"Would you like me to ask differently?"
Dean stopped.
That was the problem with Arion. He could be impossible for ten minutes and then, without changing tone, step directly onto the precise weak point under the argument.
Dean narrowed his eyes. "You make that sound suspiciously simple."
"It is simple."
"No," Dean said. "Nothing involving you, me, and monarchy has been simple in weeks."
Arion crossed to one of the cabinets near the inner wall.
Dean's suspicion sharpened immediately. "What are you doing?"
No answer.
Of course.
Arion opened the cabinet and withdrew a narrow dark case.
Dean looked at it.
Then at him.
Then back at the case.
And because he was not stupid, because he knew exactly whose family habits Arion had absorbed at inconveniently formative ages, and because he had seen enough of Saha's royal culture to know when an object was about to become a political statement dressed as intimacy, his pulse gave a traitorous, immediate kick.
"No," Dean said slowly.
