“I know.”
She kisses me, soft and reassuring, then heads upstairs to wash the city grit from her skin.
I don’t follow. Not tonight.
I stay in the dark of the workshop.
I move to the workbench where I stashed the datapad Autrua gave me. The Land Deed. The Citizenship Restoration. The "Claim."
I turn it on. The screen glows pale blue in the shadows, illuminating my face.
Takhiss, Son of Vorga. Landholder of the Flame Spires.
I hate her. I hate her politics and her games. But today, in the market, I felt the weight of being nothing but a suspect.
If I want to keep my son, I might have to become the Lord she wants me to be.
I trace the seal on the screen with one claw.
Structure,she had said.Governance.
I look up at the ceiling, toward the room where my family sleeps.
“I’ll build you a fortress,” I whisper to the dark. “Even if I have to build it out of lies.”
CHAPTER 35
ELLA
The message pings my datapad at 03:42. The sound is soft—too soft for the hour, for the weight of what it brings. Just four words glint in blue light against the screen:
We need to speak. —A
No threats. No coordinates. Just a static code embedded underneath. I decode it with hands that won’t stay still. Coordinates resolve into a sector tag on the outer ring of Novaria—one of those hybrid stations, half library, half data-archive, where Coalition and Alliance treaties were digitized after the last war.
Public, neutral, civilized.
And that’s what makes it terrifying.
Takhiss sleeps on the couch—he’s too big for it, so one leg hangs off, his hand resting on the small hover-crib that hums beside him. He always does that. Keeps his hand close enough to grab Vex if something goes wrong. Like a reflex he never trained out.
I watch him breathe. Count the rise and fall of his chest. The soft whistle that comes when his second set of lungs exhales. He looks... peaceable. Human, almost. And for a moment, I almost wake him. Almost tell him I’m going somewhere.
But if I do, he’ll follow. If he follows, Autrua will see him. And that is not happening.
So I pull on my jacket, slip my datapad into my pocket, and step into the night.
Novaria’s undercity is quieter at this hour. No cabs screaming past, no vendors shouting over engine noise. Just steam vents hissing and the echo of my boots on synthcrete. The air tastes like rust and regret. I wrap my coat tighter, check the coordinates again, and keep walking until I see it.
The library-station rises from the street like a spire of glass teeth. Its light is thin and green, pulsing from the inside out. The doors glide open as I approach, spilling a wash of recycled air that smells faintly of ozone and old paper.
Inside, the silence hums. I pass shelves of data-slates and preserved print tomes wrapped in static film. Someone once told me the Coalition clergy keeps their own scriptures here—religious records encoded in languages no one outside their order is allowed to read.
So of course she’d pick this place.
Autrua waits in the back alcove, seated at a metal table that glows from within, lighting her from below. Her robes are a cascade of black and gold, each movement whispering. Her hair is coiled in the formal priesthood pattern, every strand pinned with surgical precision. Her smile is the same as I remember—cool, practiced, wrong.
She gestures to the seat across from her. “Ella Corleone. It’s been some time.”
