“Yes.” He spoke heavily, acknowledging a variable that changed all the subsequent calculations. “Our presence may have awakened her omega side. The tower’s binding work is cracking. The braids are loosening.” A pause. “Her heat will come whether he planned for it or not.”
“And when it does?”
Malric looked at me directly. The question between us was not tactical. We know what we felt on the stairwell and in that chamber. We knew we were the cause of it, her heat coming, but neither of us had addressed it because there were more urgent things to address.
But it was there.
“I don’t know,” he said. The honesty of it, from Malric, was notable.
“She trusts you less than she trusts me,” I said. Not to wound him. As information.
“I noticed.”
“You came in hard. She’s spent her entire life being managed by a man who used a cold voice and calm logic to convince her that her own nature was lethal. I doubt he was gentle and kind with her. You sound like him. You must adjust your manner around her.”
His jaw tightened, and I watched him receive that without deflecting it, which told me it had already occurred to him and he hadn’t liked it then either.
“I know,” he said quietly.
The corridor hummed beneath our boots, the tower’s low sustained note present as ever, and beneath it something that had changed since we arrived—a warmth in the stone that had not been there when we first crossed the threshold. The placewas responding to all three of us, or to whatever the three of us together constituted, and I didn’t yet have language for what that was.
“The king will come,” Malric said. “We may not have a warning.”
“Then we stay close,” I said. “We don’t split up in this place.”
His gaze moved to the door again.
I watched his face and thought about jealousy, which was not a thing I generally wasted time on. I thought about her fear, the one she had toward us and toward herself.
“She’s not the mission,” I said. “Not the way we thought she was.”
“No,” he agreed. “She’s not.”
“She’s a person who has been used as a resource her entire life and doesn’t know that’s what’s been happening to her.”
“Yes.”
“Which means when she understands it fully,” I said, “and she will, she’s going to have to decide what she does with that. And she can’t make that decision if we’re treating her as a resource too.”
Malric held my gaze for a long moment.
“I hear you,” he said.
It was not an apology. He didn’t produce those easily, and I didn’t expect them. But it was real, which was what mattered.
“We need to walk every level again. Map the exits that don’t exist. If the king arrives?—”
“When,” I corrected.
“When,” he allowed. “We need to know the layout of this place better than he does.”
I nodded. Then, because it needed saying, “Whatever this is—what we felt on the stairs, what the tower is doing, the fact that it let us in—we’re going to have to talk about it. Properly. Not tonight. But soon.”
Malric’s expression didn’t change.
But he didn’t deny it, which was its own kind of answer.
A low, resonant gong sounded somewhere deep within the tower, the vibration traveling through stone and bone alike.
