“Yes,” I said. “Make the call.”
Mari smiled, a real one, the full version, warm and unguarded.
“Good.” She stood and reached for her phone. “One more thing.”
“What?”
She looked at me with the direct eyes of a woman who had made her own difficult choices and was familiar with the view from the other side of them. “There’s a place. Asgard. You might have heard of it, through the club world. It’s private. Sacred, almost, to the people in Jared’s circle. It’s where the important things happen.” She paused. “If you wanted to reach out to him. Not a text, not a phone call. Something that meant something.” She held my gaze. “I could arrange access.”
I thought about a man standing at a gate at eight seventeen in the morning because I had told him not to come and he had come anyway. About deeply inconvenient. About a note under a phone and a drive left in a pocket and the expression on his face in the rear drive when he had held on and I had let him.
I thought about my mother, who had never gotten to choose.
I thought about what it meant to be her daughter.
“Arrange it,” I said.
Chapter 20
Jared
The message had arrived at seven forty-three.
One line. The burner number, her burner, the one I’d left on her nightstand in what felt like a different chapter of my life.
Asgard. Tonight. Come alone.
I had read it four times.
Not because it was ambiguous, it wasn’t, but because the fact of it arriving at all required a moment to absorb.
She had reached out.
She had chosen the location, chosen the terms, chosen the register of the thing.
Not a text asking to talk. Not a call.
Asgard.
The place where the important things happened in our world, the sacred space, the room where Erik had collared Raia. The location where Noah married Shelby, and Gabriel had proposed to Rose. It was the place where our people came when they were ready to choose something that mattered.
She knew what Asgard meant.
Raia had almost certainly explained it.
Mari had probably reinforced the point with all the subtlety of a battering ram.
She had chosen it anyway.
I had spent the drive over constructing what I was walking into. Anger… she had every right to anger and I had given her more than enough material for it. Questions I didn’t have clean answers to. The reckoning of a woman who had been told the truth after it mattered and was deciding what to do with that. I had prepared for all of it. I had prepared to sit with whatever she needed to hand me and accept it without defense, because that was what the situation called for and because she deserved someone who would stay in the room for it.
What I had not prepared for was her.
Asgard was quiet when I arrived.
Raia had arranged it, which meant Erik had approved it. Mari had almost certainly involved herself somewhere along the way. The room was private, the building otherwise dark, and the familiar atmosphere of the space carried the same feeling it always had when it was empty of everyone except the people who needed it.
I found her in the main ceremonial room.
