Chapter 24 #2
Even now. Even after the plateau and the fire and the way he'd said her name when he was inside her, the way it sounded pulled from somewhere deeper than his chest. Even after the scale necklace warm against her skin, the piece of himself he'd given her. Even after everything.
The doubt whispered: you're the one who was here. When she's gone, he'll rebuild. He always rebuilds.
She needed tea.
She slid from his arms with the slow precision of extracting herself from a sleeping predator — a comparison that made her mouth twitch despite herself.
His arm searched for her in the empty space.
Found the pillow. Gathered it against his chest. She stood in the dark and watched him hold her pillow and the doubt went very quiet for a moment.
She pulled on his shirt. It fell past her thighs, enormous, still warm.
She padded barefoot through the dark halls.
The estate was silent except for the sounds old stone made when no one was listening — settling, breathing, the creak of a building that had stood for generations and intended to stand for several more.
The kitchen. Cool flagstones under her bare feet.
She filled the kettle by touch and set it to heat and found the leaves the cook kept in the third canister from the left.
She'd memorized the kitchen in her first week.
Muscle memory guided her through the dark, hands knowing where everything was, the familiarity of it settling over her like a blanket.
She poured. She carried the mug to the deep stone window embrasure — the wide-silled alcove seat that had become her place in this house. She pulled her knees up and wrapped both hands around the warmth and looked out over the dark plateau.
The doubts that had loomed enormous in the bedroom shrank here. Not gone. Smaller. Tea-sized instead of room-sized.
She took a sip and thought about what was true.
True: she had to leave. Not because she wanted to, but because her testimony was the weapon that could dismantle the network.
The other witnesses were dead. What she carried in her memory — Prince Dáinn's face, his title, his transaction — had become irreplaceable.
If she stayed and the Crimson Ledger found her before the tribunal, that weapon died with her.
And so did every future person the network would swallow whole.
True: she had to go wherever was safest. Not for herself. For the testimony. For the people here and their safety.
True: she would testify. She would look Prince Dáinn in the face in front of the High Council and she would tell them exactly what she saw. She would not be the person who did nothing with what she knew.
True: when it was over, when the network was in pieces and the danger had passed and the tribunal's verdict was sealed — she would come back.
She took another sip. The warmth spread through her chest and loosened the last of the knot.
She would come back. To the estate. To the stables and the kethral and the stablemaster who pretended not to care.
To Davn, who would raise one eyebrow and say nothing and mean everything.
To Vasek and Faelor and the groundskeeper's wife calling her dear.
To the old tree on the plateau with its roots like a throne above the valley.
To Rhaezon.
She would come back to Rhaezon. She would stand in the landing yard, and she would walk down the ramp, and he would be there and she would say: I chose this.
I'm choosing you. Not because you need me.
Not because I'm useful here. Because you are mine and I am yours, and I am done pretending that going back to Earth is what I want when what I want is standing right in front of me.
She drank the last of the tea. The warmth made her eyelids heavy. She should go back to bed. He'd be cold without her — Drakonblooded furnace or not. He'd reached for her in his sleep and found the pillow instead and she didn't want him reaching for the pillow when she could be there.
She set the mug down on the stone sill. Uncurled her legs.
The world split open.
The explosion hit the eastern wall of the kitchen and the force of it launched her off the embrasure.
She struck the flagstones shoulder-first. The mug shattered somewhere to her left.
Stone dust billowed through the air, thick and choking, and through the ringing in her ears she heard the second impact — deeper, structural, the sound of something massive giving way.
The floor bucked beneath her. The window she'd been sitting in a heartbeat ago was gone.
Where it had been was a ragged hole punched through three feet of ancient stone, and beyond it, fire.
Orange and furious against the dark plateau.
Alarms she didn't know the estate had screamed to life.
She pushed herself up. Her shoulder sang with pain. Glass and stone grit bit into her palms. The shirt — his shirt — was torn at the hem, and the scale necklace blazed against her sternum, hot enough to glow through the fabric.
A third explosion, and then the kitchen doorway cracked from lintel to floor.