The first three days settled into something that resembled a routine only in the loosest possible sense, the way two people circling each other warily in a small space eventually work out an unspoken choreography just to avoid constant collision.

Ezra was awake before Lucien most mornings, a habit left over from years of jobs that required him alert before anyone else in a building was, and he'd taken to making coffee in the penthouse's absurdly over-equipped kitchen mostly because standing in a kitchen doing something with his hands kept him from thinking too hard about the scanner reading still sitting unreported in the back of his mind.

"You don't...