"Sit."
There are two chairs facing the desk—white leather, low-backed, designed to make the occupant feel exposed. I've sat in them hundreds of times. I still hate them.
I sit. Fold my hands in my lap. Wait.
She lets me wait. That's part of it too, the silence, the sense that her attention is a gift she hasn't decided to give yet. I watch her reflection in the window glass—the sharp line of her profile, the pearl earrings she always wears, the way her fingers tap once against her crossed arms before going still.
Finally, she turns. Smiles.
It's the smile she uses for donors and board members and parents who are concerned about their children's progress. Warm. Professional. It stops somewhere around her cheekbones and never quite reaches her eyes.
"Tell me about the Grey girl."
I tell her.
The words come out the way she taught me—precise, factual, stripped of anything that might be mistaken for opinion. The Mors demonstration. The student who lost control of his shadow manipulation. The spell that tore loose and went for Everly Grey like iron filings to a magnet.
"She didn't shield," I say. "Didn't try to deflect it. She just—put her hands up. And it went in."
"In." Mother's voice is thoughtful. She's moved to her desk now, settled into her chair with the kind of perfect posture that makes my spine ache in sympathy. "Not around. Not through. In."
"Yes."
"And afterward?"
"The shadows responded to her. Briefly. They curled around her hands before dissipating." I pause. This is the part I've been turning over in my mind since it happened, the image I can't stop seeing. "Like they recognized her."
"Mmm." She picks up the fountain pen, turns it between her fingers. Not writing anything—just touching it, the way she does when she's thinking. "How long did the whole thing take? From the moment the spell broke loose to the moment it finished entering her?"
"Three seconds. Maybe four."
"Did she lose consciousness?"
"No."
"Did she seem disoriented afterward? Confused? In pain?"
"She was shaking. Cold. But lucid." I think about her face in that moment—pale, scared, but still asking questions. Still pushing back when I tried to remove her from the room. "More lucid than she should have been."
Mother sets down the pen. Aligns it with the edge of the desk. When she looks up at me, her smile has changed—still warm, still professional, but there's something underneath it now. Satisfaction. The expression of someone whose long game is finally paying off.
"Good," she says. "That's very good."
The thing about my mother is that she never wastes words.
When I was seven, she told me that Bolingbrokes do not cry, and I never cried in front of her again. When I was twelve, she told me I would be Mors president by my third year, and I was. When I was sixteen, she told me there were things about our family's history that I wasn't ready to know, and I didn't ask again until I was eighteen.
So when she says "good," she means it. When she smiles like that, she's pleased.
And when she's pleased about something involving Everly Grey, I know I should be worried.
"You knew." The words come out before I can stop them. "When you admitted her. You knew what she was."
"I suspected." Mother doesn't seem bothered by the accusation. If anything, she looks amused. "There were signs. The way her application materials kept... shifting. Little inconsistencies that smoothed themselves out before anyone could question them. Her test scores were perfectly average in a way that felt intentional. And her family history—" She waves a hand. "Mundane-blocked on both sides going back three generations, but before that? Gaps. Curious gaps."
"You set this up."
"I created conditions that would allow her to reveal herself, yes. The scholarship. The testing demonstration. The four of you." Her eyes meet mine, ice-blue and utterly calm. "You've all played your parts beautifully."
