Page 31 of The Witch They Crave

"I don't know." His jaw does the centimeter thing. "But I need you to hear me on this: whatever they say in that room, whatever language they use, you do not react. You answer what they ask. You don't volunteer. And you do not let them see the heat."

"The heat."

"If your magic flares—even once, even small—it confirms every fear they brought in with them. You are not a bomb, Calypso. Don't give them permission to treat you like one."

My name. Not Miss Dellaby. The sound of it in his mouth settles something in my chest that I didn't know was rattling.

I tap my fingers on the cup, the nervous energy like a coiled spring inside me. "What if they ask me about Emric?"

"Tell the truth."

I meet his gaze. "The truth is I killed him."

"The truth is more complicated than that and you know it." His voice drops. "Tell them who he was. Tell them what he did. Don't beg—you're not on trial for who you are, you're on trial for what your magic did under conditions that were engineered to make it fail."

I stare at the cup. The steam curls up between my hands. "I'm… scared."

I don't plan to say it. It just falls out, and once it's in the air between us I can't pick it back up. I wait for him to give me the professional response—the measured reassurance, the clinical distance. The Aamon I’ve come to expect.

He reaches across the slab and takes my hand.

His fingers close around mine—firm, warm, deliberate. Not a brush, not an accident. A decision. I feel my own pulse against his palm, like a jackhammer, and my magic does something strange: it quiets. Like his touch is a hand on the back of a spooked horse. Easy. Easy.

"I will be in that room," he says. Low. Just for me. "With you. I’ll be in your sightline the entire time. If it gets bad, you look at me. That's all. Just look at me."

I look at him now. The hazel is warm—greener than usual, the way it goes when something gets past the mask. His thumb moves once across my knuckles. Once. Then he lets go and the professional distance slides back into place, but slower this time. Like he's not in a rush to put it on.

"Have you heard from Kage?" I ask.

Something shifts behind his eyes. Quick, controlled. "No."

A week of silence. I don't know if he found anything. I don't know if he's okay. I don't know what House Vane's claim looks like or what Leopold has been doing for two weeks while I've been underground, and in an hour I'm walking into a room where all of it lands on me at once.

Corvin's boots hit the top of the stairs, and the quiet morning is over.

∞∞∞

Sunlight.

It hits my face at the top of the stairwell and I flinch from it—two weeks underground, and my eyes aren't ready. I blink against the glare, waiting for the world to fill in, and when it does I stop moving.

There are six vampires waiting for me.

Corvin and Zeva I expected. The two enforcers behind them I didn't—big, stone-faced, in council blacks with their hands clasped at their waists. And behind them, two more I've never seen, flanking the corridor like bookends.

Six escorts for one witch.

Zeva steps forward. She's holding something—metal, glinting in the corridor light, and my stomach lurches. Two thin bands of black iron connected by a short chain, inscribed with ward-script so fine I can barely read it. The inside of each band is lined with rows of tiny thorns—not sharp enough to break skin on contact, but positioned so that any movement, any twist of the wrist, will drive them deeper.

My magic recoils from the metal before Zeva even touches me.

Aamon's hand finds my elbow. His mouth drops close to my ear—close enough that I feel the words more than I hear them.

"Witch irons. Don't channel. Don't flare. The wards will burn and the thorns will dig. Hold still and breathe."

His hand drops. Zeva locks them around my wrists with the slightest look of pity.

"Standard procedure for tribunal transport," Corvin says. He doesn't look at me when he says it.