Signed For An Heir

Elara made breakfast at six-fifteen and was very, very focused on the scrambled eggs.

Not because she was hungry. Not because she had any particular feelings about eggs. But the eggs needed stirring, and stirring required her eyes on the pan, and her eyes being on the pan meant they were not on the kitchen doorway, which was where Rowan was going to appear any minute now, looking like he always looked... composed, direct, already three steps into his day, and she needed one more minute before she had to be a person who could handle that normally.

She stirred. The eggs sizzled. She added pepper she didn't want.

Last night in the car: the rain against the glass, the amber glow of the one working streetlight, the eighteen inches that had become eight, then six, then close enough that she had been acutely, painfully aware of every millimeter. His eyes had dropped to her mouth. Just for a second. Just enough. And then his phone had rung, and he had answered it and become Vale again, the name, the voice, the composure, like the previous thirty seconds had simply not existed.

She had replayed those thirty seconds approximately fifty times between midnight and five a.m.

She was absolutely, completely fine.

She scraped the eggs onto a plate and sat down and looked at them.

"You burned them."

She looked up. Rowan stood in the kitchen doorway in a grey shirt, dark trousers, his hair not quite settled yet. He looked at her plate with the clinical expression he gave most problems that needed solving.

"I didn't burn them."

"The edges are brown."

"I like them slightly brown."

"That explains a great deal about you, actually."

She stared at him. He walked to the coffee machine without looking back, poured his cup, and leaned against the counter the way he did every morning, like nothing was different. Like the car hadn't happened. Like she hadn't spent half the night lying awake counting the inches between them.

She watched him. Looked for tension in his shoulders, in the set of his jaw. Any sign at all that last night had landed in him the way it had landed in her.

Nothing. Coffee. Phone. Ordinary Thursday.

She was, all at once, completely furious.

"Rowan."

"Mm."

"About last night."

He turned. Coffee in hand, leaning easily against the counter, his eyes finding hers across the kitchen and staying there. Calm. Direct. Absolutely giving her nothing.

"The car broke down," he said. "We waited. The second car came."

"That is not all that happened."

"No," he agreed. Just like that. Simply, without deflecting. "It's not."

She waited for the rest. He picked up his phone from the counter and turned it over once in his hand, looking at it rather than at her. When he looked back up, his expression had the particular quality of a man saying something he had already decided on.

"Some things are better handled," he said, "when both people are clear on what they actually want. Don't you think?"

She opened her mouth. Found that no useful words were waiting there.

He looked at her for another moment, held her gaze just long enough that she knew he had said exactly what he meant and wanted her to understand that, and then picked up his jacket from the back of the chair and walked out. Unhurried. Like he had said a perfectly ordinary thing.

The kitchen was quiet.

Elara sat in it alone with her burned eggs and a sentence that was going to live in her head for the rest of the week and possibly beyond.

Some things are better handled when both people are clear on what they actually want.

She turned it over. Both people. Not one. Both.

The worst part, the part she couldn't argue her way out of, was that he wasn't wrong. She wasn't clear. She knew what she had come here for. She knew what the plan was, what the investigation required, what she owed her father. But those things had been perfectly clear four months ago, and the clarity had been eroding since approximately the third week, and right now, sitting in this kitchen, she was not clear about anything except that she was furious at him for noticing.

She pushed the plate away and opened her laptop.

Work. The investigation. The archive. The shell company. Her father. Those were the things that mattered. Those were the things she could afford to want without everything becoming enormously complicated.

She opened a message thread to Maya and typed: Anything new on the routing layers?

The reply came in thirty seconds.

Maya: Oh, you're absolutely going to want to sit down for this one.

Elara looked at the kitchen doorway. Thought about a sentence hanging in the air above an empty space.

She sat down.