015— KAI.

                             ~ KAI ~

The security feed showed her in the east wing at eleven forty-three.

I watched the small screen on my desk 

What was she doing?

Not a general what was she doing. A specific one. Because the east wing was mapped in my head, and at the end of the east wing corridor was a door that led to a space that was mine. 

Only mine. That nobody came into.

I got up.

I could hear the cold before I opened the door.

Then I opened it and she was already on the ice and my first thought was 

“She found the spare skates” 

“Those are too big” 

And my third thought was that I was standing here having thoughts about her skates instead of walking in and removing her.

I watched her.

Just for a moment I told myself.

She was running a sequence, completely unaware of me. No performance, no armor, nothing constructed about any of it. 

Just her and the ice and the low light catching the movement.

Her left edge kept breaking on the turn. Almost imperceptibly.

I noticed and went in.

She didn't hear me. She never heard me. I'd noticed that before, the way she was completely inside herself when she skated, the way the ice took all of her. 

She was mid-sequence when I reached the boards and I stood there.

I should have said something immediately. Should have told her to get off.

I didn't.

I watched her finish the sequence.

Then I said, "Your left side. Weaker than your right."

She spun.

The expression she assembled was a half-second too slow and I saw what was underneath before it arrived. Not fear. Something looser than that.

The mark. The ice helped it, I knew that, I'd known that before I told her, that was why I'd…

"I know," she snapped.

"You've known for a while." I looked at the skates. A towel was above the lace line. 

"You've been correcting it anyway."

"Obviously."

The rink held the silence between us.

"It's almost there," I said. "Another week."

She opened her mouth.

I stepped onto the ice and crossed toward her. I watched her track me and I watched her decide not to step back. 

The decision was visible, a small squaring of her shoulders, and something about that decision did something to my chest that I immediately filed.

I stopped close.

Closer than the correction required.

I knew that. I kept moving anyway.

I reached out and my hand closed around her forearm, repositioning the elbow, and the moment my hand made contact something happened to my pulse that had no tactical explanation. A single hard beat. Then another. My hand was steady. I checked. 

Steady.

Underneath that was not steady.

She'd gone very still.

I could see her breathing change. Shallow and careful, like she was monitoring it.

Her eyes were on my face and not my hand and I was close enough to see things I'd only clocked from a distance. The specific gray of her eyes.The freckles across her nose. The way her jaw was set — always set, always braced, and how it had softened slightly without her knowing it.

My hand was still on her arm.

Neither of us had moved.

My pulse was doing something I was going to address later.

I stepped back.

The distance returned and I could think in straight lines again which confirmed something I was not going to confirm.

"Equipment room," I said. My voice came out the same as always. I was grateful for that specifically. 

*

"Third shelf. Your size."

I left.

I walked back through the east wing corridor and I did not look at my hand. 

I did not think about a pulse that had no tactical explanation and I did not think about gray eyes or shallow breathing or the way she'd decided not to step back.

I was back at my desk for twenty minutes before I accepted that the files on my screen meant nothing to me tonight.

She was still on the ice. The feed showed her on proper skates now, the ones from the third shelf, moving through the sequence again. 

Her left edge broke twice and then on the third attempt it caught and held and she did the full turn clean.

She stopped in the middle of the rink.

Just stood there.

I turned the feed off.

I heard her come back upstairs at one in the morning.

Her door. The lock. Both of them, she always did both, I knew the sound by now. Then quiet.

I sat in my office and did not think about why I knew the sound of her locks.

At one forty-five I finally went to bed.

I passed her door and stopped.

I don't know why I stopped. There was nothing. No sound, no light under the door, no reason.

“Move,” I told myself.

I stood there for another few seconds.

Then I moved.

I lay in the dark and tried the logical things first. The Crew investigation. The northern corridor. The two informants whose information had started contradicting each other.

My brain lasted six minutes.

Then it went to the rink.

The too-big skates. The towel in the toes. The fact that she'd found the equipment room herself and come back out in the right ones without being told twice.

Something about that was… I didn't have a word for what that was.

There's a pull. 

There's been a pull since the bond cracked open on the Briar Falls ice. 

I rejected the bond.

The bond has opinions about that.

I turned the ring on my finger. Nineteen years. My mother's hands pressing it into my palm the night before everything.

 “So you always remember you belong to something, Kai.”

I should not be lying here thinking about a pull.

She's a suspect. A complication. What I'm calling a pull is biological noise, mate bond distress, proximity. It means nothing. It is nothing.

"It's nothing," I said.

Out loud.

To my ceiling.

I looked at what I'd just done and filed it as irrelevant.

                 …

The security sweep was a habit. 

I was on the east gate feed when I stopped.

Rewound.

Played it again.

1:47am. Eleven seconds. A figure was at the exact edge of the camera angle. Positioned there deliberately. Close enough to be caught, careful enough to show it was a choice.

Not my security or staff.

Facial recognition came back in four seconds.

Silvercrest.

They found the mansion.

Not just Briar Falls anymore. The mansion. This specific location. 

I turned the ring once and opened the Crew files and started working because that was what I did. I worked. I planned. I handled things.

Everything else was noise.

I worked until six in the morning before I finally drifted off.

                       …

I heard it before I was fully awake.

Laughter.

From the kitchen, had to be the kitchen. Her laugh first — the real one, unguarded, the kind I'd heard exactly once before through a security feed at midnight, and then Niko's voice underneath it saying something I couldn't make out and then her laughing again.

I lay there for three seconds.

Stared at the ceiling.

Turned the ring on my finger once and got up immediately.