Page 16 of Curvy Sold Mate

Olivia looked at her. At the auburn hair escaping its twist, the freckles across her nose, the green eyes holding a conviction that came from a place Olivia recognized—the hard-won territory of a woman who’d learned her own worth inside these walls, against resistance, without permission.

“I know,” she said. And she did know. The knowing sat in her mind, clean and logical, unimpeachable.

It hadn’t made the walk to her body yet.

She left the infirmary and crossed the compound alone, arms folded against the spring chill, the shard pulsing its foreign rhythm beneath her sleeve. The training yard was empty. The garden walls cast long shadows in the late afternoon light.

She went to the kitchen, because the kitchen was the one room in the compound that didn’t require her to perform anything, and she made tea she didn’t want. She drank it anyway, because wasting things had never been in her nature, even when the thing in question wasn’t giving her what she needed.

Chapter 10 - Viktor

The supply requisition was the problem.

Or rather, the supply requisition was a small, tedious, entirely solvable problem, which was why Viktor had been staring at it for eleven minutes without solving it. Patrol rations for the eastern rotation—someone had ordered double the standard allocation for a unit half the standard size. Transcription error, or someone on the eastern patrol was feeding people who shouldn’t have been there.

He needed the original intake form. It was in the east wing archives, where Olivia had been spending her mornings since the briefing, dismantling a filing system that had apparently offended her deeply enough to warrant a full rebuild.

He went himself.

She was cross-legged on the archive floor when he found her, surrounded by stacks that followed their own logic. A pencil held her hair up, the kind of improvised solution that meant she’d been here long enough to stop caring how she looked and start caring only whether the records made sense. A ledger sat open across her knees.

“Intake forms,” he said from the doorway. “Eastern patrol, last quarter.”

Olivia didn’t look up. “Third stack from the left. I moved them out of the miscellaneous section, which is where someone had filed them, presumably because they’d surrendered the concept of alphabetical order entirely.”

Viktor retrieved the forms. She was right—third stack, tabbed with coloured markers she must have brought herself. The intake form showed the error immediately: a transposition, two digits swapped, doubling the count. Clerical. He made a note.

“The ration logs from this quarter cross-reference with the patrol assignments in the second drawer,” she said, still writing. “If you’re checking for irregularities in the eastern rotation, start there. Someone’s been filing the returns out of sequence, and it’s masking a pattern.”

He paused with the forms in his hand. “You noticed that.”

“I’ve been sitting in your filing system for three days. I’ve noticed everything.” She turned a page. “The returns for weeks six through nine are missing entirely. Either they were never filed, or someone removed them.”

He set the intake form down and crouched beside the second drawer. Pulled the ration logs, fanned them across the floor. The gap was clean—surgical, the kind of absence that looked like carelessness until you laid the surrounding data side by side.

“Weeks six through nine,” he said. “That’s the window around the ward recalibration.”

“I know.”

Their eyes met over the open drawer. Olivia was close enough that he could see the tooth marks on the pencil where she’d been chewing the end, a habit she’d deny if confronted. The bond tightened between them, and his pulse answered it before he could stop it.

For a long second, the room held only the two of them and the shared edges of a problem that locked their minds together with a fluency that caught him off guard—her instinct for pattern meeting his for implication, the gap between a question and its answer collapsing to nothing.

Then she looked away, back at the ledger, and the pencil went between her teeth.

“I’ll pull the access logs for the archive during that period,” he said, standing. “See who was in here.”

“Already started. There’s a list on the desk.”

He glanced over. A single sheet in her handwriting, seven names, three of them crossed out with annotations in the margin.

She’d been running her own investigation. He stood over the list and read her reasoning.

“We should compare notes,” he said.

“Tomorrow. I need to finish this section before someone decides to refile it by date, and I have to start over.”

He left. In the corridor, he stopped, turned, and came back to the doorway.