Page 111 of The Black Citadel

The card waited on my desk, stained with Rift water and marked by my hand. "I want to keep mine."

"Then keep it."

"Does it need to be signed out?"

"No. It was issued to you, and the route is no longer operational."

Alex stretched across the sofa. "Frame it."

I was never going to admit to him I had already contemplated that.

I carried the report to my room with Ashter drifting after me in a thin ribbon of smoke. He materialized across the end of my bed while I spread the route card on the desk and pinned its softened corner beneath the ornate knife I had stolen from Janus. The final page of the report lay beside it, my name followed by Apex, Nephrite and one completed deployment. Beneath Registered Discipline, a single word had been entered: Healer. I smoothed my thumb over the water-damaged fold in the route card and left both papers open on the desk.

Ashter crossed the room and pressed himself along my side once I sat on the bed, solid and warm and taking up more space than strictly necessary, the way he always did on days that had asked too much of both of us. I didn't tell him to move.

The men upstairs knew the record was incomplete, yet none of them had treated that knowledge as permission to reach for what I kept. For once, the truth still belonged to me even when I chose not to write it down.

Chapter Twelve: One Was Already Too Many

Alex

The whetstone caught the edge of my hunting knife wrong, and I flipped it over before I put a burr in steel I actually cared about. Late morning sun sat over the back wall, warm enough that I'd shoved my sleeves up past the elbow, and somewhere behind me Jade's knives kept finding the target with the same flat thud, over and over, no gap long enough to count as a pause.

Thud.

I didn't need to look to know she'd hit the same three inches of wood every time.

She'd been out here since breakfast, working through her whole belt in slow rotation, walking down to collect the blades, resetting, throwing again. Two weeks ago she would have done it with her back to the wall and one eye on the gate. Today her back was to the house instead, which meant she'd stopped needing to watch the door for whoever might come through it.

Small thing. I noticed it anyway.

Ashter sprawled across the flat stone beside her the ember cracks along his back dimmed to a low simmer the way they did when nothing around him needed his attention. One eye tracked her walk down the yard and back to collect her knives. The other stayed shut.

The front gate banged against the fence post hard enough that the whetstone jumped clean out of my hand and Jade's next knife went wide by a hand span, her shoulders coming up before she'd even turned to check what caused it.

"Still jump at loud noises," Dax said, already halfway up the path with a weapons bag slung over one shoulder and a grin that hadn't changed since we were seventeen. "Some things never improve."

"Some people never learn to knock."

"Knocking is for people who aren't sure they're welcome."

I set the whetstone down and met him at the gate, and he dropped the bag long enough to grab my arm and pull me into the kind of hug that ended with him knocking his knuckles against the back of my skull.

"You're getting soft," he said. "Too much sitting around this fancy house."

"Says the man teaching children to hold a sword for a living."

"Those children could take you."

"Debatable."

He looked past me toward the target, and toward Jade, who had already collected her thrown knives and was resetting her stance like nothing had interrupted her at all.

Ashter lifted his head off the warm stone the second Dax's attention settled on her, ember light flaring bright along the cracks in his hide, a low sound building in his chest that hadn't been there a breath earlier. The ridge of plates along his spine came up stiff.