Page 38 of The Witch They Crave

Joint concern. Two owners now instead of one, and a tighter leash on my progress than I had underground, and not a single hand in this room that's mine.

Leopold is watching me. Not gloating. That's the part that turns my stomach—there's no triumph in his face, just patience, the patience of someone who knows exactly how this is going to go. All he has to do is wait.

All there is left to do is accept my new future.

Do I become a slave? Or stay a prisoner?

"Yes,” I breathe. “I… accept.”

The pen scratches. Balcour, writing, like the outcome was printed before I opened my mouth. Marcellus dips his head to the Vanes. The center adjudicator says something formal about terms being entered and the matter being closed, and the words go past me in a smear, because the thing I agreed to is already moving, already becoming real in the mechanics of the room.

Leopold turns to the platform. "House Vassard is grateful for the tribunal's wisdom." Then, smooth, unhurried, folding it in like an afterthought: "For continuity of care, I'll have Miss Dellaby's quarters prepared at the Vassard residence today. My household physician will look her over this evening—she's been kept underground two weeks, I'd like to be sure she's well. Her training schedule continues without interruption, of course." A small warm pause. "I want it on the record that her comfort is my first concern."

I almost laugh out loud.

Aamon stands. "A point of procedure," he says.

The adjudicator's eyes narrow. "Professor."

"The regulatory device remains council property. So does its operator." His voice is level, but I can read him better now. I swear I can see his entire body locked up in tension. "Containment doesn't transfer to House Vassard. It's shared. Which means the fail-safe device has to remain within functional range of the subject at all times, per the council's own containment protocol. Section nine."

I don't know what section nine is. Neither, I'd bet, does anyone else in this room other than Balcour.

"Your point," the adjudicator says.

"If the subject boards at the Vassard residence, the device—and therefore its operator—boards there also. Anything else violates the protocol House Vassard just agreed to be bound by."

I suck in a breath, realizing what he’s doing.

I watch it happen on Leopold's face. Not a crack—he's too good for a crack—but a hairline pause, a half-second where the machinery behind the warmth keeps running while the smile holds its position. He wanted me alone. He built a hallway with one door and I walked through it exactly as designed, and now the man who's chained to my kill-switch has just informed the tribunal that he comes with me.

Aamon is falling onto the sword to make sure I don’t go into Leopold’s house of horrors alone.

"That's—" Marcellus starts.

"Correct," Leyonna says, from her chair. First word she's spoken since her statement. "Section nine is real. I could recite it. The device cannot be separated from the subject beyond functional range without a reassignment proceeding, which"—she looks at the adjudicators, mild as milk—"nobody has filed."

The center adjudicator considers this. "The Professor boards at the Vassard residence for the duration, then. As a function of the device." She says it like it's tedious, which is the only reason it works—she wants this closed, and Aamon has handed her a way to close it that's technically airtight. "So entered. Is there anything else?”

"No, ma'am," Aamon says.

"No," says Leopold, warm as ever. But there's a new edge under the word. He’s pissed.

I bite my cheek to hide a smile.

Two men just made their first move against each other over who gets to own me. Neither asked what I wanted.

Maybe running away with Kage would have been a better idea.

The adjudicator waives the forty-eight hours.

Something about transfer periods, old law—Marcellus starts to raise it and she waves it off. The claim wasn't upheld, she says. It was satisfied. Council to House Vassard, and I was already the council's, so there's no handoff. I'm not being surrendered to anyone. I'm being moved from one shelf to another in the same store.

"Effective immediately." She closes the folder.

Two words, and my whole life gets picked up and set down somewhere else. Nobody asks if I'm ready. Nobody was ever going to.

The posse of enforcers stand me up. Zeva comes at me with the witch irons again and my whole body braces—