“What were you doing there?”
His voice was rough, a low rasp that scraped against the silence. The words landed as an accusation.
I stopped at the foot of the bed, crossing my arms. “Let’s just get you cleaned up properly, shall we?”
He cut straight through the deflection. “The mill,” he said, his voice tight. “How did you find it? That sector is off the grid. It doesn’t exist on any municipal map.”
“Orin Brandt down in tech got a ping on the monitors. A disturbance.” I kept my voice level, though the memory of that place—the metallic taste of the air, the suffocating wrongness of the dead zone—made my stomach turn. “I thought it was just another black-market drop. Routine.”
“Routine,” he repeated, the word flat and cold. “You walked into a dead zone alone, Selene. You have no idea what you were standing in.”
I withheld the rest. I swallowed the truth about how I really found the place—not through Orin, but via Jack Preston.
Jack had rung me at dawn, his voice jittery with paranoia. He had spotted two Umbrakynn the night before—Highspire guards by the look of their uniforms—discussing an ongoing operation at the mill. Being Umbrakynn himself, Jack sensed the rot in them immediately; they felt wrong, chemically altered, moving with the same erratic aggression as the fighter at the Pit.
It was the link I needed—proof connecting the stolen magic to a location. I went alone because, despite the pull of my magic, my mind clung to its old suspicions. I kept Riven at a distance until the danger left me no choice. I tried to message him only when the dead zone began to suffocate me, and by then, my phone had already glitched into static.
Riven caught the omission, but he let it slide. He turned his gaze to the window, his jaw set. The sunlight looked too bright, too cheerful for the grim weight settling in the room. His hand clenched on the duvet.
“I knew the location,” he said quietly, the admission leaden. “When I saw the address… I knew. The Blackwood Mill is a known Highspire drop site. A disposal ground for problems they want to erase.”
He looked back at me, his eyes dark with a mixture of anger and regret.
“But I assumed it was a graveyard. Ruin and rust. I never expected a heavy-grade Augmented sentry. To station something that lethal on the surface…”
He trailed off, the implication clear. You don’t guard a graveyard. You guard a vault.
“You’re lucky to be breathing,” he said, shifting and wincing as the movement tugged at his newly healed skin. “That thing was builtfor slaughter. And the dead zone… it wasn’t natural, Selene. It was engineered. They built it to suppress magic while he—and things like him—operate freely.”
A chill slid down my spine, more bitter than the draft from the hall. “Engineered by who?”
“By people who view magic as a raw material to be harvested and distilled.”
“Highspire,” I whispered.
His silence was confirmation enough.
“You knew what he was,” I said, stepping closer to the bed. The sun hit my back, warming the shirt sticking to my skin. “You knew exactly how to fight him.”
Riven met my gaze, his expression locked down tight. “I suspected.”
“You suspected?” I laughed, a short sound devoid of humour. “You nearly died over there, Riven. You took a knife to the gut knowing exactly what that thing was capable of. You’re hiding something.”
“I was managing a risk,” he countered, his voice dropping to that lethal register. The words were cold, a wall erected between us. “I neutralised the threat. Do not mistake tactical necessity for sentiment.”
The dismissal stung, brutal and immediate, but I forced myself to ignore it.
“I don’t need tactics,” I snapped. “I need answers. If that’s what they’re building in Highspire—if that’s what killed the others—I need to know.”
He looked at me then, really looked at me, with an expression that sat somewhere between frustration and a terrible, ancient weariness. The sunlight washed out the colour in his face, making him look like a statue carved from stone.
“There are things I cannot tell you,” he said.
It sounded like a confession.
“Cannot? Or will not?”
“Both.” The word hung there, final and immovable. My anger spiked, hot and bright, but before I could unleash it, he shifted, swinging his legs over the edge of the bed with a deliberate, slow-motion grace that looked like it cost him nothing.
