She encountered nothing.
There was no resistance, no wall. It wasn't the sensation of pushing against a barrier. It was simply nothing. An absence. As if the place where his thoughts should be was made of something that her power could not touch, not because it was defended, but because it was fundamentally impenetrable. Like pressing her hand against stone and expecting it to yield. The stone did not resist. It simply was, and she was not strong enough to change its nature.
Thralling was not going to work.
She shifted her approach. If she could not read his thoughts, perhaps she could compel him. Compulsion required a different kind of power, one that did not need to enter the mind but instead pressed against it from the outside, bending the will rather than reading it.
She waited for the right moment, when Mia's description of rehabilitation exercises trailed into a natural pause.
"Is Khiann really safe under that enclosure?" She kept her voice conversational, but behind the words she pushed every ounceof compulsion she could muster, amplified by Mia's power, directed like a lance at the center of Navuh's consciousness. "Tell me the truth, Navuh."
He frowned. Not the frown of a man fighting compulsion. Not the strained expression of someone resisting an external force. Just the ordinary frown of a man who had been asked a question he found irritating.
"Of course he is. I designed that chamber to withstand the entire mansion collapsing on top of it. I have told you this already."
Annani searched his face, his eyes, the micro-expressions around his mouth, for any sign that her compulsion had taken hold. A slight slackness in the jaw. A momentary blankness in the gaze. The barely perceptible delay between hearing the command and formulating the response indicated a compelled mind rather than a free one.
There was nothing.
Either he was immune to her compulsion and answering freely, or he was answering truthfully, and her compulsion was redundant.
"Do you know how we can get him out?"
"Why are you asking all these questions that I have already answered?" Navuh's frown deepened, and now there was an edge of suspicion in his voice. Not suspicion of compulsion because he clearly had no idea she was attempting it, but suspicion of her motives.
She could push harder, pour every drop of power into a single, focused command, and try to crack whatever it was that made his mind impervious. But she knew that it would not matter.The stone would not yield. Not because she was weak, but because Navuh was what he was, a descendant of the Eternal King who had inherited not just the power of compulsion but the immunity to it.
She had suspected it. Now she knew.
Annani released Mia's hand and sat on the single chair beside Navuh's bed.
She had not collapsed. She had not let her posture crumble. Her expression did not betray the wave of disappointment that crashed through her. She was the Clan Mother. But she allowed herself one slow breath.
"I am asking because I think you are bluffing," she said, and her voice was steady even if her heart was not. "You have no idea how we can get him out."
It was a gamble. A redirect. If she could not compel the truth from him, perhaps she could provoke it.
Navuh's expression shifted. The suspicion faded, replaced by something that looked almost like amusement. Almost like pity. And buried beneath both, so deeply hidden that anyone less observant than Annani might have missed it, a flicker of satisfaction.
He had won this round, and he knew it.
"It is easy," he said, his voice carrying the calm assurance of a man who held all the cards and was in no hurry to play them. "You let me talk with Losham and I give the command." He spread his hands. "It's as easy as it gets."
12
MATTIE
Mattie had learned a few things about negotiations over the years. Mostly from her grandmother.
The first was that timing mattered more than content. Even the best argument in the world would fail if delivered at the wrong moment. At best, it would get ignored in favor of more pressing issues, and at worst, it would be dismissed out of hand.
The second was that asking for permission was a surefire way to get a refusal. It was giving someone else the power to say no, and the result was most often a denial.
The third thing she had learned, and this was probably the most important one, was that the good intentions of others were sometimes an obstacle, especially when they didn't agree with her. It was better to act first and apologize later.
Which was why she hadn't told Dimitri or Petrov what she was planning to do when Dave arrived for his shots.
She sat in her chair by the window, her injured hand elevated on a folded lab coat, her book opened on the table, but she didn't have the patience to read. Instead, she watched the men work.Dimitri was pipetting something into a row of vials, and Petrov was at the far bench, running calibrations on equipment that Mattie couldn't even pretend to understand.
