The compound was quiet.
Not the held-breath quiet of three weeks of crisis. The actual quiet. The specific, ordinary silence of a Tuesday evening in which nothing was requiring immediate action and nobody was on the road and the archive work could wait until morning and the bond was running at its settled register and Rowan was asleep.
Darius closed the study door.
I looked at him.
He looked at me.
We had not been alone — truly alone, not the alone of sleeping beside each other while the bond monitored the third frequency, not the alone of sitting in crisis rooms — in longer than I could accurately calculate. The months had been so full of people and sessions and arrivals and the compound's warmth that the specific, particular alone of two people with a closed door and no immediate de
