She didn’t look winded. Or hurried. Or like someone who’d sprinted across half the city to retrieve vials. Instead, she crossed the room, claimed the far corner, and sat down with the air of someone settling in for a pleasant evening. From her satchel, she produced a small bundle wrapped in cloth, untying it and revealing fresh blood oranges and figs, already split open.

  She held an orange out to me without meeting my eyes. “For you,” she said. “You looked like you’d forgotten to eat.”

  “Accepted,” I said. Then I looked up at her. “Speak.”

  Lightning blazed outside, painting the space with a flash of white. Thunder rolled through the alley, rattling glass and wood alike.

  Anabeth’s smile didn’t falter. If anything, it turned playful, as though she’d just been handed a challenge.

  She chuckled under her breath. “You know,” she went on, peeling a fig with her thumb, “most knights, from what I’ve read, are terrible with silence. They fill it with oaths. Or threats. Or very loud reminders of who they think they are.” She bit into the fruit. Juice stained her fingers red. “You don’t.”

  Still, I said nothing.

  Anabeth licked her thumb clean and finally looked at me properly.

  “I used to get into trouble a lot, Sir Knight,” she said. For a second, I thought she was finally revealing something I wanted to know about her. Then she continued, “I took shiny little things. They didn’t have to be valuables. They just needed to… glint the right way. I didn’t know when I started it, or why. I only knew that once I noticed something like that, I couldn’t stop noticing it. My eyes would keep finding it again. And again.” Her gaze drifted then toward my armor. “And again. It was as though some things were… speaking. And I was rude enough to answer.”

  She was definitely not answering my question.

  “I’d take shiny rocks, faceted quartz, rings left on windowsills, seals pressed into warm wax. Once—purely by accident, mind you—a signet belonging to a minor noble family whose crest I later learned was not meant to be handled.” She shrugged. “Eventually my mother decided curiosity required discipline. So she sent me to the strictest instructor she knew, a woman who believed order was something you could beat into the world if you struck it hard enough and often enough.” Anabeth glanced up at me then. “I decided to see how much of that philosophy she could withstand.” She plucked a fig free. “I borrowed her teaching wand. Not stole—borrowed. I returned it promptly! I wouldn’t steal anything, good Sir, oh no. But the instructor was not happy, and she responded by installing a tracking orb so I wouldn’t ‘borrow’ anything else.”

  I had the peculiar sensation of standing in a confessional I had never asked to build. She spoke easily, lightly, as if recounting a childhood prank, but the shape of it felt uncomfortably familiar. Like penitents who talked around the sin they feared most, offering adjacent truths to test whether judgment would fall.

  I kept my face still. I kept my voice locked behind my teeth.

  A Knight of the Saints was trained to hear testimony without indulgence and wrongdoing without relish. We were not judges—judgment belonged to the Saints—but we were witnesses. And witnesses, above all, were not meant to enjoy what they heard.

  So I listened.

  I told myself it was duty. That I was weighing risk, not character. That I was cataloguing potential danger, not forming an opinion of the woman casually admitting to thefts that ranged from pebbles to noble signets. I told myself that curiosity was not guilt, and charm was not absolution.

  “So, naturally, I borrowed the orb,” she said.

  The instructor, it turned out, had become legendary levels of furious.

  Anabeth recited it with fond precision: the shouting heard three corridors away, the list of violated principles delivered at full volume, the disciplinary regimen that followed: drills until her arms shook and correction strikes administered with the confidence of someone who believed suffering was synonymous with learning.

  “It hurt,” she said lightly. “At first.” She bit into the fig. “But pain is just another signal, isn’t it? A sensation insisting on being noticed. Once I realized that, it stopped being… persuasive.” She tilted her head. “I learned a small spell. It rerouted the response and turned pain into something bearable. I hadn’t felt pain since. My instructor was apoplectic!”

  “You will speak your mind clearly, or you will not speak at all,” I demanded.

  “That’s the end of the story,” Anabeth said brightly, as if she’d just finished a charming anecdote over tea. She wiped her fingers on the cloth and folded it with care. “All I’m really saying is that I’m… rather impulsive.” She glanced up at me. “I still get into trouble, occasionally. But I try very hard to behave now. I think I’ve been nothing but well-mannered since we met, don’t you?” She smiled, smaller this time. “Unfortunately, reputations are like tracking orbs. Even when you remove the original, people insist on following the signal.” She spread her hands. “So if you’re wondering whether I mean trouble, no. I just have a long history of finding it first.”

  “You did not speak your mind clearly.” I tapped on my thigh.

  “Well… we all have our evasions, Sir Knight,” she said. “Mine just happens to involve avoiding authorities who ask inconvenient questions about artifacts. I could tell you why I don’t let city registrars take my name. All I ask in return…” She peered at my face, “is that you tell me what’s under the helm.”

  Ah. She got me.

  “But you don’t seem to be ready for that conversation.”

  The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

  I already knew there was nothing I could say that would truly rattle her. Anabeth didn’t spook easily, and threatening to walk away over something like this might finally backfire on me.

  So I did the minimum. Enough to defend my honor. Not enough to escalate.

  I willed myself to say, ‘It’d do well for you to not push. A knight is always ready, in time.’

  “Push me once more, and you shall know how it feels to be shackled by the neck,” I actually said.

  Somewhere far above the town, lightning tore across the sky.

  What? Wait. No—

  “Ah—” The whimper slipped out of her before she could stop it. She bit down on her lower lip, hard enough to color it, eyes meeting mine with something dangerously bright behind them.

  Ah… blasted.

  The notifications kept blooming at the edge of my vision—gauges, percentages, interpretations I had not asked for.

  Enough.

  Ceralis. Please disable affective inference. All of it. Romance is not a game.

  I prayed that it worked.

  There was a pause so brief, it was almost petulant.

  I heaved in a heavy inhale. Good enough.

  Anabeth settled her fruits on the table and took a step toward me. “Sir, you always talk to me as though you’re daring me to misinterpret you.”

  That wasn’t my doing! Ceralis, you treacherous mechanism.

  “And yet,” she added, eyes glinting, “you never actually act on it.”

  For a breath, I considered stopping her with my own voice, with Voice Reclamation. But when I looked at her, the thought stalled.

  Anabeth was beautiful. That cursed, beautiful face. The eyes that never quite flinched; the way she stood too close without touching. And that was when the pattern surfaced, unwelcome and undeniable.

  I had never once refused her nearness.

  Not the shared room, even knowing she’d engineered it. Not the flower, which I’d accepted and later dismissed as task compliance. Not the way she slung over my shoulder, or leaned in when explaining something she knew perfectly well I already understood.

  Do I really not want this?

  Then she said, “Sir Henry. Why don’t you just see for yourself whether I want to be shackled?”

  But she wasn’t infatuated with me. She was looking at the construct, the knight, the armor, the voice that bent rooms and made danger feel ceremonial. A thing shaped by vows and reputation and the Saints’ expectations.

  As a Knight of the Saints, I could not allow that illusion to take shape any further.

  I must stop this—

  Then she sat on my lap.

  The sudden intimacy of it shocked me into stillness. Her warmth, the softness of her, the way she fit against me as though it were the most natural thing in the world. She was all curves and heat, her skirts pooling over my thighs, her hair a curtain of silk that brushed my gorget as she leaned in.

  Before I could speak, her fingers brushed her throat.

  The simple choker she wore reshaped itself into a shackle, elegant rather than cruel. She didn’t fasten it.

  Instead, she guided the loose end of the chain into my hand and closed my fingers around it.

  “The choice is yours.” She licked her lips.

  Ah. My knees are suddenly so weak.

  Long gone were the thoughts of declining her. The fire in her breath had seen to that. I spoke, not as the man who trembled beneath the armor, but as the Knight I had sworn to become, wrapped in the conviction of a vow that no longer remembered mercy.

  I activated Voice Reclamation anyway.

  “Deceitful creature,” I said, “are you of criminal intent?”

  She leaned in, closer, closer, until I could feel the heat of her lips, a hairsbreadth from mine. “I've never hurt a soul, Sir Knight,” she whispered, eyes glinting with that strange, feverish honesty that always bordered on laughter. “And never, for the life of me, will I ever think about doing you wrong.”

  “Then what do you get out of this?”

  She smiled-a faint, wistful curl that almost hid the tremor riding in her breath. “Let’s just say,” she murmured, “I’m a hopelessly disarranged lady with an unhealthy obsession for the impossible.”

  My last line.

  I slid my visor up, showing her the lower half of my face. My very mortal, very human face.

  I said, “Then I regret to inform you that I might not be the impossible you’re looking for, Anabeth.”

  She studied me intently, but there was no surprise, just curiosity, the way a scholar studying a specimen she had already memorized. She must have known I was mortal. There was no way she hadn’t. I was the only one foolish enough to think the helm still made a difference.

  She stared at me longer than any saint ought to permit. The silence stretched, tremulous, unbearable. Her hand rose, hovering just beside my jaw. For a heartbeat, she simply looked at me. Her lips parted.

  Softly, almost apologetically, she said, “I’m afraid I’m in too deep to care, Sir Knight.”

  Deep? We’ve only met for—

  Then Anabeth leaned in for a kiss.