Chapter 18: Shared Watch
The first night of shared watch started with an argument about chairs.
"There is only one," Selene said, standing in the garden with her arms crossed, staring at the single wooden stool Ryuji had dragged out near the watchtower.
"I’ve never needed it."
"You are injured in three separate places."
"I’ve fought in worse shape."
"That is not the reassurance you think it is." She sat down on the stool herself, arms still crossed, chin lifted in the particular way that dared him to argue. "You will lean against the wall. I will sit. We will both survive the indignity."
He leaned. It wasn’t comfortable, but comfort wasn’t the point of tonight.
The fog rolled thick over the Grey March, same as always, and somewhere beyond the wall Renka kept her patient watch from a different angle, the three of them forming a loose triangle of eyes across the garden’s dark edges.
"This is strange," Selene said, after a long quiet stretch.
"What is."
"Sitting here. Waiting. I have spent every night since our wedding assuming you were somewhere else, doing something I did not want to know about." She looked at him sideways. "Now I am simply here. With you. Waiting for the same thing."
"Feels different?"
"It feels like company," she said, and something in her voice made the word sound like an admission she hadn’t planned on making out loud.
He didn’t answer that right away. He watched the fog instead, the old habit of cataloguing shapes and shadows running quiet under the surface of the conversation, and thought about how strange it was that company had become the word for this, for two people who’d started as strangers forced together by politics neither of them chose.
"Selene."
"What."
"You don’t have to make it sound like a confession every time you say something honest."
Her cheeks colored, faint in the low light. "I do not know how else to say it."
"Just say it plain. Same as anything else."
She was quiet for a moment, considering that, turning it over the way she turned over most things he said, careful and thorough.
"I like the company," she said finally, plain, no formality wrapped around it at all.
"Good," he said. "Me too."
The attack, when it came, arrived without the coordinated chaos of five bodies moving in formation. It arrived as a single shape, dropping from the watchtower’s shadow with a silence that told Ryuji immediately this wasn’t one of Ashcroft’s hired professionals.
This was something else entirely.
The blade came for his throat, fast enough that a lesser fighter wouldn’t have registered the movement before it landed. Ryuji caught the wrist on instinct, the same motion he’d used against a dozen lesser threats, and found this one didn’t break under the pressure the way the others had.
The attacker twisted free with a fluidity that spoke of years spent doing exactly this, and Ryuji got his first clear look at her in the pale moonlight bleeding through the fog.
Jet black hair, cut asymmetrically. Pale gray eyes, cold and analytical, tracking him without a hint of the fear he usually saw in first-time attackers.
"You’re better than the others," she said. Her voice was flat, professional, almost bored.
"You’re better than the others too."
"I know."
Selene moved before the exchange finished, void energy already crackling faint at her fingertips, and the attacker’s eyes flicked toward her with something like genuine surprise.
"Two of you," she said. "That wasn’t in the contract details."
"Contracts change," Selene said, and struck.
The fight that followed was unlike anything Ryuji had experienced since the first assassin two weeks ago. This woman didn’t panic under pressure, didn’t overcommit to any single strike, moved through the garden like she’d already mapped every piece of terrain before she’d ever set foot on it.
He fell into rhythm with Selene without either of them discussing it, the way partners who’d trained together for years might, though they’d only ever fought side by side once before, in the chaos of the coordinated strike days ago.
He struck low. She struck high. Neither of them needed to call it out loud.
The attacker parried three strikes in quick succession, retreating a step each time, gray eyes calculating, and Ryuji recognized something in her posture that he’d seen before, a long time ago, in a different world.
She’s not trying to kill us anymore, he thought. She’s testing us.
"Who sent you," he said, between exchanges.
"Doesn’t matter."
"It matters to me."
"Then you’ll have to catch me to ask again."
She broke off the engagement with a speed that surprised even Ryuji, vaulting the outer wall in a single fluid motion before Renka could close the distance from her position. Selene’s void energy lashed out after her, a thin blade of violet light that carved a shallow line across the retreating woman’s shoulder, and still she didn’t slow.
Then she was gone, swallowed by fog, leaving nothing behind but the memory of gray eyes that had studied Ryuji like a puzzle worth solving rather than a target worth killing.
Renka arrived seconds later, breathing hard from the sprint. "She’s fast. Faster than anyone I’ve tracked through this territory before."
"You didn’t recognize her," Ryuji said. It wasn’t a question.
"No. Which worries me more than if I had."
[System Log: Day 27]
[A NEW ASSAILANT HAS APPEARED, DISTINCT FROM PREVIOUS PATTERNS]
[SHE DID NOT ATTACK WITH LETHAL COMMITMENT]
[SHE TESTED THE ENTITY AND THE WIFE SPECIFICALLY, THEN WITHDREW]
[THIS BEHAVIOR IS INCONSISTENT WITH THE PREVIOUSLY IDENTIFIED FUNDING SOURCE]
[NEW HYPOTHESIS: A SECOND, INDEPENDENT PARTY IS NOW OBSERVING THE ESTATE THROUGH DIRECT COMBAT ASSESSMENT]
[...]
[THE HOUSEHOLD’S LIST OF PEOPLE WATCHING IT FROM THE SHADOWS CONTINUES TO GROW]
[I AM BEGINNING TO WONDER IF THIS ESTATE HAS BECOME SOME MANNER OF ATTRACTION]
Selene pressed a hand to the shallow cut across her own forearm, the price of the void strike’s recoil, and looked at Ryuji with an expression caught somewhere between adrenaline and grim satisfaction.
"We worked well together," she said.
"We did."
"I did not have to think about where you would be. I simply knew."
He looked at her, breath still coming quick from the fight, moonlight catching the silver of her hair where it had come loose from its usual composed arrangement, and felt something settle into place that had nothing to do with strategy or survival.
"Selene."
"What."
"That’s not nothing," he said. "Knowing where someone will be without thinking about it."
She didn’t answer with words. She closed the distance between them instead, close enough that he could feel the warmth radiating off her skin despite the cold fog pressing in around them both, close enough that neither of them pretended the proximity was accidental anymore.
"No," she agreed, quiet. "It is not nothing."
Marro found them still standing there a few minutes later, basin in hand for the fresh cut on Selene’s arm, and said nothing about the way they stood close enough to share breath, or the particular softness in both their expressions that had nothing to do with the danger they’d just survived.
He simply began his work, quiet and efficient as always, while Renka stood at the wall studying the shallow void-carved wound she’d tracked across the retreating woman’s shoulder blade.
"I’ll find out who she is," Renka said. "It might take longer than Ashcroft did."
"Take the time you need," Ryuji said. "Something tells me she’s not going anywhere."
That proved truer than any of them expected.
Two nights later, a note arrived pinned to the outer wall by a throwing knife driven deep enough into the wood that removing it took real effort. No courier. No footprints leading to or from it, despite fresh mud that should have carried the marks of anyone walking there.
Selene read it aloud, voice carefully even despite the words themselves.
You let me live. I don’t understand why. I’ll be back to find out.
No signature.
Just gray eyes, somewhere out in the fog, watching, deciding whether this classless man and his demon wife were worth understanding or worth killing after all.