Chapter 23 #2
Two words, and the tone was wrong for casual. Not urgent enough for alarm, but the easy charm was dialed down to zero. This was operational Draven. Mission-briefing Draven. I adjusted my path without asking where we were going.
He steered us toward the tree line between the arena and the Library.
The oaks here were old and thick-trunked, their canopy knitting together overhead into a green cathedral that muffled the sounds of the grounds.
The main walkway was visible through the branches but far enough away that we weren't on it.
Thalon watched us go. I felt his presence in the back of my mind, warm and steady, but he didn't follow.
We stopped under an oak where the path curved. I leaned against the trunk and pushed my glasses up. Waited.
Draven looked at me for a beat before he spoke. His hazel eyes were doing the thing they did when his brain was running calculations he wasn't sharing yet.
"What Lunessa just confirmed—my team hit the same wall." He uncrossed his arms. "Aurora Chase."
The case file he'd shown me in my suite. The human mage. The broken bond that had deteriorated for months.
"The signature damage was mechanical," Draven said.
Arms crossed, weight settled, voice steady.
"Sterile. Too clean to be organic. The bond couldn't distinguish real from noise.
It degraded from the inside." His jaw set.
"We had the pattern. What we didn't have was the mechanism. The lead went cold there."
"But the Guild flagged it as incubus magic damage," I said.
"Their protocols defaulted to a known attack type. Classification fit the framework. Nobody looked deeper."
I nodded slowly. Same principle as the ward drill. The system reads what it expects to read.
Draven said the next thing, and my stomach dropped.
"Tess. Your kidnapping."
My hands went flat against the bark behind me. I didn't decide to do it. My body just braced.
"The collar Garanth put on you cut your bonds.
Thalon. Mason." His voice didn't change.
Didn't soften. He delivered it the way he delivered everything operational, with the precision of someone who understood that the kindest thing you could do with bad information was give it straight.
"Two completely different bonds, severed by one device. "
My chest went cold.
"Same mechanism as Aurora," he said. "Replicated signature, fed back corrupted, the bond drowns in the noise. That's not fighting ring equipment, Tess. That's a research prototype."
The arena. The collar around my neck. The moment my bond with Thalon had gone silent and the world had turned grey and empty, like someone had reached into my chest and pulled out the warmth. I'd thought it was cruelty. Just cruelty.
It was data collection.
"They didn't kidnap me for the ring." My voice came out steady and I was distantly proud of that. "The ring was cover."
"You were the experiment. A live field test on the rarest bond types they could access."
I stood there. The bark was rough under my palms. A bird was singing somewhere in the canopy above us. The world was functioning normally, and I was standing inside a revelation that reframed the worst thing that had ever happened to me.
Anger came first. Not the hot, reactive kind. The deep kind. The kind that settles in.
"If they tested it on me, they tested it on other people."
"Aurora's bond. Your bonds. And the program is still running."
Draven was quiet for a beat. Then, "I can have Aegis pull what's available without going through Lunessa directly. The research was published before it was classified. There should be traces in the academic record, and my team knows how to find documents the Guild wants buried."
I nodded. Smart. We didn't know Lunessa well enough yet, and her aunt was on the Council—the same Council that had signed off on burying the research her parents died producing. Every route through the Guild was a route through people who'd already made their choice.
"And if there are current victims—people losing their bonds right now—we need to find them."
"We will."
I looked at him. The investigation had just changed shape in my chest. We weren't only tracking a weapon. We were tracking the people who'd decided the weapon was worth keeping quiet—and we couldn't take any of it through the channels that were supposed to handle exactly this.
Whatever we found from here, we found alone.
"How fast can you pull the Aegis files?" I asked.
"Fast as I can get them clean. I'll loop you in the second I have something." His mouth did that almost-smile, the one that said he was amused and impressed and keeping both under control. "Keep pulling threads on your end, love."
The word settled on my skin. I didn't let myself react to it. I had bigger things to react to.
A twig snapped.
Close. Not the path behind us—the other side of the trunk I was leaning against.
My head turned. Theron was already stepping around the oak, maybe six feet off, one hand braced against the bark like he'd been standing there long enough to settle into it. Not walking up. Already here.
I felt Draven go still next to me.
He pushed off the trunk with an unhurried ease, like he'd just happened to be passing through the same patch of woods we'd chosen for a private conversation. His face wore the neutral expression I'd learned could mean anything from mild approval to suppressed fury.
He stopped. Close enough that I could see the faint pulse in his throat. Close enough that there was no plausible version of the last thirty seconds where he hadn't heard us.
His green eyes moved from Draven to me and back.
"Draven. I want a written analysis of that anomaly detection. How Amrion identified it, what the psychic signature felt like compared to the authorized frequencies. On my desk by tomorrow morning." Perfectly professional. Perfectly reasonable.
Then he looked at me. "Tess. Good coordination up there today. Your calls on the two-front were solid." He paused. "Whatever you're working on after hours, make sure it doesn't affect your performance in training. I notice when my riders are distracted."
He held my gaze for one second longer than necessary. Then he walked away.
My pulse was hammering.
"Did he just—" I started.
"Yeah," Draven said.
"How long was he there?"
"Long enough."
I stared at Theron's retreating back. He knew. Maybe not the details. But he knew we were pulling on a thread, and instead of shutting it down, he'd told us to keep our grades up.
That was either permission or a warning. I couldn't tell which.