The room waited for the sound of ink the way a throat waits for a scream.
Evelyn stared at the blank line—**WIRE HOLDER:**—and the symbols curling through the page like hair in bathwater. Her wrists were still strapped down, leather biting at bone, so the choice wasn't *sign or don't sign.* It was subtler. Worse.
It was *agree to be used,* or be used anyway.
Dorian Wren stayed leaned against the metal table as if he had all night and all the lives in it. The tablet's glow painted the underside of his jaw an antiseptic blue. The lilies beside it sagged in their wrap, one petal browning at the edge like a bruise forming slowly.
Evelyn's mouth tasted of ash and old pennies. She tried to wet her lips and found only dryness, the body's small betrayals stacking into a wall.
"You're asking for my signature," she said. Her voice came out thin, but she held it steady. "On a document I can't physically touch."
Dorian's gaze flicked to her restraints—acknowledgment without apology. "Touch is not required."
A chill crept under her skin, not from the Cold Palace air but from the implication that consent here was a technicality. She could almost hear the corporate language forming around it: *authorization may be obtained through verbal confirmation, biometric assent, proxy—*
"You want a yes," Evelyn said.
"I want compliance," Dorian corrected gently, as if he were helping her with vocabulary.
The word *compliance* settled in her chest like a weight. Under it, the Wire hummed—tight, bright, alive. It didn't give her Silas's thoughts, but it gave her his shape: a steady pressure, as if he had planted his feet somewhere far north and refused to be moved.
She hated that it affected her. Hated that her ribs seemed to remember him.
Evelyn turned her head toward the glass wall. Her reflection hovered pale and sharp-eyed above the bed, hair unbound like spilled ink. She looked like a woman about to be framed in white and labeled *specimen.*
"You said I'd get choice," she murmured. "Define it."
Dorian straightened, smoothing his sleeve—an invisible crease, a ritual gesture. "You choose how this ends."
Evelyn let out a soft breath that scraped. "That's not choice. That's menu options."
"Call it what you like." He tapped the tablet once, and the contract page brightened, the knot emblem repeating like a brand. "But you understand the parameters. You're intelligent. You've built your life on understanding parameters."
Her pulse thudded once, slow and heavy. The sedative still clung to her muscles like damp cloth, but her mind had teeth. It kept worrying at the same spot.
"You keep saying *debt,*" she said. "You keep showing me maps and spreadsheets like you're selling me a merger. But you won't say who holds the note."
Dorian's eyes narrowed by a fraction. "You've already met a representative."
Mira. Evelyn saw again the cream coat, the pearl clip, the bruise-colored lipstick—softness used as a blade. *The one that remembers. The one that still pays its debts.*
Evelyn's stomach tightened around an emptiness that felt too much like nausea. The pregnancy report flashed in her mind, stamped red like a seal on a coffin.
"She's not Thorne Holdings," Evelyn said.
"No." Dorian's voice stayed smooth. "She's older than that."
Older. Under the glass. Under the org charts. Under the clean city names that pretended the streets hadn't been built on bones.
Evelyn's fingers twitched against the restraints, a small tremor she couldn't fully command. Dorian watched it the way a man watches a readout change—data, not distress.
"You're frightened," he observed.
Evelyn's laugh came out wrong—dry, short. "No. I'm insulted."
"By the terms?" he asked.
"By the presumption," she said, and forced her gaze back to him. "That you can put a knot on paper and call it destiny."
Dorian's mouth curved, not quite a smile. "Destiny is what people call contracts they didn't read."
The Wire tightened suddenly—an internal tug sharp enough to make Evelyn's breath catch. Not pain. Not comfort. A flare of presence, as if someone far away had just been jarred awake.
Silas felt her spike of alarm.
Evelyn used it. She leaned into the tether mentally, not trying to send words—she didn't know if words traveled—but pushing feeling down the thread: *danger, paper, binding.* A heatless panic, controlled but urgent, like a hand pressing against glass.
For a heartbeat, the answering tension on the other end hardened. Resolve turned to readiness.
Dorian watched her face with the patience of a predator who knows the net is already cast. "You're reaching," he said softly.
Evelyn's throat tightened. "You don't get to comment on my coping mechanisms."
"I get to comment on anything relevant to the asset," he replied, and his eyes dipped, briefly, to her abdomen again.
The glance wasn't long. It didn't need to be. It landed like a coin dropped into deep water—one clean sound, then the echo of what it meant.
Evelyn's stomach hollowed. Her body felt suddenly like a vault everyone had keys to.
"You keep calling him an asset," she said, forcing each syllable into place. "And you keep calling *this*"—she couldn't point, so she shifted her bound hands slightly, leather creaking—"continuity. Strategic. Protected. You don't talk like someone who wants to save a family. You talk like someone who wants to own a bloodline."
Dorian didn't deny it. He looked mildly impressed, as if she'd finally stopped pretending she could moralize her way out.
"Ownership," he said, "is simply responsibility with enforcement."
Evelyn stared at him until her eyes stung. The seam-lights made everything too clear: the sterile white, the black leather, the lilies beginning to wilt, the tablet glowing like a small altar.
"And Silas?" she asked, voice low. "Where does his responsibility end and your enforcement begin?"
A pause—small, controlled. Dorian's gaze slid toward the glass wall, to where cameras might be nested in seams, listening for the wrong kind of truth.
"Mr. Thorne is… exceptional," Dorian said at last. "Exceptional people have exceptional liabilities. They require… anchors."
Evelyn felt the Wire hum at the word *anchor.* Her chest tightened with a sudden, sour understanding.
"You want me to be the anchor," she said.
Dorian's smile thinned. "You already are."
The sentence slid under her skin like a needle. Evelyn's mind flashed backward—Silas lifting the drink in those surveillance stills, her hand over the glass, the pale powder dissolving. She'd tried to make herself the blade. The curse had made her a tether instead.
Her breath came shallow. The ash dulled sensation, but it couldn't dull the way her heart seemed to press against her ribs, seeking space that wasn't there.
"You think he'll come if you pull the Wire," Evelyn said, and the words tasted like iron. "Because he always has."
Dorian's eyes held hers. "He will come because he cannot help it."
The lilies' scent thickened, sweet and sickly. Evelyn's gaze drifted to the bouquet. A petal had fallen against the wrap, limp as a discarded glove.
"Then why do you need me to sign?" she asked.
Dorian's voice softened, almost kind—crueler for it. "Because there are degrees of coming."
Evelyn's stomach lurched. She swallowed hard, ash turning the motion into punishment.
"You mean," she said carefully, "you can summon him… but you want to *bind* him."
Dorian's eyes gleamed faintly. "Binding is stability."
"And if I refuse to stabilize him?" Evelyn asked.
Dorian's gaze dropped again—quick, clinical—to her abdomen. "Then we stabilize the situation."
The room seemed to tilt. Evelyn felt, in a sharp flash, the outline of what "stabilize" meant in corporate mouths: containment, extraction, removal of variables. The variable was her. The variable was the child. The variable was Silas's inconvenient loyalty.
Her hands tried to curl into fists and met leather instead. The restraint creaked. Pain flared. She welcomed it—pain proved she was still inside her body, not just a vessel being negotiated over.
"Say it," Evelyn whispered. "Say what you'll do."
Dorian's expression didn't change. "I don't threaten. I outline outcomes."
Evelyn's vision blurred at the edges, not from tears—she refused that currency—but from the sudden pressure behind her eyes, the body's stupid response to fear.
The Wire tightened again, and this time it carried something different: a low, contained surge, like a man standing up too fast after sitting in the dark. Not panic. Not confusion.
Action.
Silas, somewhere under the name Zhou Yan, shifting from waiting to moving.
Evelyn's chest constricted. She didn't want him here. She didn't want him dragged into this white tomb and turned into a signature. She didn't want—she didn't want anything she wanted, because wanting had always been punished in her family.
Dorian watched her face as if reading a report. "You feel him," he said.
Evelyn forced her mouth into a line. "I feel a migraine."
He ignored it. "You can help him," he continued, voice quiet, persuasive in the way a knife can be persuasive. "You can bring him back into the fold and keep him alive."
"Alive," Evelyn echoed, and the word tasted like a debt itself.
Dorian's gaze didn't waver. "And you can keep yourself alive. And the child."
The mention of the child hit like a hand closing around her throat. Evelyn's breath caught, then came out in a thin, shaking exhale she couldn't fully control.
The prose of her mind—corporate cold, clean—began to fray at the edges. Underneath it, something older stirred, velvet-dark and wet. A mausoleum feeling. A sense of candles lit in sterile seams.
She heard Mira's whisper again: *The city does. The old part under the glass. It always collects.*
Evelyn's voice dropped, hoarse. "If I agree, you reverse the Ash."
"Yes."
"And the restraints?"
Dorian glanced at them as if they were décor. "When appropriate."
"And you let me speak to him," Evelyn said, testing the words like a key in a lock. "Not through the Wire. Directly."
Dorian's eyes sharpened. "Why?"
Evelyn's pulse hammered once. She chose her lie carefully—clean, plausible. "Because if you want him to stop running, you need his trust."
Dorian studied her face, the way men like him studied markets: looking for volatility, for hidden reserves.
"And you can provide that," he said.
Evelyn let her mouth curve slightly. "I'm his wife."
The title, in her mouth, tasted like ash and blood.
Dorian's gaze drifted to the contract again. "Then say yes."
Evelyn stared at the blank line. The symbols seemed to move if she looked too long, knotting and unknotting like something alive.
She thought of Silas's steadiness—how it pressed against her from far away, unearned and relentless. She thought of the child's existence inside her, silent and already priced. She thought of the city's hidden veins converging on this white room.
Her corporate coldness tried to assemble a plan, but the gothic thing underneath it—fear dressed as lace—kept whispering: *If you sign, you won't just bind him. You'll bind yourself. You'll bind the child. You'll bind the future you've been clawing toward.*
Evelyn lifted her chin a fraction. The leather creaked as her wrists shifted.
"I'll agree," she said, and felt the words scrape her throat raw. "On conditions."
Dorian's eyes gleamed with quiet satisfaction. "Name them."
Evelyn breathed in lilies and antiseptic and the faint metallic memory of blood. The Wire hummed, taut as a violin string.
"First," she said, voice steadying as she spoke, "I want Miss Lark back in this room."
Dorian's expression tightened—just a hairline. "Why?"
"Because she knows how to speak to the old part," Evelyn said, and the sentence came out darker than she intended, like a prayer. "And if you're going to force me to negotiate a debt, I want someone here who remembers the language."
For a moment, the room held its breath again.
Then Dorian's mouth curved, thin and approving, as if she'd finally accepted what kind of world this was.
"You're learning," he said.
Evelyn stared at him, and behind her ribs the Wire pulled hard—Silas moving, Silas bracing, Silas coming closer to the edge of whatever cage he'd built for himself in the north.
Evelyn didn't know yet whether she was saving him or sharpening the knife.
But she could feel the ink waiting. And she could feel the city, under the glass, leaning in to listen.