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Wax sits the morning out on a bench at the precinct nearest the Vanisher lair — bandaged, ribs cracked, lip split, one eye swelling shut, expecting scars. Marasi sits hovering protectively at his side, hand resting on his good arm. The senior constable Reddi crosses over to report that the constable-general has decided not to charge Wayne for impersonating an officer of the law. Marasi snaps that the constable-general ought to be grateful for the help in the first place; Reddi keeps glancing across the room at his superior with an expression of mild bafflement at the man's calm.

Wax thanks Marasi quietly: the catch on Miles was hers. She would rather not have been the one watching him beaten bloody. He answers that wounds heal — even on an old horse like him — and that he could not have stood watching her in his place. She looks up at him with wide eyes and parted lips, and he reads her intent before she has spoken it. *This isn't going to work, Lady Marasi.* She blushes, forces a laugh, says she did not mean such a thing — and they both know what just passed between them. He privately thinks: if I were ten years younger. It is not the years. It is what the years have done to him. She does not deserve a man who is mostly scars wrapped in sun-dried leather.

Wayne saunters past in his bloodied lucky hat and slips Wax a second Sterrion wrapped in a handkerchief, traded for a nice scarf — taken off one of the dead Vanishers, so it wasn't *stealing*. Marasi tries to apply the same logic to the gun and is gently warned not to bother. Wayne adds that the gunsmith Nouxil was fished out of the canal alive but unhappy, and that none of the other kidnapped women have been located. Only Miles is likely to know where they have been taken — and Miles stopped feeling the kind of pain that makes a man talk long ago. Then Wayne drifts over to a few constables eating sandwiches; within minutes they will be laughing with him.

Constable-General Brettin crosses the room next, stiff as a board, hat under his arm, and surprises Wax with an offer. He has formally requested that the Senate grant Wax a citywide deputized forbearance — powers of investigation and arrest as a constable would have — backdated to cover the previous night's freelance violence and avoid embarrassment for the precinct. He also announces that he himself will be retiring soon, and that the next constable-general will be bound to the same arrangement. There are limits, of course; abuse would see the privilege revoked. Brettin withdraws stiffly. Wax watches him cross the floor and is left with the firm impression that this is a different man entirely from the one who had tried to lecture him in Yomen Mansion's kitchen.

Marasi is called in to give her own statement (he has told her to be straight with the constables about everything he and Wayne did, but to obscure Ranette's role). She glances back at him over her shoulder on the way in. Steris steps out of the same office a moment later, fixes her hair, and sits down opposite him. She thanks him formally for the rescue — and volunteers, to his profound discomfort, that she remained pure during her captivity, in case it bears on the nuptials. She suggests they now move their engagement timeline up. A dramatic rescue is expected to produce an outpouring; what would have been a scandal will now read as romance. They could announce engagement next week without comment.

She accepts him in full, including his return to constabulary work, which she is willing to call his *hobby* on the grounds that other gentlemen indulge in worse. She drops her composure for a moment to admit, more tiredly than coolly, that she comes to the union with a measure of desperation — three previous suitors broke off in writing — and that she sees him for what he is and asks the same in return. *Thank you*, she says quietly, eyes meeting his.

Wax hesitates. Of the two offers laid in front of him this morning — the unspoken one and the blunt one — this is the one he is considering. He glances once at the door through which Marasi is giving her report, the entrancing one who happens to remind him a lot of Lessie (which is, perhaps, the problem), then turns back to Steris and says they will move forward.