Page 30 of The Witch They Crave

Middling: the tribunal hears me, acknowledges doubt, but upholds the Vane claim on principle. The forty-eight-hour window opens. I file an appeal. I leverage my father's call. I buy more time, piece by piece, until time stops being the problem.

Worst case.

I close my eyes.

Worst case, the tribunal rules and the window closes and Kage's route is the only route left. He takes her. Disappears with her into the kind of nowhere a man like him knows how to find. And I—

I stay.

The realization is precise and immediate, the way the worst ones always are. If it comes to Kage's plan, I can't go with them. Someone has to hold the institution's attention. Someone has to absorb the fallout, feed them false leads, keep the fail-safe from being transferred to a handler who'd use it without hesitation. Someone has to stand in the room where she was and make sure nobody follows her out.

That someone is me.

It was always going to be me.

My hand closes. Tight enough that the knuckles ache. There's a pressure behind my sternum that I haven't felt in centuries—old and enormous and completely useless, the kind of pain that doesn't respond to logic or discipline or five hundred years of learning how to put things down.

I would be here.

She would be out there.

With him.

I let myself feel the loss and heartbreak. The full scope of it. Then I fold it up, put it away, and note what's underneath: it doesn't matter. Not the distance, not the time, not who's beside her in the interim. If I have to let Kage take her to keep her breathing, I let Kage take her.

And then I dismantle every obstacle between us, one by one, until there are none left.

Because she's mine.

She doesn't know it yet.

But she's mine, and I will always find her.

Chapter 9

The inquest is today.

I know it before I open my eyes. My magic knows it too—already hot under my sternum, already pressing outward, the way it does when my body registers a threat before my brain catches up.

The cellar is dark. A little grayer than I remember it. The resonance stone is warm in my fist—I fell asleep holding it again, copper veins pressed into my palm hard enough to leave marks.

Nobody told me when the inquest starts. Nobody told me anything—format, charges, terms, whether I get to speak or just sit there while strangers decide what the hell happens to me.

I haven't heard from Kage either.

It’s been a week since I sent him out to watch Leopold. No word through Nellie. No pulse through the blood bond—I've been pressing my awareness toward that low pull compulsively, finding it distant and steady and useless. He's alive. I can feel that much. Alive and silent, which is somehow worse than the alternative.

I sit up. Swing my legs off the cot. Pull on dark pants, the fitted black top with long sleeves that Nellie dropped off for me with a note that said for when you need armor. I drag my hair back and tie it off and open the door to the common room.

Aamon is at the slate slab. Two cups of something steaming, papers spread in front of him, already in all black with his hair slicked back and that severe part. He looks up when I come in and his eyes do a quick sweep—checking. Not checking me out. Checking me for cracks.

"Two hours," he says. "Sit down."

I sit. He pushes one of the cups toward me. I wrap my hands around it because they're slightly shaking and it gives them something to do.

"Three adjudicators on a raised platform. You'll be seated at the center of the room. Witnesses are called individually." He watches my face while he talks, gauging how much I can take. "House Vane has entered a claim. I don't know the terms yet."

"What kind of claim?"