Page 57

Garnet’s tea needed a refill. Valene had identified a document in the archive that she wanted to photograph. Fiora was showing Maelin how she’d built the graph. Bexley was reorganizing the copies she’d already sorted.

The back section was quiet.

At some point, Drayce had moved to the chair beside her rather than across the table. She hadn’t noticed when. He was studying the summary document, and she was studying the round table full of two centuries of evidence. They were two people who’d kissed, hadn’t discussed it, and were now sitting close enough that the professional distance they’d been maintaining in this room had become entirely theoretical — two people thinking about the same thing they weren’t discussing.

“You thought you were the problem.” Not a question.

“I thought I was the mechanism.”

“You’re the target.”

“Yes. Which is—” She turned the summary document over in her hands. “—I have opinions about being a target. I find I prefer it to being a liability.”

“It’s not better.”

“It’s different.” She met his eyes. “And I can do something with different.”

He looked at her with the full, undivided attention she’d stopped being surprised by and had simply come to accept. The fireplace behind them burned at the steady, even pitch it held when the room’s emotional temperature was warm rather than spiking. The ward lines beneath the building hummed their usual low hum.

She was aware of him in the fourteen-inch gap between them, every nerve on alert, which wasn’t new. What was new was that she’d stopped filing this under things she refused to examine. She’d taken it off the list somewhere between the warehouse and the kitchen and hadn’t put it back.

He kissed her.

Not across a table this time. He was right there; fourteen inches had closed to nothing, and his arm came around her waist, sure as everything he did — as if every move he made were a choice he’d already weighed. The kiss came warm and unhurried, without the careful first-time edges of the kitchen — it felt like something that had already happened twice and was happening again because both had stopped pretending it wasn’t going to.

The ward lines pulsed once. Low and steady. The espresso machine made a sound that was not unpleasant.

From the front of the café, just audible: Fiora’s voice saying something to Garnet, Garnet’s reply, and then Valene shushing both, clearly delighted and doing her best to look dignified about it.

Althea pulled back. She looked at him. He looked at her with the steady warmth that had been there since the kitchen and wasn’t going anywhere.

“The coven is listening.”

“Yes.”

“Bexley has a graph.”

“Almost certainly.”

She pressed her lips together to keep from laughing.

“We have a betrayal thread to follow.”

“We do.” He picked up the summary document. “Pike will have the ancestry records by morning.”

She stood. The back section of the Cauldron and Cup was settling back into its usual shape, the war council arrangement dissolving into four people who had found plenty to do near the espresso machine and were now running out of excuses. “We should rejoin the group before Fiora develops a fifth graph.”

“Is the fifth graph about the creature attacks?”

She looked at him. “Definitely not.”

She was choosing to find it encouraging.

FOURTEEN

DRAYCE

The caves had been logged as low-priority for two decades.