It started with exhaustion.
Not the dramatic kind. The specific grinding exhaustion of a body doing two jobs simultaneously — the ordinary work of a person with a life and a compound and a training schedule and a pack bond running at full current, and the work underneath all of that, the quiet consuming work of growing something.
Petra had pulled back the sessions. Darius had made sure she ate. Kira had brought things to the east kitchen that she described as *sustaining* and which tasted like someone who loved her had made them carefully.
All of it was right.
And I was still tired.
The tired was fine. The tired was what it was. What was not fine was what the tired did to the buffer between what I was thinking and what I said out loud.
Darius and I had been in the study all afternoon
