I did not confront him immediately.
That was the thing people never understood about having been raised the way I was raised. When you grow up as the only one of your kind, when every piece of information you receive is something someone else decides to give you or withhold from you, you learn to hold what you know and watch what happens with it. You learn that confrontation is a tool, and like every tool, it works better when you choose the right moment.
So I waited.
I watched him for three days. Cataloguing. Every act of genuine concern against the original lie of his arrival. Every moment of real attention against the performance of independence. He helped Mira carry supplies without being asked. He stayed outside the ward perimeter without pushing it. He told me things about my combat technique that were precise and useful and had no self-interest in them.
The evidence contradicted itself.
He had a Court mark. He also had four weeks of behavior that did not match a man running an intelligence operation. The two things existed simultaneously and I could not make them collapse into a single truth.
On the fourth morning I walked out to the property line at dawn. He was already there. He always seemed to know when I was coming.
"You know," he said. Not a question.
"Three days," I said. "Since I treated your arm."
He looked at the treeline. Then back at me.
"I was sent by the Court," he said. "Valdrik commissioned a surveillance operation. I was assigned to find you and document your movements and capabilities."
Hearing him say it was different from knowing it. Hearing it had a specific texture, like stepping on ground you thought was solid and feeling it shift.
"When did you start actually meaning it?" I asked. "Not the mission. Everything else."
He was quiet for a moment.
"The second week," he said. "When I watched you fight the shadow-creature alone at three in the morning and then sit down in the dirt afterward and just breathe. You did not look triumphant. You looked tired. And I thought, this is someone who has been doing this alone for a very long time, and I stopped thinking about the report."
That was the most honest thing anyone had said to me in a long time. I knew it was honest because it did not try to be. It was just what had happened, stated plainly.
I kissed him.
I did not plan to. It was a decision made below the level of planning, the way combat decisions were made. Something assessed the situation and acted before the thinking part caught up.
He was very still for exactly one second. Then he kissed me back.
I pulled away.
I walked back toward the cottage without looking back. He did not follow. I had not asked him to, and he was, finally, learning to read the difference between what I said and what I needed.
Mira was at the kitchen table. She looked at my face.
"You kissed him," she said.
"I confronted him about the mark," I said.
"And then you kissed him."
"Can we focus."
"I am fully focused," she said. "I am focusing on the fact that you confronted a Court spy about his surveillance operation and then kissed him. Those are not chronologically normal."
"He stopped reporting," I said. "Some time ago. The mark is old activity."
She looked at me for a long moment with that particular Mira expression that meant she was deciding whether to say the thing she was thinking.
She said it.
"Selene. Stopping is not the same as never having started. What did he report before he stopped?"
I sat down.
I had not asked him that. I had been so focused on the present truth of him that I had not yet looked at the history of the operation. What he had sent. When. What the Court had done with it.
The scar on my wrist was three inches long. Six months old. A patrol unit that had left no markings, used no recognizable formation, attacked and retreated without finishing it, as though they were testing rather than killing.
Six months ago.
Zevran had been in operation for eight months. His first reports would have been sent in the early weeks. Right around the time the patrol had appeared.
I looked at my wrist.
"I need to ask him something," I said.
I went back outside. He was still at the property line, exactly where I had left him, which meant he had known I was coming back. I walked up to him and I said: the patrol that scarred my wrist six months ago. The unit with no markings. Did your report give them my location. He looked at me. And in the look was the answer before the words came. His expression was the specific expression of someone who has been carrying something they know they will eventually have to hand over. He said: yes. He said: I did not know what the information would be used for. He said: I found out four weeks ago that it had been forwarded to the Ashen Faction. That it was Blackwood's people who ran the test on you. He said all of this quietly and directly and I stood there and listened to the man who had kissed me back twenty minutes ago tell me that he was the reason I had lain alone in the forest pressing a jacket to a wound and counting stars to stop shaking.