Chapter 7 Something wrong with him

The silence that settled between us lasted exactly four seconds. I counted them without meaning to.

Then Sia let out a long, slow breath — the kind that's been held in through something terrible and finally released when the crisis turns out to be a different shape than expected. She looked at me. Then she looked at the ceiling. Then she looked at me again.

"Elara."

"I know what I saw."

"Elara—"

"I know what I saw, Sia." I kept my voice level, which took more effort than it should have. "His hand was on the shelf and I thought — I genuinely thought — that someone had left a body there. That's how it looked. It wasn't pale like a person is pale. It was pale like something had gone wrong. Like whatever is supposed to run underneath a person's skin and make them look alive just — wasn't there."

Sia pressed her lips together. She had that expression she got when she was trying to be diplomatic and finding it a real uphill struggle. "And then?"

"And then he looked around the shelf and it just — came back. The color came back. Like a switch."

There was a pause.

"Like a switch," she repeated.

"Yes."

"Okay." She nodded slowly, with the concentrated care of someone choosing their next words very deliberately. 

"Okay, so what I'm hearing is — you saw a hand, you panicked, and now you think Viktor Stone is some kind of—"

"I'm not saying he's anything. I'm saying I saw what I saw and it wasn't normal."

"It's early in the morning, you slept badly, you've had half a cup of coffee—"

"Sia."

She stopped.

I looked at her straight. "I know what you're doing and I understand why you're doing it. But I'm not hysterical, I'm not projecting, and I am not—" I stopped, because I'd been about to say obsessed, and I already knew she was going to say it before she did.

She said it. "You're a little obsessed with him."

The look I gave her could have stripped paint.

"I am not," I said. Flatly. Finally.

Sia held up both hands in surrender, but the expression on her face wasn't quite surrendering. It was the face of someone who had made their point and was content to let it sit there quietly. I chose not to engage with it further.

I pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes and exhaled. The adrenaline from earlier was still moving through me in slow uncomfortable waves, the kind that don't leave quickly. My heart had only just started settling back into a normal rhythm.

"I have a report due Thursday," I said, dropping my hands. "A client report. Three thousand words on environmental policy and I've written maybe four hundred of them and I went to the library specifically to work and now I can't even—" I gestured vaguely. "I can't go back there."

Sia's expression shifted. The careful diplomatic look gave way to something more familiar — the slight arch of her brow, the corner of her mouth lifting. "Are you saying he scared you out of the library?"

"I'm saying I needed air."

"You ran."

"I walked quickly."

"Elara." She was almost laughing now. The first real, breathing laugh she'd managed all morning, and I would have been glad about it except it was at my expense. "Did you actually run away from Viktor Stone because his hands were pale?"

"That's an uncharitable summary of events."

She laughed. Properly this time. And something in the room changed with it — lightened slightly, lost some of its weight — and even though I didn't join in, I felt the tightness in my chest ease a fraction.

She was still fragile. I could see it in the puffiness around her eyes, the careful way she was holding herself together. But she was upright. She was here.

"I'm fine now," she said, reading something in my face. "I mean — I'm not fine. But I'm better. I'm functional." She pushed herself off the bed and stretched, rolling her neck. "Come on. I'll walk with you. We'll go back together."

I looked at her. "You said you didn't want to go out."

"That was an hour ago and you need me." She said it simply, without drama, which was how Sia always said the true things. "And also — " that almost-smile again " — I want to see this for myself."

"Sia—"

"I'm not going to stare." A pause. "Much."

The campus had fully woken by the time we crossed it. The morning light was doing its dishonest work, making everything look clean and calm and uncomplicated, and I focused on it deliberately — on the light, on the sound of our footsteps, on Sia talking beside me about absolutely nothing of consequence in the particular way she did when she was keeping herself occupied.

I didn't say much. My mind was doing its own thing, turning the same shape over and over without resolution.

The paleness. The instant reversal of it. The color flooding back like the tide coming in — too fast, too complete, too intentional for something that was just a quirk of light or temperature.

He was sick, I told myself. Some condition. There were conditions that affected circulation, that caused blood to withdraw from the extremities under certain circumstances — Raynaud's, something like that. There were explanations. There were always explanations, and I was going to land on one of them and be satisfied with it and stop running the image behind my eyes on a loop.

Except Raynaud's didn't reverse in three seconds. Not like that.

I shook my head. Focus.

The library was warmer than the morning outside, which was the one reliable thing about it. Sia followed me in with her hands in her pockets, glancing around with the mild interest of someone who didn't spend much time there. I chose a table in the middle section — different from the back, different from where I'd been, nothing near that particular shelving unit.

I sat down. Opened my laptop. Pulled up the brief.

Environmental impact assessments in coastal development. Current EU regulatory framework. Cross-reference with the 2021 amendment.

I read the same opening line three times and retained nothing.

I was reaching for my coffee when the shadow fell.

It came from the left. Not the sudden sharp shadow of someone moving fast, but a slow and deliberate one — the kind cast by someone who'd been standing still long enough that it arrived without announcement, already fully formed. The light around me simply changed.

Then Sia's hand closed around my arm. Light fingers. A small press.

I looked up.

Viktor was standing on the other side of the table.

He was taller than I always expected, which was ridiculous because I'd seen him enough times to stop being surprised by it. But up close, in the flat institutional light of the library, the fact of him had a different quality than it did across a seminar room or in the brief charged seconds of a corridor. He wasn't looking around. He wasn't doing what people did when they found themselves standing at a stranger's table — that small performance of uncertainty, that social softening. He was looking directly at me. Still, and certain, and entirely without apology.

He cocked his head, slightly to the right.

"I want to talk to you."

His voice was quiet. It was always quiet. Not the quiet of someone trying to be unobtrusive — more like the quiet of someone for whom raised voices were simply unnecessary. A quiet that assumed you'd pay attention.

From somewhere beside me, Sia made a sound.

It was brief and expressive and I knew without looking that her face had arranged itself into something between delight and mischief. I would deal with that later.

Right now I couldn't speak.

I had thought — when I thought about it, which I'd been trying not to — that the anger would be the thing that carried me through any interaction with Viktor Stone. It had been doing that for days. The anger at his dismissal in that first seminar, at the incident in the nightclub hallway, at the cool and absolute indifference he seemed to carry as a personality trait. The anger had felt reliable.

But up close like this, it had company.

He was — the word that arrived was unfair, and it was the most accurate word I had. The angles of his face in this light. The particular darkness of his eyes. Looking at him and being angry at him at the same time required more compartmentalization than I was apparently capable of at seven-forty in the morning, and for one deeply inconvenient moment they existed in me simultaneously — the anger and the pull of him — and I genuinely didn't know what to do with either.

I was still working that out when he moved.

There was no warning. No shall we, no follow me, no extension of social courtesy. He simply leaned forward slightly, closed one hand around my wrist — not rough, but completely decided — and pulled me upright like the question of whether I was going to stand had already been answered in his head and simply needed catching up to in the physical world.

My chair pushed back. My bag was on the floor. I was standing.

Viktor was already moving toward the door.

My feet went with him before my brain had signed off on the decision, which was its own kind of humiliating, but some instinct recognized that the grip around my wrist wasn't going to release regardless of what I said inside a library, and I had what remained of my dignity to consider.

I shot a look back at Sia over my shoulder.

She was sitting at the table with both hands wrapped around her coffee cup, watching me get pulled toward the library exit with an expression of pure, undisguised entertainment on her face. She raised her cup slightly, like a toast.

I mouthed something at her that was not printable.

She grinned.

The morning air hit us as Viktor pushed through the door and stepped onto the path outside, and he stopped there — released my wrist, turned to face me, and waited.

My heart was going at something close to twice its resting rate. I didn't know if that was the adrenaline or the anger that had finally resharpened itself now that I was out of range of his face, or something else entirely that I refused to name. I straightened my sleeve where he'd held it and looked at him, and I made sure the look was level.

"You could have asked," I said.

He studied me for a moment. Whatever he'd brought me out here to say, he was weighing how to begin it.

"You saw something," he said. "This morning."

It wasn't a question.

The back of my neck went very still.

"I don't know what you're talking about," I said.

Viktor looked at me. The expression on his face was not quite patience and not quite impatience — something that existed in the narrow space between them. Like a person who has waited a very long time for something and has stopped being surprised that waiting is required but hasn't fully made peace with it either.

"Yes," he said. "You do."

The morning stretched between us. Somewhere behind me the library doors opened and closed for someone else, and the ordinary world went on doing its ordinary thing.

I held his gaze and said nothing.

And Viktor Stone looked back at me with those unreadable eyes and waited, as if he had all the time in the world — more of it, maybe, than I could imagine.