"Then someone needs to go to Charleston and put the situation in front of her face." He looks up. The patch makes the remaining eye sharper, or maybe that's just Julian, compensating with what he has left. "Let Celeste do it. When she's back on her feet."
I take a beat.
"Maximus. She walked into that hub and pulled me back from witch-magic. Let her be the one who walks into Vivienne's territory."
"All right."
"Good." He sets the tablet down. "Conference room. Inner circle meeting."
He stands. Elena moves toward him. He holds up a hand without looking at her. She stops.
He walks out of the medical wing under his own power, the patch steady, his stride unchanged.
I follow him.
The conference room. The inner circle assembles. Celeste's chair is empty.
"Seraphina," Julian says. "What do we know about the witch who breached our wards?"
"Adrienne built the counter-resonance that breached the hub wards. A second witch delivered the strike. Adrienne is bound to Konstantin by blood oath. His leverage is her daughter. Held in a facility we haven't located. Free the daughter, the oath dissolves."
Julian briefs the room on the hub losses. The numbers land harder the second time, spoken in front of the people who will have to absorb them.
Sullivan straightens in his corner seat. "Carson has a working prototype. Small-scale, but it purifies contaminated blood. He told Elena and me this morning."
The room shifts. Julian looks at me.
"Get him in here," I say.
Carson arrives two minutes later. A human in a room full of vampires, and he doesn't flinch from any of it.
"The prototype works," he says. "Small-scale. One unit of blood processed in under twenty minutes. Contaminants removed, viable for use. The problem has been scaling it. Territory-level deployment needs infrastructure I haven't had access to build."
"The hub just made that urgent," I say. "What do you need?"
"A clean room. Pumps. Column materials. Elena's already sourced most of it. What I didn't have was authorization to move past the benchmark." He looks at me. "I'm asking for it now."
"You have it. Elena coordinates."
Carson nods and leaves. Elena is already writing on her tablet.
I'min the study when the bond shifts.
Past midnight. Julian went back to the medical wing an hour ago because Elena stood in the corridor and would not move until he did. The rest of the inner circle scattered. I've been at my desk with Vivienne's territory on the screen.
Celeste is awake.
She comes through the study door shortly after. Her hair is pulled back. She's changed clothes.
She pulls a chair to the other side of my desk and sits. Looks at the screen.
"I stopped by the medical wing."
I look up from the screen.
"He was awake. I told him what he did for me isn't something I'll forget." She picks up a pen from the desk, turns it once between her fingers. "He said I already repaid it. I don’t feel like I have.”
The healing. Julian counts the debt settled. The precision of that is entirely his.
