"Days. Maybe less." Knox's expression is serious in a way that strips away the usual good humor, leaving something hard and worried underneath. "I've been feeding him misdirection for three days, and he's starting to ask questions I can't deflect. The closed rifts are making noise, people are noticing, the Cathedral is talking, and Cael wants to know who's responsible. He's already suspicious that you've gone quiet. If I keep stonewalling him, he's going to pull rank and start looking into things himself."
"He can look. He won't find anything."
"He'll find August's apartment." Knox says it flatly. "You've been going back and forth from the Old City for days. You've been entering and leaving Order-monitored rift sites at irregular hours. You abandoned your post at the warehouse the night you met August, and you haven't submitted a report since. Cael is rigid, not stupid. He will connect the dots, and when he does, he won't send a polite inquiry."
Vale is quiet for a moment. He knows Knox is right. He's known it for days, has been pushing the timeline further andfurther, stealing hours and days from a clock that was always going to run out. The arrangement was never sustainable. It was always going to come down to this: the moment when hiding August stops being an option and the only choices left are bad ones.
"I'll handle it," Vale says.
Knox studies him. Whatever he sees makes him nod slowly, though the worry doesn't leave his eyes. "Handle it soon, Vale. Before someone else handles it for you."
He clasps Vale's shoulder once, firm, brief, the physical language of a partnership that has survived exactly this kind of disaster before, and turns down the hallway. His coat is perfect. His posture is perfect. He looks like a Templar who has everything under control, and Vale knows him well enough to know that's the mask he wears when he's the most worried.
Vale watches him go, waits until the stairwell door closes, and stands in the corridor for a long moment with his hands at his sides and a weight on his chest that has nothing to do with magic.
Then he goes back inside.
August is still at the table. He's holding his tea but not drinking it, just wrapping his hands around the cup, watching the surface. He looks up when Vale enters, and his expression is carefully neutral in the way that means he's bracing for something.
He's perceptive. He knows that conversation in the hallway wasn't about logistics.
Vale crosses to the table. He doesn't sit. Instead, he stands beside August's chair, close enough that their bodies almost touch, and looks down at the map spread across the surface: the binding circle, the rift sites, the Cathedral at its center. The vault that Maren Voss has spent four years trying to crack open and a hundred and seventy before that learning how to.
"August," Vale says. "We need to talk about Cael."
He watches August's hands tighten on the cup. The reaction is small, a fractional increase in pressure, knuckles whitening slightly, but Vale has spent days learning to read this man's body, and the tension is unmistakable.
"Knox thinks we're running out of time," August says. Not a question.
"We are. Cael is asking questions Knox can't deflect. The closed rifts have drawn attention. The Order knows something is happening, and it's only a matter of time before they trace it back to me. To us."
August's gaze drops back to his tea. The surface trembles slightly, his hands betraying what his face is trying to hide.
"What are you saying?"
Vale pulls out the chair beside him and sits, angling himself so they're facing each other. He's close enough to reach out and take August's hands, but he doesn't. Not yet. August needs to hear this with his defenses intact, needs to make this decision with his mind and not his body's craving for contact.
"I'm saying we need to bring what we know to Cael. About Voss. About the binding circle. About the vault." Vale pauses, holding August's gaze. "And about you."
The color drains from August's face.
It happens fast, the warmth that had been there all morning, the flush that had lingered from the bedroom and the shower and the easy domesticity of tea together, all of it vanishing in a heartbeat. What's left is the August that Vale met in the graveyard: pale, cornered, survival instincts firing on every cylinder.
"You want me to go to the Cathedral." August's voice is flat. Controlled. The voice he uses when he's terrified and refusing to show it. "Into the Order's headquarters. Where every Templar in Haven could—"
"Where I'll be beside you. Where Knox will be beside you. Where you'll be walking in voluntarily, with information they need, under the protection of two Templars who will not let anyone touch you."
"Protection." August sets down his tea with a deliberate care that tells Vale his hands are shaking too badly to keep holding it. "You want to walk a necromancer into the Templar Cathedral and ask the Sanctus, a man who told you to bring me back dead, to listen to what I have to say."
"Cael said that before he knew the real threat. Before he knew about Voss. When he thought you were the rift-maker, not the person closing them." Vale leans forward, forearms on his knees. "August. We have intelligence that the Order needs. We know who's behind the rifts, what he's after, and how to stop him. We've closed three rifts that the Order couldn't close on its own. If we bring that to Cael, the full picture with evidence, it changes the calculation."
"Or it doesn't. And I'm in a cell. Or worse." August's arms cross over his chest, the familiar defensive posture, the one that means his walls are going back up. "You're asking me to walk into the one place in this city where every single person is trained and authorized to kill me."
"I'm asking you to trust me."
The words land between them with the weight of everything they've become to each other in the past five days. It's an enormous thing to ask, Vale knows that. He's asking August to bet his life on Vale's judgment, on his ability to manage Cael, on the belief that the Order can be reasoned with when every experience August has ever had tells him the opposite.
He's asking a man who spent fourteen years hiding from Templars to walk into their stronghold and announce himself.
