Chapter 10
Elio
THREE COUNTRIES IN A LITTLE over two weeks, four trains, seven grim little rooms with zero aesthetic appeal, and one emotionally constipated heir who insisted anonymity mattered more than functioning climate control.
I’d played the role before—the adaptable one, unbothered by discomfort, charming even in squalor. But there was no audience here. Just Cyrus’s restless pacing and the cold fact that we’d failed to get any closer to Raven.
The performance was starting to crack.
I wanted a bath. I wanted sleep. I wanted to stop pretending this was strategic reconnaissance instead of what it actually was—helpless surveillance of a friend being used as bait.
Instead, I had Cyrus Raynoff pacing a dingy hotel room in Salzburg, fire flickering at his fingertips while Ember hissed in quiet agitation.
Echo clung to the windowsill, her scales sliding through anxious blues and grays as we both monitored the magical perimeter I’d constructed around the compound three kilometers north.
It wasn’t just the cold or the cramped quarters or the cheap instant tea that tasted like regret. It was the feeling that we were being led.
Anything? Cyrus asked without looking at me.
Same as Vienna. Same as Prague. I let the illusion shimmer around the surveillance map, tracing magical energy lines across our third European site. Security rotations. Wards resetting at dusk. Corruption signature inside—strong, stable, embedded.
His brow furrowed. Meaning?
She’s not just there. She’s part of it now but not fixed.
He’s moving her, studying how we track, and how we react.
Every place we found her was just a stage.
And we don’t even know where his stronghold is, I added.
Every location we’ve tracked her to was temporary.
He’s not keeping her anywhere we can get to.
He’s keeping her visible just long enough to watch us chase ghosts.
That got his attention. He moved closer, heat rising with him.
Explain.
I opened my tablet and flipped to my parents’ research notes. My fingers found the silver rings I wore—three today, the habit I’d never broken. Each one had been a gift from my parents, tokens of performances I’d given.
I twisted them as I explained.
According to them, corruption stabilizes in stages. Early phase is chaotic. Victim resists. Signature flickers. You can intervene. But once the subject passes a certain threshold…
I tapped the page. Their magic integrates with the master’s. The corruption weaves through them like gold thread in silk. You can’t pull one without unraveling both.
He went still. Ember flared.
So what? She’s beyond saving?
Not beyond. But extraction requires more than brute force, I said. And even if we caught her somewhere solid, it would take all four of us to break her free. And maybe not even then. She’s not like Keane. She’s… inhabited.
Cyrus looked like he wanted to punch something. Possibly me.
I waited.
He turned away instead, stalking to the window. He’s not holding her. He’s using her.
She’s not bait, I said quietly. She’s a lens. He’s watching how we react. What we do. What we leave behind.
I let the illusion sharpen, zeroing in on the compound. Three figures moved in formation in the courtyard with Raven at the center, and two more stood at the perimeter, not moving. Observing. Taking notes.
I knew their posture before I knew their faces.
My mother always stood with her weight slightly back, like she was preparing to exit a room she’d already assessed.
My father held his hands clasped behind him, the posture of a man who’d learned to look patient while cataloguing everything he saw.
They hadn’t changed. That was the thing that landed strangely.
They looked exactly the same, standing twenty meters from a girl they’d helped corrupt, watching her move through drills like she was data.
Echo went very still on my shoulder.
I closed the illusion back to its wider angle, steadied my breathing and filed it.
He’s not corrupting them for chaos, I said. He’s organizing them.
Cyrus stepped forward, his eyes narrowed. Tactical units.
I nodded.
Training. Coordinated responses. Movement drills.
He swore under his breath.
I opened another folder—thinner but no less important. My mother had written in a narrow, looping hand, detailing intelligence diagrams and compound layouts.
The same hand. The same precise, slanted letters she’d used for birthday cards and performance critiques and the notes she’d leave when she traveled, which was often. I’d spent years learning to read her handwriting before I’d learned to read her.
I set that thought down somewhere I wouldn’t look at it.
This was one of the council’s training compounds before, I said. My parents helped design its magical infrastructure, and now it’s been repurposed.
He was quiet for a long moment.
So we learned something.
I looked at him. Yes.
He crossed his arms. But we don’t have her.
Not yet.
He turned on me. So what now? We go home? Tail tucked?
I felt it then—that old pull, the desire to shape this, to soften the edges, edit the truth, and craft something he could absorb more easily.
The script wrote itself in my head. We wait for a better moment. She’ll be fine until then. Pretty lies would keep him moving forward without the weight of hard choices.
Echo’s scales flickered warning red. She always knew.
I almost gave him the performance. Almost slipped back into the role of the one who made things easier.
Instead, I looked him in the eye and gave him what he actually needed. We stop reacting. We start predicting. Going after her now—without knowing where she’ll be or how deep the corruption goes—isn’t a rescue. It’s a gift-wrapped demonstration of our tactics.
He stared at me.
We’re not hunters right now, Cyrus. We’re performers, and he’s been watching our act from curtain rise.
Echo flicked to grim silver. Ember quieted slightly.
So we give him nothing, Cyrus said.
Nothing he can use. We leave no patterns. No tells. We go home, regroup, and build something he hasn’t choreographed.
He looked away. I hate this.
Same, I said, my voice softer. But it’s the smart move.
I saw the next thought form in his head before he said it. Marigold.
Yes.
He chose Raven to hurt her. To isolate her. If he’s mapping us…
Then your proximity creates patterns. Predictable ones.
Cyrus closed his eyes briefly. I thought leaving her protected her.
Maybe it did. Maybe it didn’t. But now you know. So we adjust.
He nodded once, sharp and resigned.
Then, quieter: Thank you. For not spinning it.
Tempting as it was. I smiled tightly. You’re not the only one learning things out here.
Echo settled on my shoulder, her colors darkening to thoughtful blues. Cyrus sat on the edge of his bed and stared at the wall.
It wasn’t victory, but it wasn’t loss.
We had data. We had clarity.
We had each other—rough around the edges, far from perfect, but functional.
He paused. When he spoke again, his voice was rougher, like he was working something out that didn’t have clean edges yet.
My father told me love was a leash. That the enemy finds what you love and uses it against you. He looked at his hands—the fire gone still for once, just heat radiating off his skin. But he was wrong about everything else. Maybe he was wrong about that too.
Maybe, I said carefully.
What if the problem isn’t the attachment?
He wasn’t asking me. He was thinking out loud, the way Cyrus Raynoff thought, which was less like argument and more like someone testing weight on a floorboard before committing.
What if the problem is hiding it? Running from it?
Making it something the master can find and use because we’ve treated it like a weakness?
He looked at me. Fire burns hotter when it has fuel and air. Contained, it suffocates. My father spent twenty years containing himself. Look what that cost him.
I sat with that for a moment.
I said slowly, Did you just propose strategic polyamory as a military tactic?
Despite everything, he smiled. Sounds stupid when you say it like that.
No, I said, something clicking into place. It sounds like exactly what he wouldn’t anticipate.
Because I’d spent my entire life learning that love was performance. That relationships were transactions. That the only protection was keeping people at arm’s length while making them think they were close.
And here was Cyrus—blunt, straightforward Cyrus—proposing we do the opposite. Make our attachments visible, structural, protected not by hiding them but by integrating them into our tactical framework.
It was terrifying. It was brilliant. It was everything my parents had taught me not to do.
Because his entire methodology is based on exploiting hidden attachments and isolated vulnerabilities, I continued, working it through. If we’re openly attached to each other—all of us, in ways he can see but can’t exploit because we’ve built protections into the structure…
We disrupt his pattern, Cyrus finished. Make the intelligence he gathers less useful because the relationships aren’t hidden. They’re reinforced.
Echo settled to determined gold on my shoulder, a sign of agreement, approval, maybe even pride.
We sat with that realization.
I’m ready, Cyrus said finally, to stop fighting it. To claim my place in whatever this is we’re building. Not because I’m giving up on wanting her completely…
But because wanting her completely means wanting her to be safe, I finished. Which requires more than just your protection. It requires all of us working together.
Exactly.
Understanding settled between us. Not quite friendship yet—too new, too raw—but partnership. Brotherhood forged through shared realization that we were stronger together than apart.
Even when together meant something complicated and undefined and completely outside what either of us had been raised to accept.
Tomorrow we go home, I said, and face whatever comes next.
Together, Cyrus added. All four of us. No more splitting up and hoping individual strength is enough.
Together, I agreed.
Outside, snow fell silently over the Alps. Somewhere in that darkness, the master’s compound held Raven and gods knew how many other corrupted witches.
We hadn’t saved her. Hadn’t even gotten close.
But sitting here in this cheap hotel room with Cyrus Raynoff—the man I was learning to trust—felt like something real.
Tomorrow we’d go home and face Marigold and Keane. Figure out how to explain that we’d spent two weeks tracking Raven only to come back empty-handed but with a completely reorganized understanding of what we were actually fighting for.
And in its own strange way, that was progress.