“I’ve never met you on one,” I said.
“And yet,” he murmured.
He let the silence sit long enough to be rude, then shook his head. “She knows you have something special. Something powerful. She doesn’t know what.” The arrogance slid back into him like a remembered posture.
The Hollows flattened it, but couldn’t smother it. He regarded me the way a locksmith looks at a door, admiring the craftsmanship, irritated by the lock.
“But I do.” His eyes stayed on mine.
I kept my breathing steady because that was the only rebellion left to me in here. “Why are you looking at me like that?”
His smile widened. It wasn’t warm, not cruel, exactly. Pleased, maybe?
“Because I know precisely what you’re keeping from everyone, Maeve.”
A shiver ran through me that had nothing to do with the cold.
The dragons. The memory of candlelight flickering over pearl-scaled flanks in the library’s hush. The soft weight of legend pressed into the dark, breathing, dreaming. Elira’s confession.
Everything in me went very still inside my mittened hands. I did not swallow. I did not blink. I lifted my chin and called on every ounce of Bellemore stubbornness and Stonewick manners.
“That’s ridiculous,” I said, crisp as frost. “I have nothing to give.”
“You’re charming when you lie,” he said, unoffended. “And careless. I know they’re not yours to give.”
My blood went cold.
He shook his head once, slowly, as if I were the student who could perform the spell if I stopped thinking about the performance.
“You don’t even know the power you have at your fingertips,” he said, voice low, the Hollows making it gentler than he meant it to be. “And I don’t know if that makes you more dangerous or less.”
My skin prickled. All at once, I could feel my palms, the thin pulse in my wrists, the ache behind my left eye that came when I hadn’t slept or had tried to balance emotions on a tightrope. The Hollows pressed cool against my thoughts steadily, and I put them in order.
“Why would you try to help?” I asked, and it came out almost soft, which surprised us both. “You, of all people.”
He didn’t dodge. His answer came as cold as his eyes. “Because she wants something she should never have. And if you are the key, I will play nicely.”
“I have seen you play nicely,” I said. “There were sharp objects involved and things with fangs.”
My mind began stitching old scenes to new threads, whether I liked it or not. Malore’s teeth; the way the curse had throbbed under Keegan’s skin like a bruise waking; the hunger path’s quiet, ceaseless tug. My grandmother’s silence, precise and heavy, like a book set down so gently you don’t realize it’s too important to move.
“What does she want?” I asked again, because I needed to hear it in this room where lies came out with frostbite.
“Power,” Gideon said simply. “Nothing more complicated, which is what makes it so complicated.”
I would have preferred a riddle. A riddle lets you be clever and pretend cleverness is enough. Power just sits there, a rock in the road you can trip over or move or build a house on. Mystomach made the little drop it makes when the next step is lower than you think.
“Everyone wants power,” I said.
“Not like this,” he said. “She wants leverage over both realms without belonging to either. She wants to own the quiet between. She wants to tell the Hollows what balance is and have it agree. She wants to control all of the magic across this country. If she succeeds here, she will move on.”
I stepped back, not much, just enough to make the air feel less like a too-tight coat. Beyond the shroud, Keegan had not moved. He could stand like that for hours, a weather system choosing its moment. Stella had shifted her weight to one hip: comfortable on the surface, coiled beneath. Nova’s gaze had gone distant and deep. The bramble mule had, impossibly, fallen asleep with his chin on an ice table, confetti haloed around his soft muzzle like a questionable saint.
“Why now?” I asked. “Why pull this thread now, if it’s been knotted so long?”
“Because you showed up,” he said, as if I’d walked into a theater and the orchestra had lifted its bows. “Because the Wards hummed when you did. Because you’ve been mending faster than she can misname it as luck. Because you’re a hinge and someone finally noticed that hinges turn doors.”
“And?”
