Youri listened to Alan without interrupting, already certain of where the conversation was headed — Leonora had warned him they intended to use him for exactly this, and it was strange, he thought, how little comfort there was in being right. His gaze dropped slightly as he finally spoke.
"Prime Minister, I know what you want from me. So let's skip the part where you dance around it. You've likely already been through my mind yourself — you had your answer to whatever question you're circling long before I ever set foot in this office." His eyes lowered further, thoughtful now rather than defiant, the way a man looks when he's turning something over that's bothered him for longer than he'd like to admit, something that had nagged at the edge of his attention since long before the guards had ever walked him through that door. "But there's one thing that's been nagging at me since the moment I walked in. How is it I never once noticed the energy you carry — that pull to it, like something trying to draw the air out of the room without anyone noticing. I've only felt something like it one other time in my life. In the presence of a Sacrosian knight."
Something shifted in Alan's expression the instant the words left Youri's mouth — a flicker there and gone before it settled back into place. For a moment he simply looked at him, weighing something Youri had no way of reading — and then he started laughing, low at first, then with real amusement behind it.
"Duke, I'd suggest you start looking after yourself. Your days are numbered as it is, and you're not the only one whose life hangs in the balance here. If I were you, I'd spend less time worrying about me and more time thinking about the woman you call your wife. There's only so much a name can protect someone from, however old and however grand it happens to be."
Youri scratched absently at his long beard, tilting his head back to study the ceiling for a moment before lowering his gaze back to meet Alan's, level and unbothered, as though the threat had already dissolved somewhere between the desk and the doorway. His voice, when it came, was cold. "I hear threats as nothing more than empty noise pumped through artificial air. They don't mean anything to me — I've said as much more than once today, and I'll keep saying it for as long as it takes to sink in. I stopped caring a long time ago, longer than you'd probably believe." A faint smile crossed his face, though it didn't reach anywhere close to his eyes. "But my so-called wife is the opposite of me in every way that matters. Trust me when I tell you, fear is a feeling I lost a long time ago, buried somewhere I stopped bothering to visit — but of the precious few things left in this miserable world still capable of putting fear back into my heart, she's one of them. So no. Your threats don't concern me, and neither does she, because if there's one thing I'm certain of, it's this: Leonora Kaelthorn is not something even the Terrian Empire could shackle, if she ever decided she didn't want to be."
The tension in the room seemed to drain out all at once. Alan lowered himself back into the chair behind his desk, some private calculation already finished behind his eyes. "Very well, then. We need Altopereh. And that need is the only reason you're still breathing — the only leash anyone's bothered to keep on you at all. Let's hope, for your sake, that it still remembers you." He pressed a finger to the data pad on his desk, signaling the guards waiting outside. The doors hissed open, and the two of them stepped in, taking hold of Youri and walking him back out without a word. Whatever mission had brought the Prime Minister here in person was, apparently, finally complete.
Outside, the soldiers and guards fitted Youri into an immobility suit — a containment device reserved exclusively for S-grade threats, the most dangerous prisoners the empire ever bothered to classify by name rather than number. Once secured, thin bands of metal traced down from a collar at the back of his neck to encase his legs, torso, arms, and even his face, the whole thing folding into a single seamless restraint that left almost nothing of him visible at all. Leonora watched from the sideline as he was marched aboard the Millia — her own ship — shackled like some beast being led away before it could devour everything in its path. In truth, the greatest threat standing on that platform wasn't the man in restraints at all. It was her, barely holding her fury in check as she watched the man she loved paraded like a monster in front of soldiers who had no idea what he'd once been to her, or what he still was.
Which, in the most literal sense, he was — and had been for longer than anyone aboard that ship, herself included, had truly let themselves reckon with.
Khalil's endless dark was disturbed once more as the landing platform split open, releasing the Millia into the black beyond. Its engines roared to life, tearing through the absolute silence of that frozen, barren world like something being born rather than simply departing. Leonora stood in the control room as high-speed winds and storms battered the hull on its way out of the fortress that supposedly let nothing escape, watching the last lights of Khalil shrink behind them until there was nothing left but stars. Her mind stayed fixed on a single question the whole way, turning it over again and again without ever quite landing on an answer, the words circling back on themselves no matter how many times she tried to set them down: how was she going to keep him alive — and if she couldn't, exactly how far was she willing to go to make sure she did anyway?