Natalia closed the door behind them.
The click was quiet. Deliberate. Not a dramatic sound, just a door shutting, but her chest did something embarrassing when it did.
She turned around.
Satori was already sitting on the edge of her bed, elbows on his knees, head slightly bowed. The hallway conversation had cost him something. She could see it in the set of his shoulders. Not weakness, exactly. More like a man who had been performing for cameras and crowds and four different women all evening and had finally run out of performance.
She knew that feeling.
She was intimately familiar with it.
"Lie down," she said.
"I'm fine."
"You have three cracked ribs and second-degree burn scarring on both forearms and you've been awake for nineteen hours."
"I said I'm fine, Natalia."
"And I said lie down."
He looked up at her. His eyes, God, his eyes were doing that thing where they went quiet. Not cold. Not calculating. Just tired in a way that had nothing to do with sleep.
