerous.
“The armory does not have a door to knock upon,” he says, the smallest knife of dry humor, then slides the blade home. “It does, however, have cameras, inventory logs, and a schedule, none of which include—” he flicks his eyes down, just once, at my bare feet and disheveled hair “—this.”
“Put it on the calendar,” I snap.
“Noted,” he says. “In the meantime, the ambassador’s supper requires your timely attendance, my Lady.” He tips the slate in his hand a millimeter. “And the armory requires… air.”
I think of a hundred things to call him and none of them will make this better, so I go for what I can hit. “You heard us arguing from upstairs,” I say, closing the distance between us and the bottom of his stair with three hard steps. “You waited.”
“I gave you as much dignity as time allowed,” he says, neither apologetic nor proud. “Now I am giving you a second kind.”
“That would look a lot more like privacy,” I say, heart pounding in my ears, skin too tight. “Which you do not get to be the broker of.”
“On the contrary,” he says mildly, “that is almost exclusively my job.”
Rayek moves; the motion is abrupt and controlled, the way a bomb disposal tech decides to quit before he blows. “Permission to be excused,” he says, not to me, not even to Sneed—more to the idea of this house and its eyes. He doesn’t wait for the answer. He scoops my slate off the floor and sets it on the nearest bench without turning it off; the blue wash paints his knuckles ghostly. “My Lady,” he says, and the honorific lands like a brick between us. He turns and leaves in three silentstrides, out past the racks, through the door, into the corridor where the lemon smell lives. He doesn’t look back.
Fury hits so hot it’s almost cold. I’m shaking, not from fear, not from shame, not from anything that would win me points in a polite memoir. My hands tremble because I’m trying not to sprint after him and scream, and because Sneed is between me and the door I want and I refuse to give him the satisfaction of seeing me run into him like a teenager.
“You will say something sanctimonious now,” I tell him, heat under every syllable. “Something about duty and protocol and the optics of a baron’s daughter pressed against a wall in the armory by her bodyguard.”
“I was considering, ‘there are kinder altars on which to break a heart,’” he says, and for a heartbeat his voice is almost gentle. Then it isn’t. “But yes. There will be a conversation about duty. Preferably not here.”
“I’m not ashamed,” I say.
“I can see that,” he says dryly. “Shame is rarely your first instinct. It is, as you may have noticed, often his.”
My throat tightens, but I will not cry for Sneed; I will not cry at all. “He loves me,” I say, and it is both a triumph and a plea. “He said it. You heard.”
“I heard two people,” he says, “choosing the most dangerous path through an already perilous garden.” He straightens his slate with a tiny, fussy motion. “And I heard a transfer notice chiming on the floor.”
The blue light from my slate is suddenly nauseating. I reach over and slap it dark. “He’s not going,” I say, too fast, like speed will make it true.
“That is not your decision to make for him,” Sneed replies, maddeningly calm. “Any more than the rest has been his to make for you.”
I hate that sentence. I hate him a little less for saying it so cleanly. “Why are you like this?”
“Because one of us must be,” he says. “And because I like you alive more than I like you happy in the short term.”
“Get out of my armory,” I tell him, which is insane, because it’s the house’s armory and his fiefdom and I am speaking from a place in me that just got slammed open and hasn’t learned manners for the new room yet. “I need air.”
“On that we agree,” he says, and he slides sideways along the stair until he is out of my line and my life for the duration of three breaths. He tips his head, the smallest bow a man can get away with and still call it one, and he leaves, his footsteps vanishing into the stone like a rumor being smoothed down.
Silence lands with its full weight. The inventory reader, finally ignored long enough, gives up and goes mute. The room is hot with our heat and my fury; the oil smell gets into my teeth. I pick up my slate and stare at the blank black rectangle until my face appears in it, flushed and bright-eyed and not ruined. I refuse to ruin.
I plant my hands on the workbench and breathe until the burn in my lungs files itself into order. Tears stack against my lower lids, indecisive; I blink them back so hard my vision sparks. I will not cry, not for the house, not for Sneed, not for anybody who would use water as evidence. My chest hurts with the effort; my mouth still tastes like him. The stone at my back remembers us. The little wild part of me that thrived in the badlands of adolescence sits up, grins a feral grin, and says: okay then.
“Fine,” I tell the empty room. “Fine.”
