33. Chapter 33
Crowe
Aurora is a different building today. Yesterday it was quiet hallways and a woman who needed sleep more than she needed a meeting.
Now there are people moving with folders in their hands, and doors standing open that were shut last night.
It stopped being her private problem sometime while I slept.
Now it’s everybody’s problem, and everybody’s walking faster because of it.
They put us in a room with a long table and too many chairs.
Viktor Parlance takes the head of it with Caleb Craven on his right and Ysabelle Faine beside him, arms folded, saying nothing yet.
Serenity and Bastien sit on one side. Torbjorn is near the far end, silver through brown hair, holding still the way bears hold still.
Odile comes in late and takes the chair nearest him, almost brushing his shoulder.
Viktor doesn’t waste any time getting to the point.
“Kallista. Our team has been briefed on your situation. Now we have an update. Last night you gave Mr. Crowe a name. Tell us what it is.”
She doesn’t hesitate. “Sereth Ondrathe. My cousin.”
Nobody says anything. They’ve all read the file. It’s different hearing a victim name her murderer.
Craven takes his time before he speaks.
“All of the evidence is circumstantial,” he says.
“Somebody has to acknowledge this, so I will. A forger’s memory of a customer she saw three times.
A cousin who asked questions a concerned relative might ask.
Nothing there that proves anything.” He looks down the table at Kalli.
“If we go to that mountain and accuse a man in front of his own clan, and we’re wrong, that causes problems. That family never trusts an outsider again, and the other clans watching will doubt us. ”
He has a point. I’d have raised it myself if he hadn’t.
“I’m not asking anybody to judge him today,” Kalli says. “I’m asking to take what we have home and show it to people who need to know it. My mother. The council. The whole clan, if it comes to that.” She sits forward. “Let them draw their own conclusions.”
Faine hasn’t spoken yet. She does now, and she doesn’t soften it.
“You spent months caged and mishandled.” She says it to Kalli directly. “No offense, but how do you know that what you remember is what happened?”
Kalli’s shoulders come level. When she speaks, the words come slow and certain.
“Because I made myself hold on to it,” she says. “Every day in that place. Names, faces, what was said to me and who said it. It was the only thing in there that I had control of.”
Faine holds her eyes for a moment and then nods once, and that’s the end of the question.
Craven sets his hands flat on the table.
“The Cravens are in,” he says. “Formally. We go up that mountain as dragons, in the open, on clan business. Not a raid and not a rescue. A formal visit on official business. Your mother receives us because she has to.” He looks at Kalli.
“Once we’re inside the Eyrie, the evidence goes in front of the whole clan, not just her council. ”
“How soon?”
“Tomorrow night. I’ll have passage, numbers and the right people settled by dark.” He lists the details. “I won’t go up there without planning it properly.”
“Okay.” Kalli nods.
“You’re not wrong to take the time,” I say to Craven.
“But we need to remember that as soon as he finds out we’re onto him, he’s going to act.
We already know he’s planning to get rid of her permanently.
He might try to do that now. Or he might come up with some plausible way to defend himself from these accusations. ”
“Or he might make a run for it.” It’s the first time Torbjorn has spoken. He has a voice like a bass drum.
“It’s a chance we’ll have to take. And if he’s out there, we’ll put people on him,” Caleb responds. “It’s not just one she-dragon in this thing anymore. He’s up against all of us.”
I see Kalli’s throat work. “Thank you,” she says.
“It’s what we do,” he tells her. “Your clan has been isolated for too long now. We welcome you back. But it also means that our council rules apply. And we don’t take kindly to dragons killing their own kind. There are too few of us left.”
Faine speaks now. “Which raises a second matter, and it’s mine to raise, because one of mine did it.” She looks at me. “Ilmar Vex is dead at your hand. Caleb and I have discussed the implications of this because regardless of his crimes, he was one of the last of a dying line.”
I set my jaw. “I don’t regret what I did. I’ve ended a lot of bad men in my time. He was one of the worst for what he did.”
“Batard,” Odile spits. “You’ll get no argument from me on that.”
“From none of us,” says Caleb. “We don’t condone that from any of our members. But it means that Roland Vex, sitting in a cell under this building, is the last living male of his line.”
The tension around the table ramps up a notch.
“He’s been down there a long time,” Bastien says. “Longer than most guests.”
“He’s not a guest. He’s Syndicate leadership,” says Odile.
“But he’s being held without charge.” Viktor’s voice is icy.
“The Ivory League has noticed. There’s a case being built for his release, quietly, through channels that don’t usually move this fast. Either Aurora charges him with something that holds, or we let him go.
Those are the only two left. And that leads to our next order of business.
” He glances at his watch, heads to the door, and cracks it.
“You can send him in, Zoe,” he says to someone outside.
The door opens fully a moment later, and a man walks in. Tall, lean, dark suit with nothing on it to say who or what he is. The dry heat of him reaches the table before he does, and under it something colder, held down.
“Alastair Creed,” Viktor says, “for those who don’t know him.”
Serenity sucks in a breath, and Bastien steps closer to her.
“Viktor.” He nods at the Aurora leader. “I’m glad you’re prepared to consider our position.”
He’s what I expected from what I’d heard. His voice never rises, and his face gives nothing away. A man who has come to do a job, do it well, and go home.
“I’ll keep this short,” he says, before Viktor can offer him a chair.
“Whatever Roland Vex is, and I have no illusions about what he is, a bloodline ending in an Aurora cell is a thing the dragon world can’t tolerate.
You’ve held him a long time without charging him with anything a court would recognize.
Charge him or release him. I’m here to get an answer. ”
“That isn’t what negotiation usually sounds like,” Odile says.
“I’m not here to negotiate.” He doesn’t smile when he says it.
Bastien leans forward. “While you’re getting answers, you have a lot to answer for yourself. Your people have a long and bloody record to account for.”
“What the Syndicate does in the name of its cause is something I won’t apologize for,” he replies. He’s still not sitting.
“Really?” Odile has stiffened. “So you condone the capture and torture of shifters and magic creatures as part of your ‘cause’?”
Creed’s jaw tightens a fraction. “That is not the matter I’m here to discuss.”
Odile gives a disgusted snort. Torbjorn pats her shoulder, which is probably the most human gesture I’ve ever seen him make.
“I’m afraid this is not something we can brush aside, Mr. Creed,” says Viktor. “The Vex name has been tied to activities that demand investigation.”
Creed turns his head to him. “If this is an attempt to dig up some sort of charge, you’d better have real grounds.”
“We have more than enough grounds,” says Caleb. “There’s an operation running under a man named Renwick. Genetic matching. Reproductive drugs. Females being kept to continue the old lines. Your Ivory League is involved in that trade.”
“How—”
Torbjorn speaks before Creed can go on.
“My clan sits two valleys south of where Renwick runs his trucks.” He looks around the table.
“We’ve had unusual activity on our side of the ridge for months.
I didn’t think much of it before today.” He looks down the table at Craven.
“You go up against that compound, you’ll want to know the ground first. I know it. ”
Odile turns to him. “How many roads?”
“Two in regular use. A third that only sees traffic when the other two flood, which is most winters,” he answers her. “You planning the approach?”
“I might be.” She holds his eyes a beat longer than the question needs. “Show me what you know. Tonight, if you’ve got the time.”
“I’ve got the time.”
“I think this is a matter that needs its own discussion,” says Viktor.
“And I think there’s someone at this table who has a lot to contribute to that discussion.” Bastien is looking at Creed.
Creed thinks before he answers Bastien. “My people were approached about that program,” he says eventually.
“Renwick’s men came to us directly, with numbers and a candidate already chosen.
We refused.” No performance in it at all.
“I’ll fight for my clan’s survival with anything I have left.
I won’t buy a woman to do it. There’s a line even I don’t cross. ”
Nobody at the table knows quite what to do with a man like Creed saying a thing like that. I don’t either.
“Yet you didn’t think to end it right there?” Odile’s voice is dry. “Allowing something to continue makes you as guilty as if you were involved yourself.”
“That’s a matter of opinion, Comtesse de Rosemonde.”
Creed turns to me before Odile can form a rebuttal.
“You’re the one who killed him.”
“I am.”
“In a bedroom. In front of witnesses.” He looks at me, and there’s no anger anywhere in it. “I’m not here to avenge him. I’m here to collect what’s left of his line before it finishes dying in a cell. That’s all.”
“I appreciate that.”
“Do you regret it?”
“No.”
“Good,” he says. “I’d have thought less of the work if you did.”
Neither of us apologizes, because neither of us has anything to apologize for. That’s the end of it.
He turns to Viktor and Craven after that, and the three of them start in on what happens to Roland Vex. Nobody needs me for that part.
So I watch her instead.
She’s still in her chair with both hands around a cup that went cold an hour ago.
She’s held on to it through the whole meeting.
She sat at this table while nine people pulled her cousin apart in front of her, and she gave them his name.
Not one person in this room has any idea what that took out of her.
I know what it took. I’ve been watching her stay strong since a loading bay in the dark that night at the quarry.
“Are you all right?” I ask, low enough that it’s meant for her and nobody else.
“Sure.” She doesn’t look up from the cup.
She’s not all right. Nothing in this woman’s life has been all right for over a year. And if I say one kind thing to her at this table, she’ll come apart in front of nine people who have spent all day making decisions about her.
So I don’t say the kind thing.
There is something I could do instead. If I take six steps down the length of this table, in front of every one of them, and put my hand on the back of her neck, she’d let me. I’m fairly sure she’d let me.
Fairly sure has never once been good enough for me to act on.
Decades of reading rooms for a living and I have never been wrong about one. I’m wrong about this woman twice a day.
She gave up a title, a family name, and four hundred relatives who have known her since she could walk. She told me to my face that she didn’t do it for me. I believed her then, and I believe her now.
What I don’t know is what’s left of her when all of that is gone, or whether any of it is meant for me.
She lifts her head and finds me already looking.
She holds it longer than she has to.
Then she puts the cup down.