Chapter 12 #2
The bond pulls at the strain in her, as if the connection between us is reaching for the cost and trying to absorb it. Her fever is high but banking faster than it should, and my own body feels the faint echo of effort I didn’t spend, a tiredness in my muscles that belongs to her work and not mine.
The bond has passed emotion and directional pull between us since the marks formed.
This is different. This is physiological.
A real transfer of physical strain, and nothing in the bond was built for it, and the fact that it’s happening anyway is the kind of development that should alarm me more than the gas attack.
The bond is learning something new. The something new is not asking permission.
And under the alarm, which is real, there’s a thing I have no protocol for.
Her exhaustion is in my own arms. Some part of her is being carried by some part of me, without either of us choosing it, and the part of me that exists to make certain no one can reach inside has no objection to the reach. It wants more of it.
That is the thing that should frighten me, and the thing that doesn’t.
Elena will want the instruments on it. I’ll let her try, but I already suspect this isn’t a thing instruments explain. The bond is learning to move more than feeling between us, and whatever it’s becoming, it isn’t finished.
I file it with the things that will matter later.
“Carson’s in medical,” Celeste says. “Sullivan’s with him. Two staffer burns, nothing permanent. The gas didn’t reach the blood supply.” She looks at my forearms. The skin is healed, pink and new where the chemical stripped it. “You went to the shaft yourself.”
“The canister was venting. Whoever pulled it was taking the dose to pull it. I’m the only one in this building who walks away from that.”
“And it’s the right call. It’s also the one you reach for first, every time, before you stop to check whether it’s the only one.
” Her voice is level. The anger in it isn’t at me.
It’s at the woman who gassed our home, and at the man who taught that woman everything she knows about our walls. “Nadia.”
“Nadia.” I say it with the weight it deserves.
“She used the air system she mapped during her service. The approach was witch-covered. No trail.” I look at the medical wing, at the people on oxygen, at the air system still fouled where the gas came in.
“She didn’t need to succeed. She needed to prove she could reach Carson whenever she chose. This was a demonstration.”
Celeste’s jaw sets. “New ventilation protocols. Seraphina wards the air intakes. Marcellus doubles the perimeter rotation. And we find Nadia before she decides to stop demonstrating and start finishing.”
“Agreed.”
I put my hand on her face. The touch is mine and automatic, my palm against her cheek, my thumb at her temple, the touch that means I’m checking, I’m here, you’re here, the count is still four.
She’s warm under my hand. The fever from the exertion is fading faster than it should, and my own tiredness deepens a fraction as it does.
She leans into my palm. Then she straightens, and her eyes go flat, and the woman who was leaning into her husband’s hand becomes the co-commander who has twelve people in medical and a compromised building to secure.
“Go,” she says. “I’ve got the wing. Find out how she got in and make sure it doesn’t happen twice.”
I go.
The compound’s corridors smell like burnt flowers and disinfectant and the aftermath of a home that’s been violated. The north intake is shut and warded, Seraphina’s work, her magic burned into the metal with enough force that the steel changed color.
Marcellus is at the perimeter. His report is clean and thorough and edged with the cold fury of a man whose building was compromised on his watch.
“The approach was witch-covered. Full scent suppression. The wolves ran the south perimeter three times and found nothing. She came from the northeast, through the drainage access that runs under the garden wall, the access we sealed after the first breach assessment.” His jaw is tight.
“Nadia unsealed it. She had the compound’s security codes from her time in custody.
Ava and Tristan’s rotation schedule. The ventilation maps from the maintenance logs she accessed during her months of trusted service. ”
The trust. That’s the blade. Not the gas. The trust we gave Nadia when she was inside our walls, the access, the information, the keys to the building that were extended because she was one of us.
Every breach starts with trust. Konstantin knew that. He counted on it.
The lab is secure. The blood supply is intact behind the containment Carson activated in the three seconds between recognizing the gas and moving.
Three seconds. The distance between a continent having a cure and a continent losing one, and it landed on the right side by the margin of one scientist’s reflexes.
Marcellus falls in at my shoulder, and the night that started with a woman crying in a hallway for an audience ends with a man walking the perimeter of his own home, checking the walls for cracks, the faint ghost of his wife’s exhaustion in his own muscles and not yet knowing what it means.
That part I’ll leave for Elena. The rest of it, the part with no mechanism to explain and nothing to be done about, I understand already.
I find cracks for a living. It’s the one thing I’ve always been good at, the seam in a wall, the gap in a rotation. I’ll seal the one Nadia used. I always do.
But there’s a crack I will never seal, and it isn’t in these walls.
I stop at the end of the corridor. The night the power woke in Celeste, I felt it reach into me and find the place where a life comes apart, the seam I’ve spent my whole existence making certain no enemy could locate.
She found it without trying, because the bond is a door I built past every defense I have and hold open with my own hand.
On a bad night she could unmake me through it with a thought she never meant to think.
I put my palm flat on the cold stone, and I let myself know it, clear to the bottom.
The most defended man on the continent kept one wall undefended, on purpose, and would do it again.
Then I take my hand off the wall and go find out how Nadia got in, because that one I can do something about.