Varder ~
Varder couldn't sleep.
That wasn't new. Sleep had been a problem for months now, long before Ava, long before any of this. But tonight it was different. Tonight the ceiling felt lower somehow, the room smaller, the quiet too thick to breathe through properly.
He turned onto his back and stared upward and tried not to think.
It didn't work.
He kept coming back to her face. The way she'd looked at him in the corridor earlier — not with fear, which he could have handled, which he understood. Fear was simple. Fear was transactional. You projected enough power and people stepped back and that was the end of it.
Ava didn't step back.
She looked at him like she was trying to figure out something that didn't add up. Like he was a problem she hadn't solved yet. Like she hadn't decided what he was to her.
He didn't know why that bothered him as much as it did.
He pressed the heel of his hand against his sternum and told himself it didn't.
The knock came just after midnight.
