"I was sent to report on a potential threat. Instead, I am cataloguing the way she breathes. This is either espionage or the beginning of my downfall."
I had been built for silence and not the kind of silence poets wrote about, the soft hush of snowfall or the reverent pause before a prayer. That silence made you sentimental, which was a luxury I could ill afford. The silence I kept was the kind that ate sound: boots swallowed by shadow, breath measured like a trapped thing, the world reduced to the scuffed tip of a shoe and the dull clink of armor you had permission to hear. It kept knives clean and men careless. Which was why it was deeply inconvenient that, for the first time in a long streak of successes, I hesitated.
