30. Brock
Brock
I lose her in four seconds.
That’s all it takes. She was right there — white dress in a golden aisle, close enough that I could hear her telling the men grabbing at her excuse me, because she is polite to people who don’t deserve it even when she’s afraid.
Then the crowd closed over her, and now I’m shoulder-deep in a thousand bodies and I can’t find her.
We split without discussing it. Leif drove straight up the middle.
Gunnar and Rayner took the flanks. Erik was beside me and then Erik wasn’t anywhere, which means Erik is in the shadows between the candlelight, moving faster than any of us can.
Good. One of us is already ahead of this. I start pushing.
The crowd doesn’t part. The crowd doesn’t even notice me.
Every male in this room is turned toward the place she was like plants toward the sun, pressing inward, climbing over each other politely, formally, in their best clothes, murmuring my queen with their pupils blown wide, and I have spent my whole life understanding people and I understand these men perfectly and it is no comfort at all.
They’re not soldiers. They’re not conspirators.
They’re bakers and clerks and minor lords who woke up this morning ordinary, and then the only female dragon alive walked through a room soaked in her own fear, and instinct older than the realm stood up in every one of them at once.
Her fear. That’s the part I can’t forgive.
Her scent is everywhere in this room and it is not the garden-at-night sweetness I know.
It’s sharp and wrong and terrified, and it’s driving them deeper into the crush, and it’s doing the same thing to my dragon, who wants me to stop being polite about the bodies in my way.
I stop being polite about the bodies in my way.
A man goes sideways into his friends. Another one bounces off a column.
I’m carving a line through silk and shoulders and I catch Gunnar for half a second through the gap — his fists already bloody, his mouth moving, and whatever he’s shouting has her name in it. Then the crowd closes and he’s gone.
Somebody grabs my jacket. I remove him from it.
Whoever put this ball together invited every male dragon of standing in the realm and put them in one room with her. Thoughtless, and stupid. The arrogance of old institutions never ceases to amaze me. You don’t fill a room with dry timber by accident and then act surprised about the fire.
Rayner surfaces ahead of me, head and shoulders above everyone, dangling a lord one-handed off the ground by his collar, asking him something, once, in a voice I’ve heard exactly twice in all our years, and the man is pointing, and Rayner drops him and moves, and the crowd swallows that too.
Leif’s voice cuts across the room — a command, parade-ground, the kind that stops soldiers mid-step.
Nobody stops. There are no soldiers in this. That was intentional.
She screams.
Somewhere ahead and to the left, high and cracked and unmistakably her, and the sound goes through me and through my dragon at the same time, and I will be hearing it for the rest of my life, and I need height, I need the whole room, because down here I’m one more body in the timber.
The fountain.
I put a boot on its rim and a hand on the ridiculous gold fish spouting water at nothing. I climb, and the ballroom opens up underneath me.
The center is a churn of dark formal wear pressing inward on a point I can’t see, my men cutting toward it from three sides, too slow, all of us too slow.
The edges are still.
That’s what I see from up here that I couldn’t see from inside.
The doors. The windows. The route. Every gray robe and false steward and planted aide standing exactly where they stood an hour ago, hands folded, faces calm, watching a queen be torn at by a mob — and not one of them has moved.
Not toward her. Not away. Nothing in their bodies but patience.
You cannot fake that stillness. Panic shows — in hands, in weight, in the small parts of a face. A thousand people are drowning in instinct in front of them, and the men at the doors have the heart rate of an afternoon shift.
Because nothing is going wrong.
This is the plan, working. The room was the weapon, her fear was the trigger, and the frenzy is cover — thick enough to hide anything, and every calm man at every exit was told exactly this would happen and told to stand down while it did.
They knew. All of it, the flowers, the dress, the entrance alone — they built the fire and sold us tickets.
I stop looking at the whirlpool and sweep the walls instead, fast, corner to corner, the way you look for what a room doesn’t want you to see —
There.
Far corner, behind the columns, where no door has any business being.
A panel of gilded wall standing open on the dark, a gray-sleeved figure hauling something white, a flash of her — her hair, her hand clawing at his — and then the dark takes them both, and the panel is just a shadow among shadows, and a long torn strip of white dress hangs off its corner, swaying.
That’s all they needed.
I turn toward my men and I put everything I have into my voice.
“NORTHWEST CORNER — SHE’S THROUGH THE WALL!”