"We'll talk now. Standing." My voice is doing something it never does. It's loud. Not shouting—I don't shout, Bolingbrokes don't shout—but the volume is wrong, pushed up by the four heartbeats hammering in my chest and the taste of Grey's fear in my mouth and the fact that my hands won't stop shaking no matter how hard I press them against my thighs.
Mother's eyebrows lift. One millimeter.
"All right," she says. Sits in her chair. Folds her hands. The pearl ring catches the light. The remaining earring—just one now, the other lost somewhere in the wreckage of her carefully orchestrated catastrophe—glints against her neck. "What would you like to discuss?"
And that's the thing. That's the thing about Mother. She's not going to explain herself. She's not going to justify what happened or lay out the theory or give me the satisfaction of hearing her sayyes, I knew, I planned it, I used you.She's going to sit in her chair and fold her hands and wait for me to ask questions, and she'll answer the ones she wants to answer and redirect the ones she doesn't, and by the end of the conversation I'll have exactly the amount of information she's decided I deserve. Not a word more.
I've been having this conversation my entire life. This is the first time I've walked in without knowing my lines.
"You knew she'd pull." I say it flat. Not a question. "The channeling—all four of us, simultaneously—you knew what would happen when she hit capacity."
"I knew it was one of several possible outcomes."
"Ashford almost died."
"Ashford is recovering. I spoke with Kellerman twenty minutes ago." She uncaps her pen. Makes a note on the pad—I can't see what, but her hand moves with the brisk efficiency of someone crossing off a task. "The bond was unexpected. That's unfortunate."
"Unfortunate."
"It limits the timeline." She caps the pen. Studies me again—the shake in my hands, the sweat on my temples, the way I can't stand still because every ten seconds Knox's rage spikes throughthe bond and my whole body flinches. "How far can you get from her before it hurts?"
"I don't—maybe a hundred yards. I haven't tested it."
"Test it. I need exact numbers." She makes another note. "The bond complicates the standard approach. You can't be separated from her, which means you'll be present for the next phase, which isn't ideal."
"The next phase of what?"
"Of what needs to happen." She says it the way she'd saythe next phase of constructionorthe next phase of the budget review.No weight. No drama. A process with steps, and we're between steps, and the schedule hasn't changed.
"What needs to happen towho?"
A pause. She looks at me over the pen, and for a second the mask—her mask, the original, the one mine was copied from—slips by a fraction. What's underneath isn't cold. It's focused. The absolute, burning focus of a woman who has been working toward something her entire career and is close enough to taste it.
"The Bolingbrokes have managed these situations for five generations," she says. "Your grandfather handled two. Your great-grandmother handled four. It's what we do, Callum. It's what this family has always done."
Handled.There it is. The word that lives in eleven documents in the restricted section. The word that appears once beside a name and then the name never appears again.
"What does that mean?" My voice is barely above a whisper. The shaking has stopped. Everything has stopped—the fury, the fear, the four heartbeats in my chest, all of it suspended while I stand in my mother's office and ask a question I've been afraid to ask since I was sixteen years old and found the first document andread the first name and saw the firsthandledand closed the archive and never went back.
"It means what it's always meant." She opens her laptop. The screen lights up her face—blue-white, cold, making her look like a photograph of herself. "When it's time, you'll understand. For now, stay close to Grey. Monitor the bond. I'll need updates."
"Mother—"
"That's all, Callum."
"What are you going to do to her?"
The typing stops. She looks up. Not impatient—patient. The terrible, infinite patience of a woman who has answered this kind of question before, from other people, in other decades, and has never once changed her answer.
"What needs to be done."
She goes back to typing. Keys clicking. Laptop humming. The clock on the wall ticking off seconds into the silence of a room where a woman is planning something she won't name and her son is standing in front of her with four stolen heartbeats in his chest and the slow, nauseating certainty that he already knows whathandledmeans.
He's always known. He read the documents. He saw the names. He counted them—twenty-three, over five generations—and he did the math and he understood the math and then he folded the understanding into a small, tight square and locked it in the same drawer where he keeps everything else that would destroy him if he let it breathe.
Twenty-three people. Five generations.The matter has been handled.
The lock on that drawer just broke.
