Page 101

Peace itself seemed to make him suspicious.

I had thought Veyr didn’t have a home because a covert operative couldn’t afford one.

I was beginning to wonder if the truth was worse.

Maybe dead men weren’t supposed to need anywhere to return to.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Veyr

Istood beside the window while the trading district moved normally beyond the glass. Workers crossed between buildings carrying packages and food. A freight transport settled onto a platform farther down the street, its engines vibrating faintly through the floor. Somewhere in the neighboring unit, furniture scraped across the floor and someone laughed.

Ordinary sounds.

That was why I had chosen the location.

Ordinary could hide things secrecy could not.

The mountain site had been isolated, fortified, and connected to infrastructure no civilian should ever have known existed. Someone had still queried it.

This dwelling had no concealed entrance. No dormant military beacon. No weapons cache behind a wall. It sat on the edge of a trading district where workers came and went at irregular hours, transports landed often enough to mask unfamiliar engine noise, and no one cared enough about their neighbors to notice one more male arriving after dark.

It was less defensible.

That was not the same as less useful.

Behind me, Talia moved something on the table.

I checked her reflection in the dark glass.

Her hair, brown with a reddish tint where the light touched it, had come loose from its knot at the back of her neck. The line of her shoulders sloped down toward the screen, and I could see the faint crease between her brows that appeared when she was reading something she distrusted. She tucked one strand of hair behind her ear without looking up.

She had just finished eating and returned to the portable terminal. One leg was drawn slightly beneath the chair, her attention fixed on the fragments she had reconstructed from Sera’n’s comparison set.

She had already discovered too much tonight.

Ghost.

The word had changed the way she looked at me, although not in the way I expected. There had been surprise. Suspicion.

Then something worse.

Understanding.

“You’re doing it again,” she said without looking up.

I turned slightly. “Doing what?”

“Watching me in the window instead of just turning around.”

“I can observe the street and the room simultaneously.”

“That was not a denial.”

“It was an explanation.”

“Somehow worse.”