I did not tell Zevran about the meeting until the morning of it.
This was a decision, not an oversight. I had thought about it the night before — lying in the dark, working through the logic of it the way I worked through difficult cases. The mate bond across the distance, Zevran at the Hold doing his evening things. The warmth of it. The slight alarm when I consciously kept something from it.
I was not hiding it from him.
I was doing it first.
There was a difference. A specific, important difference that I needed him to understand.
I texted at six a.m.: *Yvaine messaged me yesterday. I'm meeting him at Sable's café tonight at six. Alone. I wanted to tell you before, not ask permission.*
His reply came in forty seconds.
*Okay.* Then: *Is Sable going to be there?*
*She runs the café
