Chapter 29 #2
Not how long was the burst? Not any secondary readings?
Not keep an eye on that sector and flag me if it recurs.
A man who'd held the Lord Protector's seat for decades—who'd survived political upheavals, Harbinger resurgences, and a supernatural unveiling—had heard a report of concealment wards cracking over a location where nothing was supposed to exist, and hadn't even been curious.
He'd just closed the door.
It could mean nothing. Busy man, late hour, delegated judgment. He trusted his monitoring officers to handle the routine. That's what institutional authority looked like from the outside.
It could mean nothing.
I stood up.
"Heading out?" Brennan asked.
"Yeah." I pushed the chair back under the console. "Exciting as always, Holt."
He grinned. "Come back anytime. I'll save you the good coffee."
"There is no good coffee."
"That's what makes it special."
I almost smiled. Almost. Then I was through the door and into the corridor, and the smile died before it reached my mouth.
Because it could mean nothing.
But a commander who dismisses an anomaly without asking questions is either negligent or protecting what's on the other end of the signal.
And Silvius was many things, but negligent wasn't one of them.
I pushed through the doors at the end of the wing and stepped outside. The path to the dormitory cut a pale line through dark grass, and I followed it because I didn't have anywhere else to go that wouldn't force me to think about why I was still thinking about this.
The read wouldn't let go. Concealment wards over empty territory.
Pressure from inside strong enough to crack them.
A four-second blip that shouldn't exist over a location where nothing was registered—and the Lord Protector, who'd survived decades of political upheavals and Harbinger resurgences, hadn't asked a single follow-up question.
It was worth a field check. I had the authority—field training mandate, never revoked when they gave me the classroom.
Reconnaissance flyover, live training conditions.
Silvius hadn't issued a stand-down order.
He'd waved his hand and closed the channel.
The anomaly sat in a gap between dismissed and forbidden, and I had the operational room to step into it.
The question wasn't whether I could.
It was whether I should.
My boots went quiet on the stone. The night overhead was clear, thick with stars, and the tightness in my chest was the old kind—the kind that never left.
I'd done everything right. That was the part no one understood. The mission had gone perfectly—textbook, clean, the kind of outcome you celebrate. And I had celebrated. I'd been standing somewhere safe, smiling, while the people I loved most were dying in a place I'd told them to go.
It lived in my bones. The shape of it. The moment between everything's fine and everything's gone. The silence after the comms cut out. The names I stopped saying out loud because saying them made them real in a way I couldn't carry and keep walking.
Officially a success. Nobody talks about what it cost.
I breathed around the scar tissue—the way I always did, the way I'd learned to. A tree grows around a wound. It doesn't heal. It just becomes load-bearing.
Taking my team into the field meant accepting the weight of more names. And the face that surfaced wasn't abstract.
Tess Whittaker. On the garden path two days ago, jaw lifted, telling me she wasn't going to stop. The face I'd held in my hand a half-second, and was dying to hold again.
If I took them out there and it went wrong—
My magic flared. Not the restless hum from the Wardroom. A sharp, electric surge that ran from my sternum to my fingertips, the kind that happened when what I was feeling outran what I could contain.
Her mouth. The heat. Walking away with my magic crawling under my skin for an hour afterward.
She could die out there. And the last thing I'd have was a kiss I never should have taken and couldn't stop wanting back.
"You know why you're going."
Yrdren. Through the bond—a stone into still water.
I didn't answer. He didn't need me to.
I clenched my fists until the charge banked. Breathed it down. Shoved the rest of it—the kiss, the surge, the fear—somewhere deep and walled it off.
This isn't about that.
Whittaker had been pulling at something for weeks.
I didn't know the specifics, but I knew it was something.
Whatever she'd found had changed the way she carried herself—a weight in her expression that went deeper than training stress.
And Silvius had just waved off an anomaly—the timing was suspicious.
My team was ready. I'd watched them prove it before Voss tore the exercise apart. They were a unit—mine—and something was wrong out there, and the system wasn't going to look at it.
Reconnaissance. Just in case.
Riders only. No Training Partners—they didn't have bonded dragons, and I wasn't putting anyone in the air on a borrowed mount for a field op. Besides, I didn't trust Valen far enough to hand him operational intel. Anya was solid, but this wasn't her ride.
My stride lengthened.
The dormitory rose ahead. I went inside. Up the stairs. Down the hall.
I stopped at Whittaker's door.
One second. My magic humming. My chest tight in the old way and a new way simultaneously. Yrdren through the bond—vast, rust-colored, silent—saying nothing and meaning everything by it.
I knocked.
Footsteps. A pause. The handle turned.
Whittaker opened the door and surprise crossed her face—immediate, unguarded. Eyes wide, lips parted, hand on the doorframe. Behind her, Anya Ravenspell sat cross-legged on the bed.
Whittaker's gaze locked on mine. I watched the surprise sharpen into attention—cataloging the hour, my expression, the fact that I was at her door at all after what happened between us.
I didn't let any of it land.
"Gear up. We've got a situation."