Alec's POV
It has been four months since I accepted this arrangement. I got used to the rhythm faster than I'd like to admit. Claire would visit me daily to bring food. I didn't understand why she did. Whatever the reason, Claire started staying longer than the tray delivery required. I noticed it somewhere in the third month, though neither of us named the change out loud for considerably longer than that. She'd set the food down, and instead of leaving, she'd pull the second chair around to my side of the small table and simply talk — about nothing in particular, at first, the ordinary complaints of a woman running half an empire alongside a sister she loved and resented in roughly equal measure, depending on the hour.
"Celeste thinks I don't notice things," she told me one evening, picking at food that wasn't hers while I worked through a column, she'd long since stopped pretending to be interested in watching me finish. "I notice everything. I simply choose which things are worth commenting on, which is a considerably more useful skill than she gives me credit for."
"What have you noticed lately?"
"That my sister has started leaving her study door unlocked in the evenings, when she used to lock it out of habit even when there was nothing in the room worth protecting." She said it lightly, the way she said most things that actually mattered to her, dressed up as idle observation rather than the confession it clearly was. "I have a theory about why. I haven't decided yet whether I'm going to share it with her."
"Maybe you should let her get there on her own."
"Maybe," Claire said, studying me with the frank attention she gave everything she found interesting. "You're careful with my sister. I've noticed that too."
I did not have a ready answer for that, and she seemed to find my silence answer enough, because she laughed, a short, genuine sound, gone as quickly as it arrived, and stood to leave. She paused at the door the way she nearly always did, as though she couldn't quite make herself walk through it without one final word.
CLAIRE'S POV
I use Alec, initially, as an excuse to stop pretending I have anywhere better to be at eleven at night, which is how most of my genuine friendships have started, if I'm honest about it.
"You're doing that thing again," he says, the third night I wander in and drop onto the floor near his cables without being invited. "Where you sit there looking bored so I'll ask what's wrong, and then you get to pretend you weren't fishing for the question."
"I don't fish."
"Everyone fishes. Some people just use worse bait." He doesn't look up from the ledger, "What's wrong."
"Nothing's wrong. I'm simply avoiding a conversation with my sister about a captive who's currently more interested in her than in me, which is objectively the correct order of things and somehow still irritating."
"The pretty one or the quiet one?"
"There's only one pretty one, and he's currently downstairs being catalogued like a rare bird by my very serious sister, who has apparently decided flirtation is beneath her even when it's convenient." I say it lightly. It doesn't entirely land that way, and Alec, infuriatingly, notices.
"You liked him."
"I liked the idea of him for approximately eleven days, which is roughly ten days longer than I usually manage with anyone who requires actual conversation." I pick up one of his the ledgers and go through them, mostly to have somewhere to put my hands. "It's fine. I traded up. I got the accountant's son, who at least has the decency to be simply awkward instead of complicated."
"Rough life," Alec says, entirely without sympathy, which I've decided is his best quality. "Being bored by two hostages instead of one."
"You're supposed to be on my side."
"I'm on the side of whoever's currently letting me use their sitting room." He finally looks up, and there's something disarmingly direct in it, no calculation, no careful weighing of what I want to hear.
"For what it's worth, I don't think you're bored. I think you're annoyed that your sister found something you didn't, and you're calling it boredom because that's a smaller thing to be annoyed about."
I consider being offended. I decide, on balance, that he's right, which is worse.
"When did you get so perceptive," I say instead. "I thought you were just the boy who reads ledgers."
"You think I don't watch people first? Everyone's password is a story about themselves they don't think anyone's paying attention to." He goes back to his book. "Yours would probably be something obnoxious. A number. A joke only you'd find funny."
"Try me."
"I'm not wasting a good guess on your actual phone. I'll save it for when I need something from you." He grins, quick and unbothered, and I find myself laughing before I've decided to, which hasn't happened with anyone in this house in longer than I want to admit.
It becomes a habit faster than most of my habits do — eleven o'clock. He doesn't ask me to be anything in particular, which is, I'm beginning to understand, its own kind of rare in a house built almost entirely out of people who need something specific from each other to justify the space they take up.
Celeste needs Alec's numbers. I needed, or thought I needed, whatever it was Jace never quite let me have. Alec doesn't need anything from me at all, as far as I can tell, except someone to talk to while he works, and it is, against every instinct I have about how relationships in this family are supposed to function, refreshing.
"Tell me something true," I say, one night, watching him work. "Something you wouldn't tell Dax."
"Dax doesn't ask questions like that. Dax asks whether the job's done."
He considers it, actually considers it, which I notice and appreciate. "Fine. True thing. I didn't grow up wanting this life. I wanted to build video games. I was good at it, actually, got into a program for it, the real kind, not the kind you pay your way into. Then my brother got into some debt with people considerably less patient than your sister, and I found out I was better at just doing what my father did than building systems, and here we are."
"Where's your brother now?"
"Safe. Somewhere that isn't here. That's the whole reason I do any of this." He says it without heat, without the particular bitterness I'd have expected from someone reciting the story of how they got dragged into a life like ours. "You?"
"Me?"
"Your true thing. Fair's fair."
I open my mouth for something easy, something charming and slightly false, the kind of answer I give most people who ask me anything real, and find, sitting on his floor at eleven at night with nothing in particular to prove, that I don't actually want to give him that one.
"I don't know who I'd be if my sister didn't need me for something," I say instead, and it surprises me more than it seems to surprise him.
"Everything I've ever built in this family, I built because she needed someone who could do the parts she can't, the warmth, the charm, the part where people believe they're being taken care of instead of managed. I don't actually know what's underneath that. I've never had to find out."
Alec doesn't say anything comforting, which I'm grateful for, because I think I'd have hated it. He just nods, like it's a normal true thing to say, and goes back to his ledger, and after a moment says, "For what it's worth, the boredom thing you do with people. That's not managing anyone. That's just you, being restless." A beat. "I think you'd be fine, underneath it. Just louder about being unsure than most people are."
It isn't much. It shouldn't matter as much as it does. But sitting there with him, I find myself wondering when exactly this stopped being something I did to pass the time.
~
I flirt with allies because it disarms them. I flirt with rivals because it unsettles them, makes them wonder whether I'm serious or simply toying, and men who are wondering are men who are distracted, and distracted men make mistakes I can use. I flirted with Jace, that one arranged night, for reasons considerably more personal and considerably less strategic. Pure, uncomplicated wanting, the rare kind I allow myself only occasionally, given how carefully I otherwise manage every other part of my life.
Alec was different though. I noticed him noticing things. The way he tracked exits in a room the way my own men were trained to. The way he watched Celeste's household with the patient, cataloguing attention of a man deciding, slowly, whether it was safe yet to stop expecting it to turn on him. I found myself, more than once those first few month, inventing small reasons to walk past whatever room he'd claimed for himself, and telling myself each time it was simply curiosity about a piece I hadn't finished assessing.
~
"You flirted with the supply courier for twenty minutes this morning," Jace told me once, entirely too amused with himself, once our own strange dynamic had settled into something easier. "The man delivers vegetables."
"The man delivers vegetables and information," I corrected. "You'd be surprised what a courier hears, moving between houses all week."
"And Alec?" he asked, watching me with a directness I hadn't earned from him yet. "You don't flirt with him at all. I've noticed."
"I don't know what you mean," I said, considerably too quickly for a woman who prides herself on never being caught off balance.
"I think you know exactly what I mean," Jace said, gently, and let it go the way good almost-friends learn to let things go, understanding there was more underneath it than either of us was ready to dig into yet.
~
It's two weeks later that Alec actually needs something from me, which I notice immediately, because Alec asking for anything at all is rare enough to feel like weather changing.
"I need a favor," he says, catching me in the hallway before I've had my coffee, which he knows better than to do unless it's genuinely urgent. "There's a name in one of the accounts I'm tracing, Korean, transliterated badly, whoever typed it clearly didn't speak the language. I can't tell if it's a person's name or a business name written wrong, and it matters which, because one of those tells me who's actually holding the money and the other tells me nothing at all."
"And you think I can help because—"
"Because you speak three languages and I've heard you swear in Korean exactly once, badly, and I'm hoping that means you know someone who can actually read this properly without me having to explain to Celeste why I need an outside translator for a document this sensitive."
I do know someone, an old contact of mine, a woman who used to do restoration work on documents for people who preferred their provenance stay vague, and who I trust considerably more than I trust most people who aren't already living under this roof.
I make the call. It takes forty minutes and a favor I'll owe for considerably longer than I'd like, but the name comes back clean: a person, not a company, a mid-level courier Alec's been trying to place for three days.
"You just saved me a week," he says, when I bring it back to him, and there's something almost boyish in how genuinely pleased he looks about it, nothing performed in it at all. "I owe you."
"You already owe me a phone password guess."
"I still haven't wasted that one on you. I'm saving it." He grins, and then, more seriously, adds, "I mean it, though. Thank you. Most people in this house would've made me explain why I needed it three times before they'd lift a finger."
"Most people in this house are exhausting," I say, and mean it more than the joke suggests. "You're not. It's nice, honestly, having someone here who just asks for the thing instead of making me guess what they actually want."
"Careful," he says. "Say something like that again and I'll start thinking we're friends."
"God forbid."
But I think, walking away, that it's already true, and has been for longer than either of us has bothered naming out loud, the first friendship I've built in this house on nothing more complicated than two people who like each other's company and don't need anything else from it.