Page 75 of Suite 7

She’s fully resting against me now, her weight settled into my chest the way it does when someone has stopped managing how they appear and simply let themselves be held. Her breathing is slow. Her hands have unclenched. The sharp, watchful quality she carries everywhere is completely gone.

I should call her a car.

She needs her own bed. Her own space. The privacy of coming back to herself without an audience, even a trusted one. That’s sound aftercare practice, distance after intensity, room to come back to herself without the weight of being watched.

I know this. I’ve known it for years.

But she’s this far into subspace, this open, every defense stripped down to nothing — and I’m supposed to send her out into the world like that.

Sending her home in this state isn’t aftercare. It’s abdication. And I don’t abdicate.

I tell myself this with great conviction.

I’m still telling myself this when I shift her in my arms and stand.

She makes a small sound at the movement, not quite a protest, not quite a question. Her head drops against my shoulder.

I carry her down the hall without deciding to.

My bedroom. My bed. Where she has never been.

I lay her down and pull the covers up around her, and she makes no move to stop me, no sharp comment, no instinctive reach for her armor. She goes where I put her, and when the blanket settles over her she lets out a slow breath. Not quite a sigh.

I straighten. Watch her, then turn toward the door.

“Where are you going?”

Her voice is different. Stripped of everything she usually puts in it, the precision, the wit, the readiness.

“I’m letting you rest,” I say.

A pause. In that same voice I’ve never heard before: “Stay. Please?”

My chest breaks open, the way a door gives when the pressure on both sides equalizes.

I turn back.

I cross to the other side of the bed and get in beside her, and she curls into me before I’ve even settled, one hand finding my chest, her head tipping into the space below my jaw like she already knows it belongs to her. She opens her mouth.

“Sleep, Vee.” My voice comes out rougher than I intend. “You’ve earned it.”

She closes her mouth. Then closes her eyes.

Within minutes her breathing deepens and she’s gone, her whole body loose against mine, the kind of loose that only happens when someone stops bracing for something.

I lie in the dark and hold her and think about tonight.

About a woman who broke a rule and then told me immediately. Not because she thought I’d find out, but because the telling mattered to her. Who held position through multiple strikes and asked for each one. Who came apart on the Cross and trusted me to catch her.

Marcel’s voice arrives uninvited: there’s a difference between an arrangement and a relationship, Kane.

I know the difference. I do.

I look at Vera sleeping against my chest, at the woman who always has something to say, who has never once in the nine years I’ve known her backed down from an argument, who came here in a black dress trying to look like she wasn’t terrified and stood her ground anyway.

An arrangement, I tell myself.

The word sits in the dark and does nothing useful.