Chapter 27: Paperwork and Feelings (A Tragedy)

Cax's POV

Moving her took two hours and nobody noticed, which was the point.

I handled it in pieces, the way I handled everything that needed to happen without creating a visible trail. Guard reassignments first, pulling four people I trusted personally and positioning them at the corridor entry points without explaining the specific reason, just citing the delegation security upgrade that everyone already expected. Then the household staff, a quiet word with the head of the wing about a room preparation, framed as accommodating a staff member with a medical need for quieter quarters. Then the security protocols, updated in the overnight log under general delegation precautions, nothing that would read as unusual to anyone reviewing it later.

By six in the morning it was done and nobody had asked a single question I didn't have a prepared answer for and I sat down at my desk to get back to the trade negotiations that had been waiting since yesterday.

The document was exactly where I had left it. Northern Territories, timber rights, the corrected version that Soren had recovered from my earlier disaster. I found my place, picked up my pen, and started reading from the paragraph I had marked.

Good. This was good. This was productive.

I read the paragraph.

Then I sat there with the pen in my hand and looked at the words without reading them and felt, twenty feet away through one wall and a corridor, a faint warmth that had no business being as distracting as it was.

She was asleep. I could feel it through the bond the way you could feel the difference between a room with a fire burning and a room without one, a low steady warmth that meant she was close and she was safe and she was finally, actually resting instead of lying awake listening for footsteps.

I put the pen down and looked at the ceiling for a moment.

Then I picked it up and found my place in the document again.

Timber rights and export volume. The clause about seasonal restrictions on the northern pass that I needed to either push back on or accept with a counter condition. I had opinions about this clause. I had several carefully constructed opinions about this clause that I had been developing since Soren handed me the corrected draft.

I read the clause.

The warmth was still there. Twenty feet away. Steady and quiet and absolutely destroying my ability to think about seasonal restrictions.

I put the pen down again.

"This is embarrassing," I said, to the empty room.

The empty room offered no useful feedback.

I stood up and walked to the window, which looked out over the east courtyard where two guards were doing a routine check of the perimeter wall. I watched them for a minute, tracking their pattern, making sure the positioning matched the new rotation I had set up. It did. Everything was correct. I had done my job well and the new arrangements were solid and Ava was twenty feet away sleeping safely and I needed to go back to my desk and read about timber.

I went back to my desk.

Forty minutes later I was still looking at the same sentence.

The bond was doing something new tonight, something beyond the usual pull and ache that I had been managing for three weeks. Having her physically closer made it stronger, which I had expected, but the specific quality of it was different from what I had anticipated. It wasn't demanding tonight and it wasn't urgent, it was just present, like something that had finally stopped straining against a distance and settled into proximity, warm and low and steady.

It was the most distracting thing I had ever experienced in my life and I had once conducted a trade negotiation with a fractured collarbone.

I picked up my pen.

Set it down.

Picked it up.

"Cax."

Ryker's voice, outside my door, low enough not to carry down the corridor.

"Come in," I said.

He opened the door and stood in the frame rather than entering, which meant this was a quick check rather than a conversation. He looked at my desk, at the document, at the pen in my hand, and I saw him register what he was looking at.

"How long have you been staring at that," he said.

"I've been working."

"How long."

"A while." I set the pen down. "The bond is stronger with her in the wing."

"I know." He leaned against the door frame. "Zephyr is awake too. I could hear him pacing twenty minutes ago."

"Did you sleep?"

"Some." Which meant no, or close to it. He looked down the corridor toward the room we had put her in, then back at me. "She's settled though."

"Yes." I looked at the wall between my study and the corridor. "She feels calm."

"Good." He straightened. "Try to actually work. We need the Northern Territories response by tomorrow afternoon and you agreed to a twenty year fixed rate last time."

"I'm aware."

"Soren cried, Cax."

"Soren did not cry."

"He had an expression." Ryker pushed off the door frame. "Get it done." He pulled the door shut behind him.

I looked at the document.

Read the clause about seasonal restrictions.

Actually read it this time, properly, the words going in and meaning something, and I had made it through two full paragraphs and was reaching for my pen to make a note when someone knocked on my door.

Quiet knock and uncertain, like the person on the other side had talked themselves into it and wasn't fully committed yet.

I crossed the room and opened the door.

Ava was standing there in dark clothes with a small candle in her hand, her hair loose, her expression caught somewhere between embarrassed and frustrated, like she had argued with herself about this and wasn't happy about which side won.

She looked up at me. Then she took a breath.

"I can't sleep," she said, "and I can feel you being stressed, which is making me stressed, which is making you more stressed, and this is a whole loop."

I looked at her.

She looked back. The candle flame moved slightly in a draft.

"Can you just," she started.

I opened the door wider.

"Don't make it weird," I said.

She walked in.