"Precisely what makes it so odd," he says, though there's another of those small shifts of relaxation as she says his true name. "The touch of flesh has ever been a matter of business. You are among the only ones who might understand that, and I daresay the Exarch dislikes me enough to leave me to suffer."

Not unjustifably, and his tone acknowledges that even if his words themselves do not, but such is what it is. The blurring of personal and professional lines is equally as strange to him as it is to her; it is merely that those lines fall in different places.

He can trust her to understand that, even if they do not see eye-to-eye on the matter any more than they do standing. Sitting on this couch, however, they come a lot closer, and Hades wraps one arm around her shoulders, gently, even as he rubs the region near his third eye again with the other.