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“Don’t.”

“I haven’t said anything.”

“You’re about to.”

“I am absolutely about to.” Valene picked up her tea. “Go upstairs. We won’t discuss it tonight. We’ll discuss it in the morning when Fiora arrives. She’s already texted me twice and she’s going to want to be here for the part where you explain how a debrief results in whatever this is on your face.”

Althea went upstairs.

A tin of lemon-zest cookies sat on the counter.

TEN

DRAYCE

Pike called it a strategy session.

This was what Pike called interventions. He’d been doing it for eleven years, and Drayce had never once been fooled. But neither of them stopped keeping up the fiction, because it let everyone sit down without making anything official.

They arrived at seven with whiskey, looking like men who’d waited long enough and were ready to wait longer. Pike had his notebook. Tor had nothing — he traveled light, in every sense. Maelin set four glasses on the kitchen counter without prompting and poured without asking for quantities, correctly, a Maelin habit that Drayce had stopped finding alarming around year three.

The fire was already burning. Drayce had lit it before they arrived, which said more than he intended, and all three of them caught it, though none of them mentioned it.

The house had that feel it took on winter evenings — solid and warm, with the scent of woodsmoke and old stone, and the faint tang of machine oil from the restoration table in the adjacent room. The radio he’d been working on for two weeks sat on the long table, tubes laid out in order, half its housing removed. He’d gotten three evenings of solid work on it before the ward situation began consuming his spare hours.

Drayce took the chair that faced the fire.

His wolf settled only slightly. It knew what Pike with a notebook and a fire meant.

“The northern ward line is weaker than it should be,” Maelin stated upfront, as he always did, having reviewed the ward logs prior to arriving. “Two of the anchor points are wobbly in a manner inconsistent with their typical recovery after a surge. They’re holding, but it’s taking a third longer than usual to stabilize."

“Since when?” Drayce looked up from the log.

“The cliff engagement. It lines up.”

Tor, from across the room, glanced at Drayce. Drayce kept his eyes on the fire. They didn’t say it aloud. It wasn’t necessary. The cliff engagement had happened the same night Althea took a wrong turn into the evacuation route, and the anchor had been failing ever since — not bad luck. Drayce had spent a week watching the ward reports confirm it.

“The warehouse ambush pattern.” Drayce set his phone on the table. “Review it.”

Maelin already had the incident report drafted on his phone. He handed it over. Drayce read it a third time, and it said the same thing as the other two: the creatures had moved in formation along a patrol route on a known schedule, at a location the ward monitoring wouldn’t flag as a primary breach point. That wasn’t Rift behavior. Rift creatures didn’t know patrol schedules.

“Someone gave them the route,” Tor said.

“Someone with local knowledge,” Drayce agreed. “Or access to the monitoring logs.”

“Council access,” Maelin replied. Not an accusation. Just a man running a threat assessment out loud.

“Elder Council has ward modification and monitoring access,” Drayce said. “Legitimate, institutional, built into the infrastructure.” He’d known for a week, and it hadn’t grown any more comfortable. “We’re not naming anyone without more.”

Pike hadn’t written anything yet — still in the listening phase before forming opinions, which meant those opinions would be sharp when they arrived. “We’re naming the shape of it. Someone with access is directing the attacks. The ward boundary is the mechanism. The target is different.”

Drayce looked at the fire.

“The surges,” Maelin said, arriving at the same moment Drayce did. “The creatures respond to the emotional magic surges. If someone is deliberately provoking them⁠—”

“They’re not targeting the wards. They’re targeting her.” Drayce said it flatly, and his wolf said nothing, waiting to see what came next. “The ward degradation is the side effect, not the objective.”

Tor pushed off the far wall and moved to the couch. He picked up his glass and sat. His attention had shifted — from observing to processing. Drayce had known his brother long enough to tell the difference. Tor was doing math he would share when it was finished.