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“Nothing important. Whatever happened at school, if I went. What we’d have for dinner. She let me pick, always. My father never let me pick anything.” She caught herself. Something shifted in her face, a recalibration Chris felt through the bond before he saw it, a door swinging shut on a room that had briefly been open.

“Anyway,” she said, standing, brushing dirt from her knees. “We should finish the write-up before dark. Viktor will want the map tonight.”

“Sloane.”

“We’ve covered the whole boundary. There’s nothing left to do out here.”

She was already walking. Chris sat on the log a moment longer, the bond pulling tight in his chest, the warmth of the last ten minutes retreating into something guarded and distant, the way heat leaves a room when a door opens onto winter.

He caught up with her at the tree line. She didn’t slow down, didn’t look at him, kept her eyes fixed on the path ahead like the ground itself required her full attention.

“That was a good afternoon,” he said.

“It was productive.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“I know what you meant.” She adjusted the strap of her bag. “We have a report to write.”

He let it go. He matched her pace instead, walking beside her through the last stretch of trees, watching the compound lights come into view through the branches.

He didn’t push. He’d learned that much, at least. But he carried the memory of her laugh the whole way back, small and unguarded, the sound of a door that had been open long enough for him to see what was on the other side of it.

Chapter 18 - Sloane

The sound of her fists against the bag reverberated through the silence of the training yard.

Sloane worked combinations until her wraps darkened at the knuckles. Jab, cross, hook, reset. She threw a hook that missed the sweet spot and grazed the edge of the bag. Pain shot across her knuckle. She shook it out, reset, went again.

The compound was quiet around her. Past midnight now. The perimeter lamps cast long shadows across the yard, and the only other light was a single window in the east block, a warm square against the dark stone. She stripped the wraps off her hands, sat on the low wall at the edge of the yard, and pressed her thumbs into the sore spots between her knuckles.

Her shoulders burned. Her forearms trembled from two hours of sustained impact. She’d been hoping the exhaustion would settle her body enough for sleep. It had worked before, in the years when sleep required her to be too tired for her mind to reach her. She tested it now, sitting still, letting the cold night air pull the heat from her skin.

Her mind reached her anyway.

She picked the wraps back up. Two more rounds. The bag swung on its chain, the rhythm of it filling the yard, her breathing sharp and controlled in the dark.

By the time she gave up, her hands ached too much to make a fist. She showered in the training block, changed into a clean shirt, and walked the path toward the residential wing.

She stopped at the corridor that led to her room. Stood there with her hand on the stone frame, her hair still damp against her neck.

Kahn had asked for eyes on the west corridor at irregular hours. A moving check, off-schedule, the kind of patrol that kept an intruder guessing. That was a real reason to turn left instead of right.

It was also a lie, because the west corridor ran nowhere near the kitchen.

She turned left.

Her steps slowed as she moved through the older section of the compound, where the stone was rougher underfoot. She placed her weight on the outside of each foot, testing the floor before she committed. Old training, drilled into her by years of moving through a house where being heard meant being found.

It took hours of walking before she made her way to the quarters she shared with him. And of course, she thought as she entered, he was there.

Chris stood at the counter with his back to her. Sleeves pushed up. A mug beside him, full, untouched. He had a blade on a folded towel, running it across a whetstone in slow passes. The sound was quiet, rhythmic, metal on stone, a sound that belonged to a person whose hands needed occupation because his mind had refused to cooperate.

He turned the blade, checked the edge against the overhead light, and went back to the stone. His shoulders moved with each pass. She watched the rhythm of it, the unhurried precision, the way his wrist turned at the end of each stroke to keep the angle consistent.

He set the knife down. Rolled his neck. Pressed the heel of his hand against one eye, and the gesture was so raw, so unperformed, that she felt her breath catch in her throat. He looked like a man who’d stopped pretending he wasn’t tired.

She should have left, slipped past him to her room. She was standing in a doorway watching him with no excuse prepared, and if he turned around now she’d have to account for the expression on her face, which she hadn’t checked and didn’t trust.