Chapter 26 Callum
I don't check my cuffs.
I can't. My hands won't stop shaking.
The bond is a living thing inside my chest—four heartbeats that aren't mine jammed behind my ribs like animals in a cage, each one pulsing with someone else's feelings.
Knox's fury is hot. It sits in my left lung like an ember, flaring every time he moves, and he's pacing somewhere behind me—I can feel the rhythm of his steps through the connection like I'm walking them myself.
Ferrix is scattered. His presence in the bond feels like static, like a radio caught between stations, fragments of probability bleeding through in bursts that make my vision stutter.
Ashford is faint. A thread. A candle in a draft.
They took him to the infirmary and I felt the distance open up like a wound, a pulling in my chest that got worse with every step until someone—a nurse, a healer, I don't know—did something that stabilized him and the pulling eased to an ache.
And Grey.
Grey's heartbeat is the loudest. I don't know why—something about the bond, some hierarchy I don't understand—but her pulse sits at the center of the tangle and everything else orbits it.
Her fear tastes like pennies. I can feel it on my tongue, metallic and sharp, every time she breathes.
Her confusion is a pressure behind my eyes, a headache that isn't mine, and underneath both of those—
Every time I hurt her. Played back from her side.
The grip on her arm outside Ossium Hall, the bruises she hid under long sleeves.
The clinical voice I used when I told her don't mistake practicality for kindness.
The dark classroom, my hand reaching for her face before the phone buzzed.
All of it—every calculated cruelty, every report I filed, every time I watched her cry on Brittany's shoulder through the security feeds and wrote it down in my mother's preferred format—looping through the bond like a recording I can't pause.
I cross the campus with my shirt untucked.
My Stylus Mortis is gone—somewhere on the amphitheater stone, probably cracked, definitely not something I can think about right now.
My shadows are dragging behind me like something that's been beaten.
They keep trying to reach southeast. Toward Bellamy Hall. Toward her.
I yank them back. They come reluctantly. Everything in my body is pulling toward Grey and away from where I'm going, and the dissonance makes me nauseous—my legs moving north toward the Administration building while every other part of me screams south.
Margaret's desk is empty. The whole floor is dark except for the light under Mother's door.
The hallway smells like floor polish and the lilies she keeps on the credenza outside her office, and the smell makes my stomach clench because it's the smell of every meeting, every report, every yes, Mother I've delivered since I was old enough to understand that obedience is the rent I pay for existing in her world.
I open the door without knocking.
She's at the window. Phone to her ear. The cream suit has dust on the left shoulder from the shockwave—a faint grey smudge, barely visible, and the fact that she hasn't brushed it off is more alarming than anything else I've seen today.
Mother doesn't tolerate imperfection. Mother notices a crooked painting from across a room.
The dust on her shoulder means she's either too focused to care or too satisfied to notice.
"—I don't care about the banners, have someone collect them before the rain.
And get Warrick to stop calling my assistant.
If she has concerns, she can put them in writing.
" She sees me. One finger. Wait. "The courtyard assessment can happen Monday.
I want the area roped off by tonight. No students, no faculty, nobody with a camera.
" A pause. "Yes, I'll approve the overtime. Just get it done."
She hangs up. Sets the phone on the desk beside the laptop, beside the pen, beside the notepad where she's already made a list. I can see the handwriting from here—small, precise, each item numbered.
She's made a list. Amphitheater cracked, Sanguis president in the infirmary, five students bonded by magic that hasn't been seen in a century, and she's made a numbered list.
"Sit down, Callum."
"What did you do?"
"Sit down."
"What did you do."
She turns from the window. Studies me the way she studies everything—the untucked shirt, the missing Stylus, the shaking hands. I watch her catalogue the damage. Watch her file it under acceptable losses.
"You're upset," she says. "Understandable. Sit down and we'll talk."
"We'll talk now. Standing." My voice is doing something it never does.
It's loud. Not shouting—I don't shout, Bolingbrokes don't shout—but the volume is wrong, pushed up by the four heartbeats hammering in my chest and the taste of Grey's fear in my mouth and the fact that my hands won't stop shaking no matter how hard I press them against my thighs.
Mother's eyebrows lift. One millimeter.
"All right," she says. Sits in her chair. Folds her hands. The pearl ring catches the light. The remaining earring—just one now, the other lost somewhere in the wreckage of her carefully orchestrated catastrophe—glints against her neck. "What would you like to discuss?"
And that's the thing. That's the thing about Mother.
She's not going to explain herself. She's not going to justify what happened or lay out the theory or give me the satisfaction of hearing her say yes, I knew, I planned it, I used you.
She's going to sit in her chair and fold her hands and wait for me to ask questions, and she'll answer the ones she wants to answer and redirect the ones she doesn't, and by the end of the conversation I'll have exactly the amount of information she's decided I deserve. Not a word more.
I've been having this conversation my entire life. This is the first time I've walked in without knowing my lines.
"You knew she'd pull." I say it flat. Not a question. "The channeling—all four of us, simultaneously—you knew what would happen when she hit capacity."
"I knew it was one of several possible outcomes."
"Ashford almost died."
"Ashford is recovering. I spoke with Kellerman twenty minutes ago." She uncaps her pen. Makes a note on the pad—I can't see what, but her hand moves with the brisk efficiency of someone crossing off a task. "The bond was unexpected. That's unfortunate."
"Unfortunate."
"It limits the timeline." She caps the pen. Studies me again—the shake in my hands, the sweat on my temples, the way I can't stand still because every ten seconds Knox's rage spikes through the bond and my whole body flinches. "How far can you get from her before it hurts?"
"I don't—maybe a hundred yards. I haven't tested it."
"Test it. I need exact numbers." She makes another note. "The bond complicates the standard approach. You can't be separated from her, which means you'll be present for the next phase, which isn't ideal."
"The next phase of what?"
"Of what needs to happen." She says it the way she'd say the next phase of construction or the next phase of the budget review. No weight. No drama. A process with steps, and we're between steps, and the schedule hasn't changed.
"What needs to happen to who?"
A pause. She looks at me over the pen, and for a second the mask—her mask, the original, the one mine was copied from—slips by a fraction.
What's underneath isn't cold. It's focused.
The absolute, burning focus of a woman who has been working toward something her entire career and is close enough to taste it.
"The Bolingbrokes have managed these situations for five generations," she says. "Your grandfather handled two. Your great-grandmother handled four. It's what we do, Callum. It's what this family has always done."
Handled. There it is. The word that lives in eleven documents in the restricted section. The word that appears once beside a name and then the name never appears again.
"What does that mean?" My voice is barely above a whisper.
The shaking has stopped. Everything has stopped—the fury, the fear, the four heartbeats in my chest, all of it suspended while I stand in my mother's office and ask a question I've been afraid to ask since I was sixteen years old and found the first document and read the first name and saw the first handled and closed the archive and never went back.
"It means what it's always meant." She opens her laptop. The screen lights up her face—blue-white, cold, making her look like a photograph of herself. "When it's time, you'll understand. For now, stay close to Grey. Monitor the bond. I'll need updates."
"Mother—"
"That's all, Callum."
"What are you going to do to her?"
The typing stops. She looks up. Not impatient—patient. The terrible, infinite patience of a woman who has answered this kind of question before, from other people, in other decades, and has never once changed her answer.
"What needs to be done."
She goes back to typing. Keys clicking. Laptop humming.
The clock on the wall ticking off seconds into the silence of a room where a woman is planning something she won't name and her son is standing in front of her with four stolen heartbeats in his chest and the slow, nauseating certainty that he already knows what handled means.
He's always known. He read the documents.
He saw the names. He counted them—twenty-three, over five generations—and he did the math and he understood the math and then he folded the understanding into a small, tight square and locked it in the same drawer where he keeps everything else that would destroy him if he let it breathe.
Twenty-three people. Five generations. The matter has been handled.
The lock on that drawer just broke.
I leave her office. The hallway is empty.
The lilies on the credenza are white and perfect and they smell like a funeral and I walk past them with Grey's heartbeat in my chest and Knox's fury in my lungs and Ashford's thready pulse in my wrists and Ferrix's static in my skull, and my own heartbeat underneath all of it, faster than I can control, hammering against the inside of my ribs like something trying to get out.
I follow the bond south.
Not by choice. My legs make the decision for me—turning left out of the Administration building, down the stone steps, across the quad toward the pull.
Toward Grey. The bond is a fishhook behind my sternum, and every step in the right direction eases the barb by a fraction, and every step I don't take makes it dig deeper.
I count as I walk. Not minutes—steps. Seven hundred and twelve from Mother's office to wherever Grey is, because the bond keeps adjusting my trajectory, a compass needle swinging toward a moving target.
She's not in Bellamy Hall. She's south and east of it.
Near the infirmary, probably. Where Ashford is.
Where the others will have clustered, pulled by the same fishhook, gathered around the one person none of them can leave.
Six hundred and forty. Six hundred and thirty-nine.
The campus is quiet. A few students cross the quad in the distance, glancing toward the roped-off amphitheater.
The clock tower chimes. Normal sounds. Normal evening.
No one looking at the Mors president walking across the grass with his shirt untucked and his hands shaking and four stolen heartbeats keeping time in his chest.
I can feel them getting closer. Knox's fury banking from a roar to a simmer.
Ferrix's static sharpening into recognizable patterns.
Grey—Grey's fear shifting, changing texture, the metallic taste on my tongue taking on a new edge as I approach.
Wariness. She can feel me coming. She knows who I just talked to.
Three hundred. Two hundred. One hundred.
I see them. Clustered on the bench outside the infirmary—Grey with Brittany beside her, Knox standing, Ferrix leaning against the wall. Waiting for Ashford to be released. Waiting for me.
Waiting for the son of the woman who did this to them.
I stop ten feet away. Check my cuffs. Force of habit.
They're wrinkled. The shirt is untucked.
The blazer has dust on it. My Stylus is gone and my hands are still shaking and the girl sitting on that bench is looking at me with brown eyes that hold no warmth and no hatred and no fear—just the flat, tired gaze of someone who is done being surprised by the things people do to her.
I don't fix the cuffs.
I sit down on the far end of the bench. Say nothing. The bond settles—five points, close enough, the pain easing to a hum.
We wait for Ashford.