Vivienne holds my gaze for two seconds. Three. Whatever’s behind that look, she keeps it behind her teeth.
Three committed or leaning. Vivienne weighing. Santos unreadable.
The door opens.
Marcellus fills the frame.
“There’s someone at the gate requesting parley.”
“Who?” Maximus’s voice from the back wall.
“Nadia.”
My hands close into fists at my sides. The reaction is faster than the thought. The last time she was inside our perimeter, she left Ava with a dislocated shoulder and Tristan locked in a holding cell and our entire tactical overlay broadcasting to Konstantin in real time.
“Bring her in,” Maximus says. “Escorted. Searched. She doesn’t leave anyone’s sight.”
Minutes pass. The lords wait. Vivienne recrosses her legs. Dmitri doesn’t move. The door opens again.
Nadia enters between two of Marcellus’s guards.
The silver hair is the same. Shoulders back. Chin level. Dark clothes, sharp lines, functional.
At the console, Julian stops. The composed control he holds during briefings is gone. His hand is on the edge of the desk, knuckles white, his eyes tracking Nadia across the room with the precision of someone cataloging a threat he already failed to identify once. He doesn’t speak. He holds position. But the tendons in his forearm are rigid, and the effort it takes him to stay where he is shows in the line of his shoulders.
At the back wall, Maximus holds his ground. But the shadows at the base of the wall darken. They press outward along the floor for half a second before he pulls them back, and what reaches me through the bond is fury. Cold and controlled. The kind that compresses into something dense and quiet and infinitely patient.
He stays at the wall. He stays silent.
That restraint is louder than anything Julian’s white knuckles are saying.
Parley means she walks in, she delivers her message, and she walks out. Untouched. That’s the protocol. It exists because negotiations collapse without it, because wars end at tables and the tables only work if people can reach them alive.
I know why it matters. I respect why it matters. It still costs me something to stand here and watch her breathe the same air as the people she betrayed.
She addresses neither of us. Her attention is on the lords.
“Lord Konstantin sends his regards and his terms.” Her voice is level, clear, the voice of an intelligence officer delivering a brief. “He is aware of the facility strike. He is aware of the coalition. He appreciates your initiative.”
Appreciates.
“The facility you struck was one of several. It was also the smallest. The others have already been relocated. The locations the defector provided are empty buildings now.”
A glance at me on the word defector. She means Alexei.
“Lord Konstantin wishes the assembled lords to understand that his blood supply network is resilient and scalable. The facility in question will be replaced within thirty days.”
Okonkwo hasn’t sat down. “You came here to tell us he can rebuild?”
“I came here to tell you how it was built.”
Nadia’s gaze moves across the arc. Lord to lord.
“The feral outbreaks you’ve been managing for the past two years are not random. Lord Konstantin has been introducing contaminated human blood into your distribution channels. Deliberately. He controls the rate. When he needs leverage, the outbreaks increase. When he needs cooperation, they decrease.”
Something in the room shifts. No sound, no visible movement. The temperature drops by degrees as every vampire processes what she just said.
“The uncontaminated blood he’s been supplying you is the remedy to a crisis he’s been feeding. He plants the contaminated blood. Your vampires drink it. They go feral. You need clean blood to stop the outbreaks. He sells it to you from his farms.”
