I had no room to argue. We’d taken a serious beating. I’d known opposing the Draziri would be expensive when I took the job but standing by while an entire species was being exterminated was beyond me.

“I’d do it again,” I told him. “I’d shelter the Hiru again.”

“Of course you would. And that’s why I need you to open the Baha-char door for me.”

“Wilmos?”

Sean nodded.

Wilmos owned a weapons shop at the galactic bazaar. He also ran mercenary crews and brokered deals between private soldiers and people who wanted to hire them. Like Sean, he was a werewolf without a planet, and he was the one who’d gotten Sean the Nexus job. And a small part of me worried that once Sean walked back through Wilmos’ door, he wouldn’t come back.

The anxiety pinched me, sharp and cold.

I couldn’t tether Sean to the inn. If he left, he left. It would mean we weren’t meant to be. I had to let it go.

Bringing the weapon systems back online was going to be pricy, and I really wanted to hold some money in reserve, in case the Drífen or the Assembly threw another curveball at us. I took a mental inventory of our funds.

Ugh.

“How much do you need?”

Sean thought it over and turned to me, a serious look on his face. “One dollar. Maybe three.”

I rolled my eyes.

“I was paid well on Nexus.”

“That’s your money. You earned it.”

“Damn right and I’ll spend it as I please. Right now I’m richer than you.”

“How do you know that?”

He grinned at me. “I asked the inn. It won’t open the Baha-char door for me, but it gave me complete access to your finances. I could rob you blind.”

“You think you can. Seriously, how much do we need?”

“I won’t know until I get there. Dina, you have to decide if we’re together or not.”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“If I’m going to live here, you have to let me contribute. It’s fair. You’re in charge of the guests, and I’m in charge of their security. This is what I do.”

He was right. It was fair.

I pushed off the stairs. “I’ll open a door for you. But only if you promise not to spend everything you have on upgrading the inn. You bled for that money.”

“Mostly I made other people bleed for that money.” A shadow crossed his face. “Now I’ll use it for something good. Something I want.”

We walked to the kitchen together. “Will you be home in time for dinner?”

“I’ll try,” he promised.

4

Finishing the Drífen quarters took forever. Not only did everything have to be intricate and ornate, but I’d had a hard time concentrating. I kept worrying about Sean, about the Assembly, about the Drífan coming, about Rudolph Peterson…

Magic tugged on me. Caldenia wanted my attention. I opened a small two-way screen in the nearest wall. “Yes, your Grace?”

Caldenia gazed at me. “It’s three o’clock, my dear.”

Three o’clock was the time when we had our afternoon tea, provided the inn wasn’t under attack or filled with lifelong enemies trying to broker a fragile peace.

“I’ll be right there.”

I could have said no. I had too much to do and not enough time to do it. But I missed our tea, too. For months and months in the beginning, it had just been me and Caldenia at the inn, and even after Orro came to stay with us, he rarely joined us for tea. We finally convinced him to have dinner with us, but he was truly comfortable hovering in the kitchen, covertly watching our expressions as we ate his food. A couple of times I’d dared to make dinner so he could have the night off. Both times I’d aimed for simple things, like steak or roasted chicken. He ate the food and afterward awkwardly patted my shoulder or my head, whichever happened to be closer, so I’d know he didn’t completely hate it. But Caldenia and I shared each other’s company when it was just the two of us and I’d come to enjoy having tea with her.

In thirty seconds, I walked into the tearoom. I had made it months ago to Caldenia’s specifications. She wanted to sit high and enjoy the view, so I had built a small turret off the dining room and you had to climb a short staircase to reach it. Today the stairs were a bit of a chore. Maybe I made them too steep.

Like all places her Grace occupied, the tearoom was an unapologetically luxurious, yet elegant space. The windows took up three quarters of the round room’s wall space, offering a beautiful view of the Avalon subdivision directly across the road from us. I had a choice between the orchard or the street, and I picked the street, because Caldenia loved to people watch. Speculating on our neighbors’ comings and goings provided her with endless entertainment, and she predicted affairs and identified divorces and firings with frightening precision. None of the people in the neighborhood realized that a former galactic tyrant observed every aspect of their lives.

I crossed the rosewood floor and joined Caldenia at a round table in the center of the room. The table was laser cut from a block of garnet mined many light-years away and Caldenia adored it. She said it reminded her of crystallized blood.

I picked up a small glass teapot, poured jasmine tea into her Grace’s cup, filled my own, and sipped. Mmm, delicious.

Caldenia inhaled the aroma and delicately swallowed a tiny mouthful. For a couple of minutes there was only silence and tea, and I felt the knot in the pit of my stomach slowly unraveling.

“Fire!”

I winced.

Caldenia chuckled.

“It’s not funny.”

“On the contrary, it’s quite amusing.”

I drank more tea. “I don’t know what has gotten into Orro. Usually he’s dramatic but this is too much even for him. It’s all declarative statements, grand pronouncements, and ‘Fire!’”

Caldenia chuckled again.

“He’s going to give the inn a heart attack. He never used to be this bad. I don’t know what happened.”

Caldenia looked at me from above the rim of her cup. “Let’s just say that your ordeal took a toll on all of us, dear. When you sat there like a mannequin and your werewolf carried you everywhere while the inn was under attack, even I experienced emotional discomfort. It was fleeting, of course. I came to my senses quite quickly, but the momentary twinge was real. That creature in the kitchen is perhaps the most sensitive of all of us. It shook him badly.”

I hadn’t realized. I’d been so focused on everything that needed to be done and so absorbed in the simple happiness of having Sean that it never occurred to me that Orro was upset.

“You are his savior,” Caldenia continued. “You found him at the lowest point of his life, living in squalor, without plan or purpose, and you rescued him and brought him here. For him and I, this inn and you provide a refuge, a home, if you will. If something were to happen to either of you, we would be adrift. It’s a terrifying prospect.”

“I hadn’t considered that.”

“Under normal circumstances, we would have some time to…what is that wonderful word? Process. Once, when I was quite young, I hired a squadron of Yako mercenaries. Vicious warriors, ferocious and merciless, clad in a natural scale armor with claws three inches long and teeth to match. Once I besieged Lorekat, they broke through the shields and slaughtered thousands. It was a meatgrinder. The street quite literally ran red with blood.”

She said it with relish, the way most women who looked her age would say, “My husband took me on a cruise and there was free wine.”

“After we took the city, the Yako leader informed me that they would be leaving. I offered them money, plunder, favors, but none of it made any difference. Their general informed me that the taking of life was a traumatizing occupation and now they had to restore the balance of their souls. They all had to return home, hug their spouses and hatchlings, and sit on their eggs. The Yako yearned for peace and comfort, and no riches could replace it. It taught me that for every period of stress there must be a time of rest and contemplation. This is the sole reason I’m still alive.”

Wow.

“Our period of peace and contemplation was cut short. We are all coping as well as we can. I do it by drinking tea and watching the Laurents’ divorce war. Orro is doing it by trying to abandon decades of culinary training so he can recreate street food of marginal quality. To each his own.”

“What can I do?”

She shrugged. “Nothing at all. Just be unharmed for a little while and it will all go back to normal. The more normal you act, the quicker we will relax and lull ourselves into blissful complacency. Sentient beings are spectacular liars. We are gifted with an unparalleled ability to deny things that make our life unpleasant. We even pretend death isn’t a certainty, because contemplating our own mortality drives us mad.”

Normal. Very well, I could do normal.

“The Laurents are divorcing? They seemed like such a nice couple.”

Caldenia’s eyes sparkled. “Oh, it’s sordid. Apparently, Elena decided that their marriage wasn’t spicy enough and she talked Tom into joining a swinger’s club.”

“Tom and Elena? Down the street?” I didn’t even know Red Deer had a swinger’s club.