Magnus leaned forward a fraction. “I’m going to be explicit because you respond to explicit.”
Alaric didn’t blink. The reaction stopped somewhere behind his eyes, locked down before it could surface. The impact hit anyway, asharp internal recoil he refused to let reach his face. Control held, but only just, like a fault line locked under strain, holding only because it had not yet been forced to give. “Speak,” he grittedout.
“Keep her isolated. Fuck her senseless if you want. But give me time to make sure she wasn’t in on this.”
The temperature in the room dropped.Alaric didn’t raise his voice. Didn’t move. But something sharp flashed behind his eyes.”I don’t know who’s fucking who senseless,” he muttered.
Magnus’s expression didn’t change, but his gaze sharpened. “That’s not an answer.”
Alaric experienced the pressure of it anyway. Not the question itself, but what it was trying to force him to reveal. He kept his voice level, even as his thoughts splintered outward, cataloging consequences fasterthan Magnus could name them. “It’s the only one you’re getting.”
“You’re avoiding the point.”
“No.” Alaric drew in a slow breath. “I’m removing the part of your point designed to provoke me.” Because provocation led to reaction, and reaction was a liability. Because if he let Magnus frame this as a test of loyalty, he’d lose the ground he needed to keep hersafe.
Magnus’s mouth tightened. “You’re not defending her.”
The accusation landed harder than any of the analysis had. It registered, sharp and immediate, before he forced it down. Defense implied weakness. Defense implied uncertainty. And he was not uncertain about Sera. He was uncertain about the timeline, the missing proof, the way risk propagated once people started pulling threads.
“I don’t defend people with emotion,” he said, each word measured. “I assess risk.” Because risk was something he could map. Manage. Contain. Eliminate.
“And your assessment?”
For a brief moment, Alaric saw the cost of allowing it. Not abstract, not hypothetical. Immediate. He was choosing delay over defense, verification overcertainty. He was letting someone else frame Sera as a problem to be solved instead of a person to be protected. He accepted that cost without flinching, because flinching didn’t change outcomes. Proofdid.
Alaric straightened. “Your plan stands.”
The decision settled cleanly. Too cleanly.
He was accustomed to the sensation of certainty locking into place, the internal quiet that followed when a course of action aligned with necessity. This time, the quiet didn’t arrive. There was only a thin, persistent tension beneath his ribs, as if something unresolved had slipped past containment and was still moving through the system.
Magnus exhaled slowly. Relief flickered and vanished. “Good. Then we proceed quietly. No drama. No accusations. She doesn’t need to know until we’re ready to implement—”
A soft breath sounded behind Magnus, caught and held too long to be accidental. Sera stood in the doorway, posture composed, eyes clear. The certainty hit him before he turned. Not suspicion. Not hope. Certainty. She’d heard enough.Fuck!More than enough to understand what they were planning. More than enough to know he’d let it stand.
Chapter 13
ALARIC SLOWLY TURNED.
Sera felt the shift before she sawit.
It moved through the room like a pressure change, subtle but unmistakable, the kind that made systems flicker and people still without knowing why. The air tightened. Not loud. Not dramatic. Just suddenly precise, as if a line had been crossed and everything on the other side of it had recalibrated.
She registered it the same way she registered an anomaly on a clean dashboard. Afraction of a second where everything that should have been stable wasn’t. Ahesitation that didn’t belong.
Her body reacted before her mind finished naming it. Shoulders settling. Breath going shallow. Attention sharpening instead of scattering. She’d learned a long time ago that when a room changed like this, you didn’t rushto fill the silence. You watched it. You let it show you where the fault lineran.
Only then did she lift hereyes.
Magnus froze.
She looked at him first. Not angry. Not frightened. Simply attentive. The way she looked at systems right before they failed. The way she looked at people right before they lied to her. Searching for the tell that precedes a managed narrative.
“So that’s what I am,” she said quietly. “An active breach. Adangerous one. Aconduit. Or worse.”
She was careful to use his language. Not metaphor. Not emotion. The clean, technical phrasing Magnus favored when he wanted distance from consequence.
The words she repeated didn’t shake when she spoke them. That didn’t mean they didn’thurt.
