Chapter 28: The Night Shift

Zephyr's POV

I heard her leave Cax's room before the door opened.

The bond gave it away, that slight shift in the warmth of it, like an ember being moved from one place to another. I had been tracking it all night without meaning to, sitting against the wall outside her door with my weapons across my knees and my back straight and my eyes moving between the two corridor entry points the way a proper overnight watch was supposed to work.

Professional, and correct. Nothing unusual about any of it.

The door opened quietly and she stepped out into the corridor and immediately walked directly into my outstretched legs.

She stumbled and I caught her wrist before she went down, my hand closing around it automatically, and she looked at my hand and then down at me sitting against the wall and then back at my hand with an expression that went through surprised, embarrassed, and something she was actively suppressing, all in about two seconds.

"This isn't what it looks like," she said, with enormous dignity.

I looked at Cax's closed door and then back at her and kept my face completely neutral because I was good at that when I needed to be. "I know what it looks like."

She straightened up, her wrist still in my hand for a moment before I let go. "Good."

"He stress-works," I said. "When the bond gets loud. He picks up documents and stares at them."

"I know," she said. "He stared at the same page for twenty minutes while I sat on his floor and neither of us said anything and it was actually fine."

Something about the way she said it, quietly, like she was still slightly surprised by that, made something in my chest settle by a fraction. "Did it help? The loop."

She considered this seriously. "I think so. He seemed less tightly wound when I left."

"His pen was moving when I walked past twenty minutes ago," I said, "so probably yes."

She looked at me for a moment, then at the corridor around us, the dim wall sconces and the quiet and the empty stretch of stone in both directions. She looked at my weapons across my knees. At the position of my back against the wall, straight and deliberate, facing the main entry point.

"You've been out here all night," she said.

"It's a watch position."

"It's four in the morning."

"Watches run through the night. That's what makes them watches."

She looked down at me with an expression I couldn't fully categorize, something between exasperated and something else that she wasn't giving a name to. "Have you slept at all?"

"I don't sleep much."

"That's not what I asked."

"No," I said. "I haven't slept."

She nodded once, like that confirmed something she had already suspected, and pulled her loose hair back over one shoulder and looked down the corridor toward her own door. She was softer than I had ever seen her, the specific softness that came from an hour of being around someone safe when you had been tense for a very long time, and something about seeing it made the Sylvan soul very quiet in the way it sometimes went quiet around her, sudden and complete, like a candle being cupped.

"Is Ryder's man still in the palace?" she asked quietly.

"Yes. But he doesn't know where you are now." I kept my voice even. "Three locked corridor doors between here and anywhere he has access to. I checked them all at midnight and again at two."

"And Ryder himself."

"In the second floor guest quarters with two of my people outside his door." I met her eyes. "He is not getting into this corridor tonight, Ava."

She was quiet for a moment, standing there in the dim corridor in her dark clothes with her candle burned nearly to nothing in her hand. Then she said, not quite looking at me, "What happens when the delegation leaves?"

"We deal with what comes next."

"That's not an answer."

"It's the honest one." I shifted slightly against the wall, adjusting the weight of the weapons across my knees. "Right now tonight is the only thing that matters. Tomorrow is Ryker's problem and he's good at problems."

Something moved at the corner of her mouth, not quite a smile but the shape of one, small and reluctant. "You're very different from him."

"Everyone is very different from Ryker."

"I meant from how I expected you to be." She looked at me properly then, the way she had in the stairwell, like she was trying to see past the surface of something to what was underneath. "When you're you."

I understood what she meant by that last part and I didn't look away from it. "When I'm me," I said, "I'm usually sitting outside your door."

She looked at me for a long moment, then at the wall, then at her nearly dead candle. "Get some sleep, Zephyr."

"I'm on watch."

"You can watch and sleep. Lean against the wall, it's what you're already doing." She turned toward her door and then paused, her hand on the frame. "Thank you," she said quietly, not turning around. "For last night. And tonight."

She went inside and the door clicked shut behind her.

I looked at the closed door for a moment and then back at the corridor entry point and settled my weapons back across my knees and breathed out slowly.

The Sylvan soul was quiet, both of them were, my own and the one that wasn't mine, and the silence was so complete and so unfamiliar that I sat inside it carefully, like something that might break if I moved too fast.

Both of them, quiet, for the first time in years, together, not fighting, not pushing, just still.

Thirty seconds, maybe a little more.

Then the cold one came back.

Not rushing, or urgent, just settling back into place the way something did when it had been temporarily displaced and knew exactly where it belonged.

Its voice was calm when it spoke, which was almost worse than when it was angry.

"You're falling in love with her," it said, somewhere behind my eyes. "This is going to make what comes next very unpleasant."

I closed my eyes and kept them closed and said nothing back because there was nothing to say to something that was telling the truth.

Down the corridor, behind a door that was open by perhaps two inches, a thin line of shadow moved slightly in the gap, like someone adjusting their position, careful and patient and very, very still.

He had been there all night.