The tooth of the gear kissed brass and the room exhaled.
Oil lived on Asha's fingertips, lemon-metallic and clean, softening the pad of her thumb where the brass plate had nicked her. She leaned over the skeleton clock until her breath fogged the lens, the workshop's lamplight ribboning across the bench in gold. Dust made constellations in the beam. Rain wrote slanted script down the window.
Someone was at her back.
She sensed him the way a violin senses the bow—by the air changing. Most men shifted when they entered her space. This one set his weight and refused to sway, still in a way that announced discipline, not fear.
"Clockmaker," he said.
Asha didn't turn. "Boots off the clean stones."
The voice didn't move. Leather creaked—kid gloves, tight at the knuckles. He glanced down; she could feel it, the pause in the air, the tiny apology that never formed. Rain slid from his coat in quiet rivers. The room began to smell like cold wool against warm brass, the old duet of winters in a city that never stopped paying its debts.
"What is it?" she asked. Not his name. Not why the guards were waiting in the hall, breath held like men on ice. She meant the thing that brought him into a small room when he owned a palace full of large ones.
"The Regent requires your hands."
She set the screwdriver flat, ribbed handle catching the light. "My father is unwell."
"It's about time," he said. "And a marriage."
The word bent the room before it reached her. Asha turned. The Regent, Kairon Velde—pale where the storm had not touched, rain darkening the hem of a black coat that should have frightened her more than it did. The sharp plane of his cheekbone softened by lamplight. A pale seam across his right palm, healed ugly. Eyes that traveled like inventory: windows, sketches pinned in a swarm, the locked top drawer of the cabinet, the map of tools laid with a soldier's care. Then her.
"You came to propose in a workshop?" Asha asked. "How devastatingly practical."
He did not smile, but something at his mouth eased, as if the idea liked him. "You will be safe. Your father's debt will vanish. In return, you will build me a clock."
"Clocks are all I build," she said, hearing the shakiness she hated and smoothing it with dry humor. "But none that marry men."
"A device," he corrected quietly. "That forgets."
Asha wiped her thumb with a rag. The nick stung; she preferred pain she could name. "Clocks don't forget. People do."
"People are compromised," he said. The words had the pared-down quality of someone who spent them carefully. "I require a mechanism that erases a single thread when wound with a key. No madness. No fog. A clean absence."
She took a step closer. His pupils widened the barest fraction; his shoulders stayed square. His eyes did not drop to her mouth, which told her he had trained them not to. "Which thread?"
"That will be in the contract."
He watched her like a tactician studies terrain. She watched him the way a watchmaker studies a stubborn spring: not for one failure, but for a pattern. He wore power like a well-made coat. He kept his hands still when most men reached. He stood near heat and did not flinch.
"Why me?" Asha asked.
"You hear what other people only see." His gaze lifted, not polite now—aware. "Your pieces do not keep time. They persuade it."
The windows shivered with rain. Far down the corridor, a guard moved and then remembered not to. The room shrank to the circle of lamplight and the spaces between their words. Asha set the rag down.
"If I refuse?"
"The debt-holder serves a man who likes public lessons." His jaw moved once. Not a threat; a fact he hated to say. "You will not refuse."
She wanted to ask if he had ever learned to beg for anything. Instead she lifted her hand and reached for him. He didn't step back. She took his right wrist—glove soft, bones steady—and turned it, palm up. The scar caught the light and told her it had been earned badly and mended worse.
"Old," she murmured.
He let her hold him the time it took a thin second hand to move two steps. His body was warm beneath winter fabric. When she released him, he flexed once, as if testing whether the memory had lodged in the muscle.
"My father," Asha said. Her voice thinned and she pulled it back. "You can protect him."
"I will sign it," he said. "Ink thick enough to make the page heavy."
She moved past him, clean scent of cedar and cold air trailing her like a sleeve, and lifted the key that hung from a nail by the cabinet. He did not stop her. The brass key knew her fingers; she had filed it for her father years ago when locks were a luxury and drawers were cheaper secrets.
The top drawer slid open. Inside lay a ring—plain gold, warmed by old wood—and a small polished plate engraved with a single word: **ASHA**. The strokes were shallow, as if the hand that made them had not trusted itself to press hard.
She felt him watch the back of her neck. The skin there grew attentive.
"You have never been here," she said softly, not turning.
"No."
"You have never touched my tools."
"No."
"But this is my name in my drawer." She closed her fingers around the ring until the circle pressed into the soft part of her palm. "Who put it there?"
"The city watches the talented," he answered. "Sometimes it… anticipates."
She looked up and saw in the cabinet's mirror a version of him that had almost smiled once. The lamplight made his eyes less law, more man. She wanted, foolishly, to ask if he slept. Whether he knew how to laugh without checking who was listening. Whether he had hands that remembered warmth when they were empty.
Instead she slid the drawer shut and squared her shoulders, the way she did when a spring fought and she refused to lose. "If I build what you want, I own its key."
"You will keep the key," he said, and she watched something loosen in his stance, as if he had offered the smallest piece of himself and found it did not kill him.
"And the marriage?"
His breath left him as if he had turned toward a window just to look and remembered there was a drop. "We will not make a show of it."
"I don't want a show," she said. "I want respect."
He held her gaze until she could count the gold flecks around the darker center. "You will have it."
Asha nodded once, the way she did before solder met metal. She washed the oil from her hands. The water in the basin remembered copper and turned the skin of her knuckles pink. When she dried them, she realized she'd been bracing against a cold that had nothing to do with the weather.
"Your rules?" she asked, because power came like this—quiet, and then everywhere.
"No balcony after dusk. No visits to the east corridor." His voice wore protocol like armor. "You will keep a guard. You will ignore the court's attention. You will tell me before you… experiment."
"And your rules for yourself?" Asha leaned back against the bench, palms on the wood, chin lifted. The body learns to look brave before the mind does.
He stilled. It was subtle, that inward check a man makes when he meets a wall he thought was a door. "I will not lie to you," he said finally. The admission sounded new in his mouth, and it fit.
The lamp fluttered once and steadied. Rainbeat softened to a hush like fabric being folded. Somewhere beyond the window, the city inhaled, exhaled, and went on counting its coin.
Asha slid the ring into her pocket. The cool gold lay against the heat of her thigh, a private promise she had not yet decided to keep. She took her coat from the peg, shrugged it on, and reached for the umbrella with the lacquered handle her father had carved when her mother still sang at the sink.
"Where are we going?" the Regent asked.
"To tell my father I'm marrying time," she said, and let herself smile because it was easier to face a storm if you made it yours first. "And to bring my best small files. If your clock is to forget, it will need a memory finer than yours or mine."
He stepped aside and gave her the door with a soldier's courtesy and a man's attention. In the hall, the guards arranged themselves into the shape of safety. Asha walked into the rain, the Regent a half step behind, and the city raised its gray face to watch them go. The umbrella took the first shock of cold. The street smelled of wet stone and new iron.
Asha did not look back at the window. She pressed the ring into her palm until the circle left a mark, and she kept walking until the rhythm of her footsteps synchronized with the quiet animal beating inside her chest.
The clocks are still ticking in the shadows. Step closer and hear them first on Patreon **@rosavyn**.