CORVIN
The message comes through Marco at the end of the day, five words, could I come to her room this evening, and I finish the border correspondence in half the time it deserves and go.
I go because she asked.
That is the whole mechanism now. Somewhere in these last weeks I stopped pretending there was a version of me that hears Amaris ask and does anything but come, and I am too old for pretending and too tired for it and pretending never sat well on me anyway. It fit like a borrowed coat. I wore it for two weeks at a dining table and called it strategy, and we have already established what it actually was.
Her door is unlatched. I knock anyway, one knuckle, her own custom returned to her, and push it open.
