BONDED ENEMIES

Chapter 4: House Rules

He checked the safe first. Double lock, top of the line, the grade that went onto evidence rooms. The signed page was inside, face up: Kestrel's name at the bottom, over the date, over the clause that kept him in this house until the child was born. Silas read it once, closed the door on it, and turned the handle until it seated in the frame.

Then he went back to the mattress.

Kestrel was flat on his back with a forearm over his eyes. The shock had left his hair standing off his skull in a burnt silver frizz, and there was a wet patch on the sheet beside his head, and none of it had done anything at all to his face. Skin like a man who had been kept indoors on purpose. A jaw they could have used on a recruiting poster. A small red mole beside the throat, which Silas had noticed inside a wormhole and had not been able to stop noticing since.

He opened the camera on his terminal and took four shots, circling the mattress for the angles, and he was in no hurry about it.

The face was the one part of this he considered handled. Whatever else had gone on in that hole, the result was going to be presentable.

A month of his own life had gone into that hole as well and come back out with no inventory attached to it. He had a signature now, and a mark on the back of his neck, and a pregnancy, and four photographs. He kept his own books on all of it, because nobody else was going to.

He put the four pictures into the album and locked the album behind a second lock and named it himself. i***t. His own word, entered by his own hand, on a device that never left his body. The album had been empty the day the terminal was issued to him. It held four photographs now, and every one of them was of the same man.

"If you'd signed when I told you to sign," Silas said, "you'd be eating upstairs."

Kestrel didn't move the arm off his eyes. "You did it on purpose." His voice was down to gravel and still carried the whole insult in it. "I signed at two forty in the morning. Two forty. And you still put me on the floor."

"You took your time."

"Four hours is not taking my time."

Silas brought the shackle panel up onto the wall and looked at it. Four locks, all closed. One intensity bar, sitting where he had left it, at the top of the range.

He pressed RELEASE ALL.

* * *

He never got his eyes back up.

Something crossed the room — a shadow, a body, no noise at all — and a hand closed on his wrist hard enough that the joint complained, and then the floor went out from under him. One pull. No warning, nothing wasted, and he was down on his back with Kestrel over him and both his wrists crossed in one of Kestrel's hands above his head.

The angle was wrong.

Silas clocked that before he clocked anything else, because noticing was the job. The man had his weight split between one knee on the mattress and one boot on the floor, holding himself off to the side, keeping the lean while it cost him every bit of his leverage, his center of gravity somewhere out by the window.

Careless.

"Delete them," Kestrel said.

"No."

"Vance."

"No."

Kestrel's teeth came together. Under the burnt hair his eyes had gone from silver to something with a light behind it, which was the face he wore when he had already decided what he was going to do. "I'll say this once, because I'm that kind of person. I don't lose. Somebody gets one over on me and I take it back the same day, and then I can sleep. That's not a threat. That's a personality."

Silas said nothing. He looked at the hands holding his wrists and tested them, which was what he did instead of arguing.

Kestrel's eyes dropped.

Not to Silas's hands, which were pinned. Not to the panel on the wall. Down, to his mouth, and they stayed there a beat longer than anything in the room could account for, and Silas watched him hear his own breathing change.

Then Kestrel came down and kissed him.

It was not a good kiss. Badly aimed, landed hard, and Silas kept his eyes open for all of it, taking inventory — and then Kestrel pulled back and set his teeth into Silas's lower lip on the way out, deliberately, and split it.

Blood, warm, on his tongue. He turned his head and spat onto the sheet.

Kestrel was breathing through his teeth. "Put them away."

"Put what away."

"Your pheromones." He was up on one hand now, which put his weight back on the mattress and his face back over Silas's. "You walk around in heat all day and then stand there and act like it's my fault."

"Get off me."

"Make me."

Silas looked up at him and said nothing and did not move, and after a second Kestrel's jaw set, because there was nothing in the room to push against.

"You smell," Silas said.

It went through Kestrel like a pin through a bubble. He was off the mattress and across the room before Silas had his elbows under him, one arm up, nose in his own armpit, and whatever he found in there changed his face in stages.

"Right," he said. His ears had gone red. "I want a shower. Even a prisoner gets a shower. Isn't that written down somewhere, Admiral Vance?"

Silas got up and put himself back together — collar, cuffs, the line of the tunic, each crease worked out under his thumb while he stood there bleeding from the mouth. It took him under a minute. When he was done he looked like a man who could walk out of that room and onto a bridge.

Kestrel watched him do it with an expression Silas had been looking at across a lot of rooms and a lot of years.

"Follow," Silas said, and walked out without checking.

* * *

The lift was rated for four. With the two of them in it, it read as rated for two. Kestrel put his shoulders against the wall and looked at the back of Silas's neck.

Silas let him.

The mark was there. It was going to be there for the rest of his life: a permanent bite, closed and healed and layered over with a week of new skin, on the back of the neck of a man whose story about it was a dog and would stay that way. Silas watched the floor indicator and ran the numbers he ran most hours of the day. Eleven days to the first hearing. Four days to the next contact. One Alpha in the house, contracted to be at his disposal.

"Third floor," he said. "Your room. Fourth floor is the gym, the range, the sims. Second is the library and the medical room. First is the kitchen and the dining room." The lift climbed. "One through four are open to you. Outside is open to you. The fifth floor is not."

Kestrel waited for the rest of it.

There wasn't any.

The door opened on a room that had never had a guest in it and did not look it: a bed with actual sheets on it, a window with the shutters up, a light on behind the bathroom door.

"Clothes will come up," Silas said. "Shower. I'll have your prints on the house locks before dinner."

Kestrel went past him into the room and stood in the middle of it, looking at the bed like it had insulted him, and then at the window, and then he opened the bathroom door and stood in there a second and came back out.

Behind him, Silas put his hand on the lock panel and began entering the settings himself, because he did not delegate the locks in his own house.

The water came on. Silas finished the third floor, took the fifth floor down to a code he had never written down anywhere, and was closing the panel when the bathroom door opened again.

Kestrel stood in the doorway in a pair of Silas's trousers and a shirt off the same rack.

All of it was wrong. The shirt pulled tight across the shoulders so the seams sat in the wrong places; the sleeves stopped an inch and a half north of his wrists; the trousers were short in the leg and had no room in them anywhere, and he was holding them up at the waist with one hand.

"Whose are these," he said.

"Mine."

Kestrel absorbed that. It took him a second, and then his eyebrows came down. "You gave me your clothes."

"They were new. Never worn."

"They're yours." He looked down at himself, comprehensively. "I'm six-four, Vance."

"Six-two."

"Six-four." He pulled the waistband out and let it snap back. "Two inches, and two inches is a difference everywhere. Especially the underwear. I've got things in there being held against their will."

Silas had heard any number of things said to him across a desk and had a procedure for all of them. He did not have one for this. Something in his chest went tight and hot and stayed that way for a second, and then went back where it lived.

"You're six-two," he said. "It's two inches."

"Two inches is every—"

Silas put his foot into Kestrel's head.

Kestrel went sideways and caught the ankle in both hands and used it. It was an old move. There was nothing in it that Silas did not already know.

For four minutes they went at each other across a guest room that had not been built for it. A lamp went over. A towel came off the rail and ended up on the floor. Somebody's knuckles hit the wall beside the doorframe. Neither of them put anything into it; between the two of them, a fight at that level was a warm-up, and both of them knew exactly what the real ones cost.

Somewhere in it, with Silas's ankle still locked in his hand, Kestrel said, "You know I've got your head on my range at home."

Silas tried to take the ankle back. Kestrel held on.

"Printed it off a news feed. Last year. There's a whole wall of them." He dodged the next thing, which cost him the ankle. "It's the best shooting I ever do. I'm not going to lie to you about it."

Silas stepped back, straightened his cuff, and looked at him.

"Noted," he said.

That was not the answer Kestrel had been fishing for. Silas watched him decide to be annoyed about it, and he was still deciding when the door closed.

* * *

The house told him Ward was at the east door before the chime did.

"Admiral." Ward came in with a case under one arm and a hard-shell box in the other hand, and he set the box down on the table like it was going to go off. "Kestrel's terminal. Forensics released it this morning. I signed for it personally, because I did not want it sitting in a queue anywhere with a label on it."

Silas turned the box around. "Clean?"

"Everything they pulled off it is on file at the Bureau. The device itself is clean." Ward hesitated, which was how he did the other thing, the thing he had actually come to say. "The president's office has the transfer."

"I know the president's office has the transfer."

"They'll ask for a written report. This week, probably." Ward said it to the table. "And when they ask, it goes into a file, and once it's in a file—"

"It stops being mine to lose. Thank you, Ellis."

Ward went pink around the collar and said nothing, which was the correct answer.

"You can take two days," Silas said. "There is nothing here that a house and a physician cannot do between them."

"I'd rather not, sir."

"Then don't."

Ward didn't leave. He stood there with his hands at his sides for a moment, and then he dug in his coat, and what came out was a small book with a cover gone soft from handling, held in both hands like a thing he had already decided to be embarrassed about.

"What is that," Silas said.

"It isn't a file." Ward turned it over once. "My sister had a hard one, four years ago. Nine weeks in the hospital, and I sat in it, and I wrote down everything the doctors said and everything they wouldn't. Then I went and read up on the rest of it, and kept writing." He held it out. "Weeks one to forty and after. It isn't medicine. It's just — the whole thing, in order."

Silas took it. It was heavier than it looked. He opened it at random and got a page dense with a careful hand, every line dated, a number in the corner of each one, and near the bottom a sentence underlined twice with three exclamation marks after it.

"Thank you," he said.

Ward still didn't go.

"Say the rest of it," Silas said.

Ward's hands came together in front of him. "When the child comes. I'd like to be in the record. Not as the attending." He looked up. "As the name you put down. So that if anything ever happens, the list of people they call has me on it, and keeps me on it. After."

Silas looked at him for a while before he answered.

"You're asking a man who has spent his entire working life deciding things for other people," he said.

"Yes, sir."

"Ask me again in a month."

"I'll ask you again in a week."

"You'll ask me again in a month."

"Yes, sir." Ward's mouth did something that was almost a smile, and then thought better of it. He got as far as the door. "The two days. Thank you, Admiral."

"Ellis."

Ward stopped.

"Take them out of the building," Silas said. "That's an order."

Silas put the book in the inside pocket of his coat, where it sat against his ribs, and went to find something to eat.

* * *

He went up to the third floor at seven with the terminal under his arm and the book against his ribs.

He knocked once and opened the door without waiting, because it was his house.

Kestrel was on the window seat with his feet up and clothes on that fit, which meant the fabricator had done a better job than the wardrobe had.

"Your terminal," Silas said, and threw it.

Kestrel caught it one-handed without looking away from the window. Then he looked at it, and then at Silas.

"Everything off it is already on file," Silas said. "The device is clean. If you put anything new on it, I'll read it."

"I'd expect nothing less." Kestrel turned the terminal over once and set it down on the seat beside him. Then he came off the seat and walked the length of the room, straight through the space where Silas was standing, and stopped at the door with one hand on the frame.

Silas turned and went out through it, because the door was where he had been going. The man held it wide and stood in the middle of the opening while he did it, which put his shoulder two inches off the front of Silas's coat for the length of one step.

"Good talk, Vance," Kestrel said, and shut the door on him.

Silas took the stairs. He was in the kitchen with one hand on the doorframe before it reached him that his coat was lighter on the left side than it had been when he put it on that morning.

He considered going back up for it, and then considered that a man who could take a book out of an inside pocket in one step of corridor was not going to hand it back because he had been asked, and let it go.

The house had left an apple on the counter, cut into rabbits. He ate it standing up and had no opinion about the rabbits.

* * *

The kitchen door hit the wall.

"Vance." Kestrel came around the island and stopped on the other side of it, both hands flat on the counter. "The book in my door."

Silas chewed, swallowed, and set the rest of the apple down.

"The physician's," he said. "You can bring it back down to the first floor in the morning."

"I threw it away."

Silas looked at him.

"It was in my coat," Silas said.

"It was." Kestrel said it flatly, like a man reporting weather. "One step of corridor. You want to keep hold of your things, Admiral."

"It smelled like another Alpha, Vance." Both hands still on the counter, laying it out like a case file. "So do you. That's what I want to know. Which Alpha walks through this house."

Silas didn't answer him. He stood with his hand near the plate and looked at him the way he looked at a supply ledger that did not balance.

Kestrel came around the island and took his left hand and turned the palm up.

He did it fast and he did it hard, and then his head came down over it — close, nose all the way in — and he breathed in for a long, slow second.

Silas stayed where he was and let him.

Kestrel's face did something complicated. "There it is," he said, quietly. "That's not yours."

Then he put his mouth on Silas's palm and licked it, one long stroke from the heel of the hand to the base of the fingers, then again across it, then pressed his mouth flat down over the whole of it and breathed.

Silas stood still.

He could have taken the hand back. He had a foot and a free arm and the man's weight was pitched forward; it would have taken a third of a second. He stood there instead and watched him work — the red coming up in Kestrel's eyes, the pupils gone wide, the animal part of him taking the wheel — and he watched him lay his own scent down over the skin, mouth and thumb and the side of the palm, layering it until there was nothing under it.

Then it broke.

Kestrel's eyes came down out of it. He looked at the hand, and then at his own mouth, and then he let go of the wrist and stepped back hard and spat twice onto the kitchen floor and dragged the back of his hand across his tongue.

"God. Vance." He spat again. "What did you put on yourself? Is that a joke to you?"

"I put nothing on anything."

"Then what is it."

"Nothing that concerns you."

"I'm warning you." Kestrel pointed at him with the hand he had just wiped his mouth with. "Whatever that was, whichever Alpha comes through here and hands you books — I'm the Alpha father of that kid. If you want something written down about how you're doing, you ask me, and I write it. That's my job. That's the only job I have."

Silas looked at his own hand, wet, and left it where it was.

"You have a great deal of time on your hands," he said.

"What?"

"Eat lighter." Silas picked the apple back up. "Less salt."

Kestrel heard it. His jaw moved, and stopped, and he stood in the middle of the kitchen with his mouth shut and nothing to send back.

Silas left him there, and carried his hand out of the room held a little away from his body.

* * *

He washed it in his own bathroom with soap, and then with more soap, and then held it under the water until the water ran cold, which was what he did with a thing he did not want to think about while he was thinking about it.

Then, with the hand still wet, he pulled up the day's entries.

The gate log. The door log. The delivery log. The house's own account of every body that had crossed a threshold in this house between midnight and now.

Ellis Ward, once: in at four twenty, out at four fifty.

The supply drone, twice, neither time past the east intake.

Kestrel, who had been on three floors and was not cleared for the fifth.

Nobody else. Nobody at all.

He stood at the basin and ran it properly, because this was the thing he was better at than almost anything else.

The only Alphas in this house today had been Ward and the man on the third floor. He had known Ward's chemistry for six years, at arm's length and closer, in surgeries and in shuttles, and he had been smelling the other one at close range for a week and could have picked him out of a crowd of fifty.

The smell on his hand had been neither.

He redid it four times. It came out the same way every time.

The medical file was not in the house system. It was not in the military system, or the Bureau's, or anywhere a subpoena could go and reach it. He had started it the day of the diagnosis — encrypted, in his own words, one entry for every day of it — and the chip it lived on sat in the safe in the wall of the room downstairs, behind the signed page and both locks.

He went down and opened the safe and added one line.

*Foreign alpha pheromone, left palm, 19:20. No unscheduled entry to the property in the preceding forty-eight hours. Source unaccounted for. Observe.*

He saved it, closed the encryption, put the chip back behind the signed page, shut the door, and turned the handle until it seated in the frame.