What he knows now

"You knew," Bastien says. "This whole time."

It is not a question. He is looking at me the way he looks at contracts with hidden clauses, like he is already three steps past the surprise and deep into the calculation of what it costs him.

We are in Nadia's office. She has moved to stand beside her desk with her hands clasped in front of her, the body language of someone waiting for a verdict. Bastien is in the doorway and I am between them and the space feels very small for three people carrying this much.

"I found out eight weeks ago," Nadia says. "When I confirmed the pregnancy."

The word lands.

I watch it hit him. His face doesn't change the way most people's faces change. There is no gasp, no visible crack. Just a stillness that gets a degree colder, and his eyes move from Nadia to me, slow and deliberate, and stay there.

I don't look away. I decided years ago that I would not be the person who looks away first in this building and I am not starting now.

"How far along," he says. Not to Nadia. To me.

"Eight weeks."

A muscle in his jaw moves once.

"And you were going to leave today without telling me."

"Yes," I say. No apology in it. No explanation either. Just the flat truth because he does not get to stand in that hallway having signed my exit papers this morning and then look at me like I owe him disclosure.

Something shifts in his expression. Not anger. Something more uncomfortable than anger, the specific look of a man who knows he has lost the right to be upset about something and is upset anyway.

He steps fully into the room and closes the door behind him. He doesn't move toward me. He goes to the window, the same one I stood at ten minutes ago, and he puts one hand on the frame and looks out at the ordinary street below.

"Tell me about Wolfe," he says.

Nadia takes him through it. The decade-long search, the disappearances, the call this morning. She speaks in the careful, factual way she has, no drama, just information, and I watch Bastien's shoulders get tighter with every sentence even though his back is to us and he probably thinks I can't see it.

I can see it.

I have spent three years learning the language of his body because his face gives so little away. The set of his shoulders is the real conversation with Bastien Rourke.

Right now they are saying he is furious and trying very hard not to show how much.

When Nadia finishes he is quiet for a long moment.

"The call came through pack security routing," he says finally. "That means Wolfe has someone inside our network. Someone who gave him access to the internal line structure." He turns from the window. "This wasn't a probe. He was showing me he could reach us."

"I know," Nadia says.

"How long until the suppression compound is ready?"

"I can have the first dose prepared within the hour. It will dampen the Volana signal for roughly seventy-two hours. After that it needs to be repeated."

Bastien nods once. Then he looks at me.

"You're not leaving today," he says.

I feel my spine straighten. "The contract is terminated. You don't get to tell me what I'm doing."

"I'm not telling you what you're doing. I'm telling you what the situation is." His voice is controlled but there is an edge underneath it that I recognize, the sound of a man choosing words very carefully because the less careful ones are right there. "If you walk out of this building today, you are unprotected in open territory with a Volana signal that Cassian Wolfe has already confirmed. You are eight weeks pregnant. And whoever he has inside our network will report your exit the moment you step outside."

"I understand the risk."

"Do you." It is not a question.

"Yes, Bastien. I am the one carrying the blood he wants. I understand the risk considerably better than you do."

He looks at me for a long moment. The kind of look that used to make me feel like he was reading something written in a language he hadn't decided whether to learn.

"Then stay," he says. "Not because of the contract. The contract is done. Stay because it is the practical choice until we can suppress the signal and identify Wolfe's inside contact."

"And after that?"

"After that you can do whatever you want."

I almost laugh. Not because it's funny but because three hours ago I was on a staircase with pregnancy news and a smile I had practiced in the mirror and now I am standing in a doctor's office being asked to stay by the man who spent the morning arranging my departure.

The world has a very specific kind of humor.

"I'll stay seventy-two hours," I say. "While the first suppression dose runs. After that we reassess."

Bastien nods. That's it. No relief visible, no gratitude. Just the nod of someone filing an agreement.

I turn to Nadia. "Can we do the first dose now?"

She moves to the cabinet on the left wall and begins preparing, and I sit back down in the chair across from her desk because my legs have been standing through a lot this morning and the baby, even at eight weeks, makes its preferences known when I push too hard.

Bastien doesn't leave.

He sits in the chair beside the door, not close to me, not hovering, but present in the way he sometimes was in the evenings when I would read in the library and he would come in under the pretense of getting something from the shelf and then simply stay. He never called it staying. He would just be there, in the chair closest to the lamp, doing something on his phone, and the room would feel different with him in it.

It feels different now too and I resent that. I resent how easily my body recognizes him as a fixed point when he has spent the entire morning proving he is anything but.

Nadia prepares the injection with the quiet efficiency of someone who has done precise things in tense rooms her whole career. She comes to me and I roll up my sleeve and she cleans the inside of my elbow with a cotton pad that smells sharp and clean.

"Small pinch," she says, the way she always does even though I have never once flinched at a needle.

The compound goes in cold. I feel it move up my arm like water under ice, a strange spreading numbness that isn't painful but isn't nothing either. Nadia withdraws the needle and presses a small square of gauze to the spot.

"You may feel a little tired in the next hour," she says. "That's normal. The body pushes back slightly when the signal is dampened."

I nod and roll my sleeve back down.

Bastien is watching me from the chair. Not the careful watching he does in meetings, where he looks at everything and shows nothing. This is different. This is the look from the stairwell window, the one with the crack in it.

I button my cuff and meet his eyes.

"You had a question," I say. "You've been sitting on it since Nadia told you about the pregnancy."

He is quiet for a beat.

"Was it before or after your father came to see me?" he asks.

The question costs him something. I can hear it in the way he keeps his voice flat, the extra work that takes.

I hold his gaze.

"After," I say. "Six weeks after."

He nods slowly like he is cataloguing that information and what it means and what it changes.

My phone buzzes in my pocket. I pull it out expecting the car app rescheduling confirmation.

It is not the car app.

It is a text from a number I don't recognize. No name. Just eleven words that make the cold from the injection feel warm by comparison.

It reads: I saw you go in. I'll be here when you come out.