Eyes
The static swallowed whatever Simon had been about to say, and by the time Dorian rapped on the divider again and got it lowered properly, the man seemed to have decided the moment for it had passed, offering only an apologetic shrug and a "lost that one, sir, sorry" before the divider slid back up between them. Dorian let it go. Ilsa didn't, not entirely — the half-sentence sat with her the rest of the drive, turning over quietly in the back of her mind the way an unfinished thought does when the person thinking it refuses to simply set it down.
"You're still thinking about the guard," Dorian said eventually, watching her rather than the window now.
"I am."
"It's probably nothing. Men get sick. Men get relieved from shifts. It happens to guards all the time and none of it usually means anything." He said it kindly, not dismissively, the tone of a man who genuinely believed what he was saying and simply wanted her to stop turning it over so hard. "I'm a little surprised, honestly, that you're this invested in one guard neither of us has ever properly spoken to."
"That's exactly why I'm invested." She turned to face him properly now, some of the earlier idle curiosity sharpening into something more deliberate. "Think about who trains the men standing at that particular gate, Dorian. Liu Teng's had a hand in staffing half the private security in this city for decades, whether people realise it or not. And you know what his own men are like — the ones who actually serve directly under him, not the hired muscle everyone else gets. They're not just strong. They're built the same way, trained the same way, some of them near enough interchangeable in body and mind both, like he's been quietly making the same man over and over until he got the version he wanted."
"That's true of half the old houses' personal guard, though. It's not exactly rare, training men to a standard."
"It's not the training I'm curious about." She said it patiently, the way you explain something to someone you know is intelligent enough to catch up if given the space to. "It's the stillness. I've seen Liu Teng's men before, up close, more than once. There's a particular quality to how they hold themselves — like their bodies have been asked to stop reacting to things a normal body would react to. Pain, cold, boredom, none of it seems to land on them the way it lands on the rest of us. And that gate guard has exactly that same quality, except more so. More complete, somehow, like whatever trained him went even further than whatever trains Liu Teng's men." She paused. "I'm not saying it means anything yet. I'm saying it's the kind of thing worth noticing before it turns out to matter."
This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.
Dorian considered that a while, longer than he might have if it had come from anyone else, because he'd learned by now that Ilsa's instincts had a habit of noticing threads long before anyone could see the shape of the tapestry they belonged to. "You think he's connected to Liu Teng somehow."
"I don't think anything yet." She settled back against the seat, some of the sharpness easing out of her posture now that she'd said her piece. "I'm simply not ready to file him away as an ordinary guard who happened to catch a cold. Not until I understand why he stands the way he stands."
Dorian didn't argue further. He'd long since learned that the smarter position, when Ilsa fixed her attention on something this quietly, this patiently, was not to argue at all, but to wait and see what she eventually turned up, the same way you waited to see what a lion had actually been stalking only once it finally moved.
---
Reiner, meanwhile, was three drinks further into the evening than he'd intended to be by the time the man he'd been waiting for finally arrived.
He came in without the fanfare the room usually afforded its more notable guests — no announcement, no particular stir among the staff, simply a tall, narrow figure in a charcoal coat crossing the floor with the unhurried ease of someone entirely unconcerned with being noticed. His face carried an angularity that made his age difficult to place, somewhere between forty and sixty depending on the light, and his eyes, when they found Reiner's table, held a stillness that made Reiner sit up slightly straighter without quite meaning to.
"Randolph." Reiner rose, extending a hand, his usual easy charm sliding into place around the name like a coat he'd worn many times before. "Glad you could make the trip. I was starting to think the roads had swallowed you whole."
"The roads are fine." Randolph's voice matched the rest of him, even, unhurried, giving away considerably less than it seemed to promise. He took the offered hand, his grip brief and precise, and lowered himself into the seat across from Reiner without waiting to be invited to it. "I simply prefer arriving once the room has emptied out its more forgettable company. Fewer questions that way."
"Fair enough." Reiner sat back down, motioning for another round, some old instinct in him already recalculating exactly how careful the rest of this evening's conversation was going to need to be. "Shall we get to it, then?"
"Let's," Randolph said, and something in the flatness of the word made the warmth of the room feel, for just a moment, considerably further away than it had a minute before.