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At that moment, Turner swept into the room, pretty clothes a little askew and a touch of red rimming his stupidly pretty eyes. “Are we talking about your fearless leader or me?”
“Who could tell?” Sebastian sneered at him to hide the relief at the end of his questioning.
Joan sighed and gave Turner an apologetic look. “He’s in a mood. He’s not always like this.”
Turner waved her concern away. “The first time I met him, he was a conniving governor intent on rooting out my secrets, and the second time I met him, he blew me up and nearly killed me.”
Sebastian held up a hand to stop him. “Second time was me; first one wasn’t.”
Turner cocked his head. “It wasn’t?”
“That meeting you had with Tesh? When he put you in a courtyard so your scent cream would sweat off?” Sebastian shook his head. “That was all Tesh. I was in someone else at the time.”
“Ah. Well, I feel even less bad that you killed him, then.” Turner shrugged a single shoulder at Joan in a more elegant way than a shrug should be. “In that case, the first time I ran into him, he was trying to kill me. A little attitude is an improvement.”
Sebastian had to grudgingly admit that that was quite pragmatic and magnanimous, and he kicked over a chair for Turner to sit in. Turner gave him a little smile and sat down.
Joan placed a tablet in front of each of them. “Alright, let’s get started.”
* * *
Leon sat at his war table with his map in the dark early hours of the morning, alone, and glared at the empty doorway that had silhouetted Sebastian yesterday afternoon. He watched in his mind’s eye as Sebastian’s lean and graceful form stormed out like an impotent panther and felt the acid tang of the words he’d said in his mouth. He’d known he hadn’t needed to go there. But Sebastian hadn’t needed to go there either.
Joan walked in holding two mugs of klak—none of that overly fragrant coffee humans still bound up with Earth obsessed over. “Sebastian’s getting ready to leave now.”
Leon clenched his jaw and looked back down at his map, even though the lines and marks had long since stopped coalescing into anything meaningful in front of his aching eyes. “Good.”
“Did you sleep?”
“No.”
Joan set one of the mugs beside him with a soft thud, careful not to get it on the edge of the map, worn and stained though it already was. He glanced up at her and saw the judgment in her eyes, for what he wasn’t sure yet, but he was sure he’d find out soon. She circled the table and sat in a chair across from him.
“You should go see him off.”
So the judgment was for his little spat with Sebastian. He’d wondered if he would be berated for that by more than himself. He groaned and dropped his head back to give the ceiling a turn at being glared at.
“He gets under my skin like a splinter.” He bared his teeth. “Like shrapnel.”
Leon had experience with shrapnel. He still had the scars on his left thigh from a previous entanglement. And the way Sebastian dug at him—impossible to ignore, ever-present, all-consuming—felt just like it.
“Yes,” Joan observed in a mild tone. “I believe he does it on purpose.”
He didn’t, though. Not always. Leon swallowed. Sebastian got under Leon’s skin just by existing. Just by throwing that cocky grin around, by standing with more grace than Leon had ever seen a man possess, by his sheer terrifying competence.
Leon was the villain to the Resistance’s enemies, but Sebastian was the terror. And it was Leon that directed him, and it gave Leon a thrill he’d never felt before. But it was like holding a viper, and Leon never knew when it might bite him instead, so he kept poking at it just to get the bite over with so he could stop dreading it.
Maybe if the viper that was Sebastian just bit him already, Leon could stop obsessing over him—feeling him under his skin whenever he was around or mentioned or when Leon’s mind wasn’t occupied with something else for long enough.
Leon groaned and dropped his forehead into his palms. He was losing his metaphor.
“You know all he wants—”
“I don’t care what he wants, Joan.” Leon lifted his head from his palms and glared at her. “There are more important things right now.”
Joan pressed her lips together, then shrugged. She stood. “Fine. Enjoy your shrapnel, then.”
Joan got all the way to the same doorway Sebastian had stormed out of when Leon finally bit out a question. “Is he leaving from the hangar?”
