Chapter 48
Amy
Azriel tells me at two o’clock.
He comes to find me in the library, at my corner table, in the periodicals section, the pocket of privacy I have made mine. He sits across from me, looking at me with the expression of someone about to deliver information they have been dreading.
“The hearing is at four,” he says. “I’m going to speak for him. Valen is going to speak. Zero has the full file on Victor’s operation. There is a real chance, Amy. I need you to understand that there is a real chance.”
“What kind of chance?” I ask.
He meets my eyes. “Forty percent. Maybe fifty if Valen’s read on Silas is right.”
“And the other fifty?”
“He goes back,” Azriel says quietly. “Indefinitely.”
I look at my notebook. “I want to speak,” I say.
He shakes his head immediately. “You are not a member of the Order. You have no standing in the Chamber. If you appear, it gives Silas a reason to frame this as a protection failure rather than an operational success, and that is worse for Saint, not better.”
“Then tell me what I can do.”
Azriel looks at me for a long moment. He looks like a man who has been carrying a version of love for someone for months, has watched it change into something else, has made his peace with the change, but has not yet made peace with everything the change has cost him.
I know he likes me, but I think I have fallen for his brother, and I could never see Azriel as anything more than a friend.
And deep down, I think he likes someone else. I can tell by how he looks at me.
“Write it down,” he says finally. “Everything. What happened from the day you arrived. What he did, what it cost him, and what he knew and chose anyway. Write it down and give it to me, and I will put it in front of Silas myself.”
“Will that matter?”
He looks at me with those careful, honest eyes. “I don’t know. But it is true. And truth is the only thing I have found that the Order cannot entirely manage. It’s safer this way for all of us.”
I open my notebook to a fresh page. I write for two hours.
I write about the courtyard and the note under the door and the back row of the lecture hall.
I write about the quad in the dark and Marcus and the alley and the library and the roof.
I write about what it means to be chosen by someone who had every reason to keep the door closed and opened it anyway.
I write about the sex and the way he stuffed my panties in my mouth an hour ago while he fucked me on the kitchen counter and the marks on my knees he put ice on when he was done from banging against the cabinets.
I write that he is not the monster they built the room for. He is what the room made instead. And the difference matters.
I fold the pages. I give them to Azriel at three thirty, the part the Order needs.
He looks at them for a moment. Then he looks at me. “Whatever happens,” he says, “whatever the Order decides today, nothing changes between you and Saint.”
“I know,” I say.
He nods. He walks toward the church. A church I now know isn’t where you seek faith but judgment.
I sit in my corner of the library in the afternoon light, and I press my thumb to my forearm, and I wait.