Oh no.That’s the kind of sentence that ruins a person.
So I kiss him.
I pull him down by the front of his shirt and kiss him slow, the kind of kiss that doesn’t ask for anything, and his hands settle at my waist, careful, and then not careful, and for a while the ventilation hum is the only other sound in the world.
“You’re going to be their favorite person,” I tell him against his mouth. “I’m going to have to fight my own children for you.”
His forehead drops to mine. He doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t have to. The bond is saying it.
Then I slide off the crate before the moment can turn into more feelings than I signed up for. “Frame that speech I gave you. It’s not coming back. Now come help me ruin Konstantin’s evening. Adrienne’s waiting.”
He picks up the blade. Sets it on the rack.
He follows me to the door. At the threshold he stops.
“Celeste.”
“What?”
“We’re never speaking of my feelings again.” A beat. The corner of his mouth. “Starting tomorrow.”
My own rule. Amended in his favor.
“Move,” I tell him. “You’re stalling.”
He moves. We go to Adrienne. The war continues.
Chapter
Six
By the time we reach the conference room that evening, Adrienne has Konstantin’s whole filthy architecture spread across the table, and she looks at it without flinching. She lived inside it.
The diagrams are hand-drawn. Adrienne works from memory, not files, because the files were kept inside wards she can’t reach anymore and the memory was the thing she brought out when we cut her free. The lines are clean and precise and the handwriting is small, and every node in the network is labeled with the name of the witch who maintains it and the leverage Konstantin has over them. Daughters, sisters, parents, debts. Every line of ink is a person trapped by leverage they can’t break alone.
Since we pulled Lira out of the facility where Konstantin held her, the freedom shows in Adrienne’s hands, which are still now where they used to shake, and in her eyes, which stay on you where they used to slide away.
“He doesn’t bind them all the same way he bound me,” she says, tapping three points on her own diagram. “He had mydaughter. That’s the cleanest leverage there is, terror with a face on it. But the others, the ones working his wards, he’s got tied a dozen different ways. Debt. Addiction he manufactured. One I’m fairly sure just believes him, which is the hardest knot of all. You can’t free someone who doesn’t think she’s caught.” She looks up at me. “I know what the inside of every one of these feels like. That’s the one useful thing he made me. If anybody can talk them loose, it’s the woman who got loose.”
“Then we build it around you,” I say, pulling the diagram toward me. “We go knot by knot. The ones tied by terror, we take the terror away. The ones tied by debt, we find out what he’s actually owed and whether we can pay it or break it.”
Knot by knot. How you take apart anything built to last.
A warmth starts at the back of my neck. I ignore it, because the pregnancy has been changing my temperature one degree at a time and warmth is nothing new. Then the warmth spreads. Down my spine. Across my collarbones. Into my hands. I lose my place on Adrienne’s diagram and read the same knot three times without taking in a word of it, and my heartbeat picks up speed for no reason a war council has ever given me.
For half a second I brace, expecting the current, expecting the twins riding it up from below. But the two small fast heartbeats under my own stay even. It isn’t them.
So I run the checklist. No fever climbing my spine. No pressure behind my eyes. No pull from below the navel. Nothing on the list of things that have gone wrong with this body, and the heat keeps spreading anyway, and somewhere in the middle of ruling things out I become aware of my husband across the table. The line of his shoulders. His hands flat on Adrienne’s diagram. The sound of his voice doing things to my concentration that a war council has never once done.
Oh.
Oh, you have got to be kidding me.
Want. Sudden and total and absolutely inconvenient, arriving all at once and whiting out the diagram and the war and the entire concept of Konstantin’s contracts. My body has decided that what it needs right now is my husband, and it needs him immediately.
Terrible timing. Just spectacular.
I consider fighting it. I’m decent at fighting things. Then Maximus turns a page of the diagram with those hands, and the argument’s over.
