Claire POV
I hear it before I understand what it is — a sharp, involuntary sound from the sitting room, not quite a word, the particular noise a person makes when a thing they're doing suddenly stops being safe. I'm down the hall and through the door before I've decided to move.
"Talk to me," I say, already crouching beside him.
"Alec."
"I'm fine."
"I know," I say. "I'm not asking because I think you're not. I'm asking because I want you to know I noticed, and that you don't have to make it a joke on my account." I sit down properly beside him, on the floor, among the ledgers. "You scared me. That's allowed to just be a true thing, without either of us turning it into a bit."
"The power suddenly went out, and I think I lost some of the data Celeste gave me."
He looks at me a long moment, something unguarded moving across his face that I don't think he lets many people see. "Thank you," he says, quieter than his usual register. "Most people would've just asked if the data was intact."
"I don't particularly care about the data."
"I know," he says. "That's rather the point." And he leans his shoulder against mine, briefly, the way you lean on someone you've stopped needing to perform composure for, and goes back to his screens, and I stay exactly where I am, among the cables, for considerably longer than the moment strictly requires.
CELESTE'S POV
The power failed on a night the whole compound had been dreading for a week — a storm large enough that even our reinforced walls groaned under it, rain coming sideways hard enough to sound like gravel against the windows. Half our people were out running emergency checks on the perimeter fencing. I stayed behind, because someone had to, and because I have never once in my life trusted anyone else to handle a crisis as thoroughly as I trusted myself to handle it.
I checked on Jace almost as an afterthought — a box to tick, nothing more, or so I told myself, climbing the stairs with a flashlight in one hand and my sidearm in the other, old habits refusing to loosen even for weather.
He was sitting up in the dark when I opened the door, alert in the way of someone who has learned, somewhere along the way, not to trust that silence meant safety.
"You could have knocked," he said, and there was no real complaint in it, only the dry, testing humor he'd started offering me those past weeks, a little more of it each time, like he was gauging how much I could stand to receive.
"I own the door," I reminded him. "Knocking is a courtesy, not a requirement."
"Noted," he said. "For future kidnappings."
I should have been angrier at the joke than I was. Instead, something in me, tired and rain-soaked and strangely glad to have somewhere specific to be in the chaos of that night, nearly smiled.
The storm rattled the shutters hard enough that we both flinched at the same moment, and something in his face, illuminated only by my flashlight, went briefly and unmistakably afraid — not of me, I understood immediately. Of the sound. Of thunder, or something thunder resembled closely enough to matter.
"You don't like storms," I said. Not a question.
He didn't answer right away. "There was an earthquake," he said eventually, "back when I was starting out. A building I was in came down two floors below where I'd been standing twenty minutes earlier. I've never quite trusted loud, sudden sounds since."
I sat down across from him without deciding to, my back against the wall opposite his cot, flashlight balanced between us so it wouldn't blind either one.
"I didn't know that," I said.
"Why would you? You never asked."
He said it evenly, without any obvious accusation, but something in his face closed as he said it. It was gone quickly enough that I might have imagined it.
I hadn't.
For all the ground we had gained between us, there were still moments when Jace looked at me and I remembered, with uncomfortable clarity, that I was the reason he needed permission to walk through his own bedroom door.
I sat down across from him without deciding to, my back against the wall opposite his cot.
"I didn't know," I said.
"No," he said quietly. "You didn't.".
"Tell me," I said. "About before. Whatever you're willing to give me."
He studied me for a long moment, like he was deciding whether the offer was real or another kind of test. Then, slowly, haltingly at first, he started to talk.
He told me a little about the industry that had made him briefly famous and discarded him just as quickly once he stopped being profitable. He mentioned his mother only once, briefly enough that I understood not to ask the question that followed. He talked about cities he had lived in but never really known, people who had recognized him in restaurants and airports while the people paid to know him rarely seemed to know him at all.
There were things he stopped short of telling me. I noticed every one of them and, for once, let them stay his.
I listened until the storm finally broke somewhere near dawn and the lights flickered back on. Jace looked different in the sudden brightness. More exposed somehow, as though the dark had allowed him to forget for a few hours exactly where he was and who I was to him.
Then his eyes found mine, and something shuttered again. Not completely. Not the way it had before. But enough to remind me that whatever had changed between us that night had not erased what came before it.