Page 33 of Laundering Down the Legions
"I love you too."
"Say it like you mean it. Not like you're comforting me. Like you're telling me something I need to know."
I sat up enough to really look at him, at the person under the healer. "I love you," I said. "Not despite the crisis. Not in spite of you being scared. I love you because you're still here. Because you could've let go of Trux and you didn't. Because you could've let me stand there and get grabbed and you didn't. I love you because you keep choosing people, over and over, and it costs you everything, and you choose them anyway."
His arm tightened.
"That's the scariest part," he said. "You love me for the exact thing that's going to destroy me."
"Then we survive it, anyway."
He pulled me back against his chest. "When the bond completes," he said into the quiet, "you'll feel exactly what I feel. You'll know what it costs. You'll carry it with me."
"Yes."
"And you won't try to make me stop. You won't ask me to choose myself over the team."
"No."
"Good. Because I wouldn't stop anyway."
I knew that. I also knew that him knowing I knew, that I wasn't loving him on the condition he'd change, was the thing that made it survivable. It wasn't much. But it was all we had right now.
CHAPTER 18
My first thought walking in was a crime scene. Files stacked in chronological order, photographs pinned in a line, medical documentation laid out in a sequence that built toward something. It wasn't fair to Kearan, who'd clearly spent hours making it precise, but the geometry of it hit me wrong in the way that means bad news is coming.
Kearan stood at the far end of the table, hands flat on the surface, looking like he'd been standing there a long time. Grayson was already there, off to the side with a notebook open.
"Hey," I said, because walking into a room where two people are arranged to deliver a terminal diagnosis requires something, and I didn't have the vocabulary to match what I was reading. "So this is ominous."
"Sit," Kearan said. Not a request. The voice of someone who'd rehearsed this and needed me contained. "I'm going to walk you through it."
I didn't sit. I moved closer instead, scanning without touching. My name was on multiple documents. Dates I recognized and the compound I'd first been taken to after Ro had handed me over to division leaders. "You've been working on this a while."
"Since the bond rejected Ryker. There was a reason the misdirection lasted so long without anyone questioning it."
"He brought me in six hours ago," Grayson said. "Wanted verification before you knew."
"Okay." I sat.
He moved to the first file, hands steady, and I appreciated that, the way he'd channeled rage into clean information delivery. "Your food supply," he said. "I've been tracking it since we found the inhibitor in your system. But I tracked it backward."
He showed me a calendar in his meticulous hand, dates circled, dates with notations, question marks resolving into certainty. "It started about the time you entered division custody. One small dose that you probably never even noticed."
"You're saying someone poisoned me."
"I'm saying someone fed you an inhibitor compound in a way that you wouldn't become suspicious" he corrected, in the voice he used for news that was going to hurt. "Which raises the question of who had access to your food during that time."
Second file. Access logs, kitchen rotations, delivery manifests, all cross-referenced. "I didn't feel right about everything after the bond rejected Ryker, so I started switching out your food provided by the division. Someone had tampered with it."
"Say the name."
"Evelyn Blackwood."
Evelyn. The hard Division woman from the last compound, the one who'd looked at me like I was contaminating her air, who'd been cruel to Rhiot with the precision of somebody who'd made a study of finding the soft spot and leaning on it. I'd spent a lot of energy not confronting her, because some people aren't worth it.
"I didn't remember seeing her at the first compound."
