Chapter 13
Tess
"So Amrion just... let you sit there?"
Draven's mouth curved. "For about an hour. Didn't move, didn't speak. Just watched me like I was the most fascinating thing he'd ever seen." He leaned back in his chair. "Then he yawned—which, by the way, is terrifying when it's a dragon—and went to sleep."
I laughed. "That's actually kind of sweet."
"Sweet." He gave me a flat look. "The inside of his mouth is the size of a bathtub, Tess."
"A sweet, terrifying bathtub." I pulled my notebook out, setting it on the desk between us. "Thalon kept nudging me with his nose until I scratched the ridge above his eyes. Like a giant, scaly cat. I sat with him for two hours and he basically purred the whole time."
"Purred."
"Okay, it was more like a low rumble that vibrated my entire skeleton. But the energy was purring."
Draven shook his head, but the smile stayed. My chest loosened.
I'd been nervous about this—first class with all the newly bonded Dragon Riders in one place, everyone sizing each other up, trying to figure out where they fit in the pecking order.
But entering with Draven? Sitting beside him like it was the most natural thing in the world?
Yeah. I felt a lot more comfortable than I'd expected.
And I was pretty sure he knew it. The easy banter, the way he'd steered us to seats near the middle instead of the back where I might've hidden—he was trying to put me at ease.
Raze dropped into the seat on my other side. He flashed me a grin.
"Saved you a spot," he said, like he'd been planning this all morning.
Lunessa slid into the row in front of us. She glanced back. "If Theron makes us run drills again this afternoon, I'm filing a formal complaint with my tattoos. They're exhausted."
I snorted. "Morning to you too."
Anya appeared a moment later, settling beside Lunessa. She didn't say anything, just offered me a faint smile before pulling out a worn leather journal and setting it on the desk.
And then Valen.
He took the seat at the end of Lunessa's row. His red eyes flicked over our little cluster—lingering on me just long enough to make my skin prickle—before he leaned back in his chair like he owned the place.
Draven's posture shifted beside me.
Raze caught it too. He didn't say anything, but the tension sharpened between them.
Valen smirked.
Lunessa rolled her eyes and muttered, "Incredible. The territorial energy in this row could power a ward."
I exhaled slowly and focused on the front of the room. This was fine. We were all on the same team. Mostly. Technically.
The classroom was filling in around us—chairs scraping, low voices, the particular hum of thirty-something people settling into a space that was too formal for comfort and too early for anyone to be fully awake. The luminescent stone walls glowed faintly gold.
Mason was across the room with Team Two.
I felt him before I saw him—the mate bond a steady pull low in my chest. He was leaning back in his chair, listening to something the gargoyle-shifter next to him was saying.
He didn't look over. He didn't need to. I could feel the awareness humming both ways.
Kane sat two seats down from him. White hair. Perfect posture. His gaze was on the front of the room, already focused on nothing, which meant he was thinking about everything. I registered him and moved on.
"Tess."
Draven's voice had shifted. Same volume, different weight.
I looked at him. His hazel eyes had gone still.
"Far wall. Left of Voss."
I didn't turn immediately. I let my eyes track naturally, like I was scanning the room. Past the other applicants settling in. Past Theron near the side door.
Then I saw him.
Lord Malrec Beaumont stood against the far wall, positioned just behind and to the left of Lucien Voss.
He wasn't sitting. Wasn't holding notes or wearing any kind of observer credential.
He was simply there—shoulder-length black hair, black formalwear lined in crimson silk, hands clasped loosely in front of him.
His skin was flawless and pale, and even from across the room, the air felt heavier.
My stomach tightened.
"He's not supposed to be here," I said quietly.
"No." Draven's voice dropped. "He's not an instructor. Not a mentor. Not on the Council."
"So how—"
"Voss." Draven tilted his chin slightly toward the Omnium observer without looking directly at him.
"Voss is on the Omnium Council. Lord Malrec is his right hand—has been for centuries.
Old blood, old money, same Traditionalist playbook.
" He paused. "Everything Lord Malrec sees in this room goes straight back to Voss. And Voss has a vote."
I processed that. The chain of it—Voss on the Council to Malrec in this room to... Valen, sitting three rows ahead of us?
"Silvius let this happen," I said. Not a question.
"Silvius opened the door." Draven's jaw tightened. "Whether he agrees with what walks through it is a different question. But the result's the same."
The wrongness settled into my chest. The precision of it. The way the system had been threaded so carefully that a man with no title and no oversight could stand in a Rider classroom and watch me, and everything he observed would travel up a chain to someone who could actually do something with it.
He's accountable to no one.
I looked at Lord Malrec again. He wasn't watching me. He was watching the room—all of it, everyone.
Draven's knee pressed against mine under the desk. Brief. Grounding. Then gone.
The side door opened, and the room shifted.
Aelar. I recognized him immediately—the towering frame, the silver braid, the blue eyes that could freeze you mid-sentence.
He'd taught our Crisis Management Strategies course during the applicant phase, and every single one of us still carried the bruises from it.
Metaphorical bruises. Mostly. The elf didn't believe in coddling, and he didn't believe in second chances on assessments, and he definitely didn't believe that humans belonged in his classroom—though by the end, I'd like to think I'd earned something adjacent to his grudging tolerance.
He didn't announce himself. Didn't need to. He set a leather folio on the front desk and didn't open it.
His gaze swept once across the assembled riders. It paused briefly on the observers along the wall—Lucien Voss, Lord Malrec—registered them the way you'd register furniture, then dismissed them entirely. His focus returned to us.
Then he spoke.
"Welcome to Threat Assessment and Tactical Analysis." His voice carried without effort. "This is not Crisis Management. You are no longer applicants learning to survive your own panic. You are bonded riders now, and the expectations have changed accordingly."
He let that settle. No one moved.
"Today you learn the part of this work that will never make a ballad," he said. "Threat reporting. Inter-agency communication. The chain of information that determines whether people live or die—not because someone failed to fight, but because someone failed to talk."
He let that land.
"You will learn which threats are reported to the Guild, which are escalated to the Omnium Council, and which fall under local government jurisdiction.
You will learn the filing protocols, the classification tiers, and the timeline requirements.
And you will learn why getting this wrong has consequences that outlast any battlefield. "
Aelar's gaze moved across the room. It didn't linger on me, but it didn't skip me either. The skepticism was there. Like he was measuring all of us against a standard we hadn't earned yet.
He pulled up a projection on the wall behind him—jurisdictional maps, communication flowcharts, agency hierarchies. The practical, bureaucratic skeleton of what it actually meant to be a Rider once the dragon flights and combat drills were over.
I leaned forward. This was the part nobody talked about.
The paperwork. The chains of command. Which threats went to the Guild, which went to the Omnium Council, which got routed to local Supe governance or—in the post-Unveiling world—human law enforcement.
Where reports got filed. Who read them. What happened when the wrong person received the right information, or the right person received nothing at all.
Aelar taught like he fought. No wasted words.
No softening. His skepticism about this cohort lived in the pauses between his sentences, the way his gaze lingered a beat too long on certain faces, the way he said "your generation" like it was a diagnosis.
But it wasn't personal. It was the weight of someone who'd watched too many people die from preventable failures.
"Let me give you an example of why this is important. The Hollowmere Disappearances," he said, and the room shifted. Even the people who'd been half-listening straightened. "Fifteen years ago. Who can tell me what happened?"
Silence. A few uncertain glances.
Aelar's expression didn't change. "Then listen."
He laid it out with surgical precision. Lesser fae and demons—brownies, pixies, a handful of low-ranking cambions—had started vanishing from isolated communities across multiple territories.
Not dramatically. Not all at once. One here, two there.
The kind of disappearances that barely registered because the people vanishing were already invisible.
The Guild investigated incidents in one territory. A local coven flagged disappearances in another. Human authorities—newly aware of the supernatural world and fumbling through it—stumbled into a third cluster entirely by accident.
"Three investigations," Aelar said. "Three separate systems. Three sets of reports filed within their own jurisdictions, read by their own people, acted on by their own protocols.
" He paused. "Nobody shared information across boundaries.
Nobody asked whether the pattern they were seeing in their territory existed anywhere else. "
I was writing fast, but the pen slowed as the picture took shape.