Chapter 5

Alastor

I had been more right than I knew.

The residence was in Rosedale.

It was not visibly a fortress. That was the point: the architecture of security, at the level I operated at, worked best when it was invisible to the eye and present in the infrastructure. The building looked like what several of the adjacent properties genuinely were, a large, private home behind a stone wall and a gate that read private residence in the discreet way of somewhere that didn't need to announce itself.

Inside, the gate was reinforced steel behind the stone facing. The wall had sensors every four metres. The grounds had a rotation system that Kade managed personally and reviewed quarterly. The building itself had safe rooms on three floors, a private server room in the basement, and a medical suite on the second floor that I had required after a situation three years ago that I did not think about when I could have avoided it.

Julian came through the gate and read the residence the way he read everything: cataloguing it. His eyes moved across the facade in a pattern I recognised from watching other people perform security assessments, except that Julian wasn't trained in security and was doing it anyway, from instinct.

Mapping exits. Of course he was.

"Your room is on the second floor," I told him. "East-facing. Private bathroom. The lock is a keypad; you set the code yourself."

He looked at me briefly.

"I set it myself," he repeated, making sure.

"You set it yourself," I confirmed.

The line of his shoulders dropped by perhaps three degrees. He looked back at the residence. "Whose rooms are adjacent?"

"Mine are on the third floor. The second floor east wing is yours. Kade's quarters are on the ground floor."

"And the rest of the house?"

"Common areas. The kitchen, dining room, and my study on the second floor west wing. You have full access to common areas at all hours. My study requires a request unless the door is already open."

Julian processed this with the quiet efficiency of someone inputting data. Then he picked up his go-bag, which he'd refused the offer of a car with his belongings, which told me the go-bag contained everything he considered essential, which told me something about how he had learned to live. He followed Kade toward the entrance.

I watched him cross the threshold of my residence. I thought, with the particular neutrality I applied to things I needed to be neutral about, that I had not had another person in this space for an extended period in a very long time.

The last person had been Dorian.

I did not think about that further.

The dinner situation had not been planned as a dinner situation.

I ate at seven. This was a routine so old it had become structural: seven PM, the main dining room, a meal prepared by whoever was on rotation in the residence kitchen, eaten without the phone, without documents, because I had learned in my mid-twenties that the only reliable way to prevent the brain from eating itself was to give it a daily period in which the work was simply not permitted.

Julian appeared in the dining room doorway at six fifty-eight.

He had changed: the charcoal suit from the wardrobe, fitted with the accuracy I'd specified when I'd had Serena pull his measurements from his tailor's records, which he presumably didn't know I had done and which I would not be mentioning. He looked….

I returned my attention to the water glass I was already holding and considered the sentence I had just not completed.

"I didn't know if this was…. I can eat in my room," Julian said from the doorway. "Kade said dinner was at seven. I wasn't certain whether that was an invitation or just information."

"Sit down, Julian."

He sat. Across from me, at the long table that could have seated twelve and currently seated two, the space between us had the specific quality of a silence that was aware of itself.

The food arrived: lamb, roasted vegetables, bread, and Julian looked at his plate with the expression of someone running a brief internal calculation before picking up his fork and eating with the same quality of functional attention he'd given the breakfast tray that morning. Not pleasure. Fuel.

"You haven't eaten properly today," I said.

He looked up. "I ate…."

"Half a tray at seven AM. Nothing since."

A pause. A muscle in his jaw worked once and then released. The look of a person who wasn't accustomed to being noticed in that particular way and didn't know where to file it.

"I was working," he said.

"You can work and eat."

"Noted," he said, in a tone that was perfectly polite and communicating something slightly more layered than politeness, and I found, unexpectedly, that this was more interesting than deference would have been.

We ate in silence for a moment.

"The forty-seven entities," he said. "I've been through eighteen of them. The skimming pattern holds across all of them, same timing architecture, same flag-avoidance methodology. Whoever this is, they've been at it for at least fourteen months."

"My review team flagged it as irregular eight months ago."

"Then whoever it is accelerated after the first flag." He set his fork down briefly. "That's significant. Most internal fraud either pauses when scrutiny increases or routes around it. This continued. That suggests confidence." His eyes moved to the middle distance briefly, the way they did when he was thinking and had temporarily stopped managing the expression on his face. "They believe they're protected somehow. Or that the evidence isn't enough to be actionable."

I looked at him. "Or that the person in the best position to investigate them would never believe the accusation."

Julian returned from the middle distance. His eyes found mine across the table.

He had blue eyes. I had not registered this correctly the previous night; the lamp had flattened the colour to something more ambiguous. In the dining room light, they were distinctly, cleanly blue, and they were currently doing something precise and watchful that I associated with people who had learned to read rooms for the same reason I had: because a wrong read had once taken exactly the thing they couldn't afford to lose.

"You have someone in mind," he said.

"I have someone I don't want to have in mind," I said.

"Tell me," he said.

"Not yet." I picked up my glass. "When you have the evidence, I'll tell you the name I'm already thinking of. If they match, then we know the forensics are running clean."

He considered this with a flatness that was almost, not quite, approval.

"That's actually the right methodology," he said.

"I know."

He picked his fork back up.

The silence that followed was different from the first one, less aware of itself. We ate, and I asked him about the timeline discrepancy he'd found in Group C, and he explained it with the economy of someone who knew the subject well enough not to perform knowledge around it, and I followed the logic because I had built enough of these structures to understand their forensic anatomy from the inside.

He was good at this.

I had known that from his professional record. Knowing it in a document and sitting across a table from it were different things.

At some point, the lamp caught the inside of his wrist at a low angle. He had his sleeves rolled again, an unconscious habit, the cuffs folded back with the practised ease of someone who worked with their hands, and I saw the edge of the suppressant patch.

Small, neutral-coloured, sitting against the pale skin of his inner wrist like a thing he had long since stopped noticing.

My jaw tightened.

Not at him. I was careful about that, careful in my own chest, in the privacy of my own reaction, to locate the anger correctly. Not at Julian, who had been told in some way and at some point that his natural scent was a problem to be chemically resolved. At whoever had made him believe that.

I knew the specific quality of a shame that had been installed by someone else.

I had watched it be installed.

Julian looked up from his plate and caught me looking at his wrist, and I watched the corners of his eyes pull taut, a brief, involuntary tightening, and then his arm shifted fractionally toward him before it stopped, because pulling the sleeve down would have been an admission.

"I've used them for a while," he said. The tone was carefully level, which meant it was covering something that was not level. "It's just a habit."

"I know what it is," I said.

He looked at me.

"Who told you it was too much?" I asked.

The question landed differently than I had intended. I had intended it as direct; I was always direct, it was the most efficient approach and the least dishonest, but Julian's face told me it had arrived somewhere more specific than directness. Somewhere that had not been opened in a while.

He held my gaze. His mouth opened, something forming behind his eyes, a reflex toward explanation or deflection, and then he stopped himself and looked back at his plate.

"It's not relevant to the contract," he said.

"It's relevant to me," I said.

He looked up again.

I met his eyes and held them, and I said what I had decided I would say since the elevator last night, when the thread of his real scent had come through the chemistry and done what it had done, and I had spent the intervening hours locating the correct way to say this so that it was clear rather than demanding.

"If you are going to marry me," I said, "you have to stop it."

Julian went still.

Not the professional stillness he used in negotiations: the other kind. The kind that was the body processing something it hadn't prepared for.

"My mate," I said, "would not hide his scent."

The word, mate, sat in the room between us and did not move.