Bastion was out.


    Half a bottle of whiskey and a night of holding the city together had ripped him under in thirty minutes. He was on his side, arm thrown across the sheets like he expected her to be there. He twitched now and then, some fragment of a fight reying, but he slept. He deserved to.


    When he drank like that, I never let him sleep alone. Not since we were teenagers. Heavy whiskey meant his chest slowed, meant his body sank too deep, meant Iy awake cataloguing every breath and waiting for the one that didn’te.


    Pride said he could handle it. My paranoia said he’d choke, quit breathing, leave me with silence I couldn’t crawl out of. So even when he passed out face-down, I kept a hand near him.


    Four-oh-eight. Two hours since we walked in. I couldn’t sleep.


    So I reached for the phone.


    Habit. Compulsion. Religion. Call it any word you want; it was the one thing I trusted when my control stopped feeling like control and started feeling like drowning.


    Swipe. Open. Her dot steady, right where it should be: Alexander’s penthouse. Security we vetted. Staff we reced. Windows we upgraded. Locks we changed. If she had to sleep anywhere that wasn’t between us, it would be under our systems. Under my eyes we controlled.


    She was safe.


    It should have been enough.


    It never was.


    My thumb hovered over the microphone icon. The line that turned location into proof of life. One second, I told myself. One breath. Just listen. The way I listened when we were kids and Bastion and I pressed our palms to iron bars to make sure the other was still breathing on the other side of the dark.


    I told myself no.


    I clicked anyway.


    Static. Then the softest inhale. A held pause. The gentle fall. Again. Again. The rhythm I knew better than my own pulse.


    Good girl.


    I took my first real breath all night. The vice around my ribs loosened. Iy there with the phone to my ear, and I counted her breaths like prayer.


    Then the other sound slipped in.


    A voice.


    Male.


    Not Alexander. Not family. Not anyone who should have been there.


    ric.


    I went still in the way only a predator does. Everything in me narrowed to a point—ears, eyes, fists, the cold anger rushing through me and that never stopped tightening unless she was physically under my hands. The phone casing creaked in my palm.


    “Yeah,” ric murmured, close enough to sound like he was standing at the foot of her bed. Smug. “I’m with her now. Sleeps like an angel… pity she’s bing disobedient.”


    Her inhale touched my ear the same second his voice did, and the two sounds shouldn’t exist in the same world. Innocence and trespass. Sanctuary and intrusion.


    My jaw locked until it hurt.


    He kept talking. Like he had the right to narrate her sleep while she trusted the dark.


    “I want a wife that listens,” he said, almost conversational. “Not one who chooses to defy me.”


    Wife.


    I stared at the ceiling so I didn’t put my fist through it. Wife was a dynasty word, sure. A contract word. A performance word. But from his mouth it was theft.


    She wasn’t his wife. She wasn’t his anything.


    She was ours.


    Ours to watch sleep. Ours to guard. Ours to wake with a kiss and a ss of water and a hand at her nape when her head hurt. Ours to keep soft in a world that worshipped breaking everything.


    “You can promise what you want, Alec,” he added, voice pulling back like he was talking to the doorway—quiet, restrained, the kind of careful that told me he was used to getting away with it. “But I’ve been with her for weeks.”


    Weeks.


    My lungs forgot how to work for a full second. The phone made a small noise under my hand. Bastion stirred at the movement, settled again.


    Her inhale again the speaker, soft and unaware.


    “She was quieter at dinner,” ric continued, almost amused. “Even with cocaine. You hear me? They lined the table with powder and she still sat there like a statue. One smile. One sip. Polite. Pretty. But stubborn.” A chuckle. “That won’t hold. She’ll learn.”


    Cocaine. Measuring her obedience by whether sheughed for him while men cut lines.


    My hand shook once. I looked at it like it belonged to someone else and then willed it still. I don’t shake. I don’t ever shake. Not even when I took the backend of an entire social tform just because her video buffered for two seconds and I hated that anything in the world between her and me was unstable.


    Her breath. It was still there. It kept me from breaking the line. From waking the whole city to walk to her in the next five minutes and shoot a man for standing too close to a girl who deserved to sleep without men performing power over her like it was theatre.


    I switched the phone to my other ear and stared at the ceiling again, cataloging every sound, mapping the room by audio the way I do when I’m in surveince mode.


    The floor creaked near her door, someone shifting their weight. The sound of fabric, his sleeve.


    The faintest tick from a wall sensor. We’d installed those. Our men. Our equipment. The small satisfaction of there is nothing here you can use against her that I haven’t already sanitized.


    I could see the penthouse in my head. The new blind system Bastion had orderedst year. The fresh paint in the hall. The textured rug we’d sent because she slips in socks when she’s tired.


    The nightstand drawer with the anxiety pills she never touches. I rece them before they expire, so no dynasty tribunal will ever use it against her.


    The softer sheets we forced in when that brand switched factories and the finish changed by two thread counts.


    He didn’t know any of that. He didn’t know he was walking through rooms built with mypulsion, my code, my single-minded, unrepentant need to control everything that might hurt her.


    He didn’t even know the camera he thought he’d disabled in the corner was a decoy and the real one was the motion sensor in the thermostat.


    He didn’t know the ss wouldn’t shatter for him no matter what he threw, or that the balcony door needed a biometric she didn’t even have because we don’t want her stepping outside alone when she’s lightheaded.


    But he knew where she slept. And he was standing there, narrating her breath to someone else, evaluating her obedience like she was a horse he meant to break in front of a crowd.


    “Yeah,” he said softly, moving foot to foot. “I’m watching her now. She curls her fingers when she dreams. Didn’t know that. Cute, isn’t it? She’ll stop fighting once she understands who leads.” A pause I wanted to fill with a gunshot. “Training takes time.”


    My mouth went dry. The wordnded wrong. He liked it. He liked the way it felt when he tried to fit it around her—training, disobedient, wife. He was building an entire lexicon in the dark, believingnguage alone could make her his. Men always think words are enough until they meet a Crow.


    I listened to her inhale again. Counted to three. Listened to the exhale. Counted to three. She’s safe, I told myself. She’s sleeping. He’s just talking. He hasn’t touched. If he had touched, her breath would have changed. I know what her body sounds like when she’s ufortable in sleep. I know the swallow hitch, the reflex of a hand clutching the sheet. None of those were there. She was peaceful. The only reason she was peaceful was because she didn’t know he was there.


    My throat burned. Because the only reason he was there was because I wasn’t. We weren’t there.


    I closed my eyes, and my head did the thing it always does when something threatens to unmake me: it went to systems. To solutions. To pre-empt the next ten disasters before the first one finished happening.


    Her breath. Again.


    Bastion shifted, a low sound at the back of his throat. He curled closer without waking, palm ttening at my arm like he was checking I was still there. He does that when he’s too tired to move properly. He reaches. It’s a reflex older than most of our scars. I’m not sentimental. I am very good at remembering.


    The phone warmed against my cheek. ric kept talking. Filling the space with himself.


    “She won’t tell me where she wentst night,” his ego sounded bruised by a girl asleep in another room. “Looked through me when I asked. She’ll learn.”


    He loved that phrase. She’ll learn. He believed in a future where she was smaller, because he mistook quiet for weakness. The dynasty trains girls to be calm while they bleed. We were trained to hear that calm and know where the wound is.


    I put his voice on one side of a scale and her breath on the other. His side weighed nothing.


    There were a dozen ways to end this quickly. Walk into his world and tear his throat out in front of the men he uses to feel tall. Leak a rumor to the wrong house and watch him get eaten by politics sharp enough to make him cry for a mother he doesn’t deserve.


    Pull him into a casino conversation and let numbers show him why confidence is a currency and he can’t afford ours.<fnde17> Discover more novels at findnovel</fnde17>


    Lure him into a back hallway and say I’m going to speak now and that means you’re going to listen and then make the listening permanent.


    Quick would cost her. Quick would look like the thing everyone fears when they say Crow with their lips tight. She isn’t a rumor. She’s sacred. You don’t spill the sacred in public.


    So we wouldn’t.


    We’d make this clean.


    We’d make him useless.


    We’d cut every ce where he could stand between her and the door and call that protection.


    We’d make himte untilte felt like humiliation. We’d surround him with smiling men who answered to us and watch his jokes die in empty rooms. We’d let him realize he had no routes left. And when he left—because men like that always leave when they can’t perform power—we’d make sure he believed it was his idea and that leaving her was his proof of love. He’d tell someer that he stepped back for her own good and they’d nod and p his shoulder and we’d smile in the dark.


    The animal in my chest, the one that was trained to be a crow, didn’t want clean. It wanted immediate. It wanted to break the bone in his wrist that held the door-frame and then use that hand to make him open every door he’d ever closed around her. It wanted to kneel at her bedside and say we’re here, angel, sleep, while the floorboards dried where we’d dragged him out.


    Her breath stopped me. Every time.


    She doesn’t need to wake to blood. She needs quiet. She needs to open her eyes and see light she likes. She needs water she will actually drink without me having to coax it between her lips with a thumb at her chin. She needs to know that if she says no to dinner, no one calls her disobedient like a man who’s never been told no by anyone who could make it matter.


    Bastion murmured again, a broken sound like the ones he makes when the memory of cages creeps in too close. I turned slightly and pressed my palm to his arm. He settled.


    “Week after week,” ric was saying, lower now, as if he’d walked further into the hall and turned his mouth away. “Promises don’t move her. That’s the problem with girls like this—too many handlers and they think no one leads. She’ll figure out I’m different. She will.”


    You’re not different. You’re ordinary. Crows kill ordinary.


    I let the thought pass. I catalogued his confidence. I pinned each phrase to the board in my head and drew strings between them the way I do with ports and manifests and missing crates. With her now. Weeks. Dinner. Cocaine. Disobedient. Wife. She’ll learn.


    He wanted a pet. He wanted her to be an object he could point at and say see? Look how good I am at owning. That was the punchline. He wanted a mirror.


    We don’t want a mirror. We want a woman. A mind. A mouth. A spine that pushes back when the world tries to bend her. We built a city so she could be the version of herself the world wouldn’t let her be without fear. We didn’t bring her to an altar to shrink her. We built the altar to hold her weight.


    Her breath changed—barely. A deeper exhale, a longer inhale, the kind thates before the body turns over if it’s free to. I listened with everything I had. If his feet moved closer, I would hear it. If she woke, the first word in her throat would be our names even if she didn’t say them out loud.


    Nothing. She settled.


    I closed my eyes finally, not to sleep, but to let the room arrange itself behind my eyelids with the precision I need to make war without looking like one.


    The phone warmed my cheek. My free hand slid under Bastion’s forearm when his twitched sounded too familiar. The whiskey had dragged him to the darkness.


    Tomorrow he would ask what was happened. I would tell him everything in the smallest number of words necessary. He would go very quiet. The quiet that means he’s decided the shape of the violence, not that he’s doubting it.


    We’d start by making sure breakfast arrives exactly when she sits up, because she forgets to eat, when she is worried and we will not let a man who wants obedience also oversee her hunger. We’d seed a text she never sees that pulls ric across town so she has an empty doorway when she leaves her room. We’d move three men. We’d wipe two numbers. We’d speak to one doctor. We’d send a jacket to her room because she always forgets a jacket and today the wind will hit the ss and we can’t control the wind.


    ric’s voice had faded to a murmur I could barely catch. He said something that sounded like she’ll be easier by the weekend. The words didn’tnd. I stopped listening to him. There was nothing else in his mouth that mattered. He’d already given me everything I needed.


    Her breath filled the line. I counted three more cycles. Four. Five. Bastion exhaled.


    I ended the connection.


    The silence after was heavier. Just the room, and the man who is my mirror, and the thought of her, and a city that would try again at seven, and again at eight, and every hour after until we reminded it who it belonged to.


    I set the phone face down. My hand didn’t shake anymore.


    He thinks he’s been with her for weeks.


    He’s about to learn—she’s been ours all along.