Chapter 42
Tess
Whiskey had claimed the warm spot on the couch where I'd been sitting, which meant I was now standing in my own suite holding a mug of tea with nowhere to put myself.
"You're a tyrant," I told him.
He stretched one paw over the edge of the cushion. Yawned.
Three days since the facility. Theron had mandated downtime—no training, no debriefs—in that voice that sounded like protocol but meant I'm taking care of you.
I hadn't seen him since the extraction site.
He was maintaining his distance after the kiss.
I understood it. I hated it. And I wasn't going to think about it right now.
Three days of sleeping, eating, and letting healers poke my still-tender ribs. My suite had the comfortable wreckage of recuperation—piled blankets, books open to lost pages, my brain circling endlessly.
That was the thing. My body was resting. My brain was not. The cells. The victims' faces. Dominick's voice echoing off concrete. The research data Lunessa had flagged. The look on Silvius's face at the extraction site.
"Rest, little one." Thalon's voice, warm and golden, pressing against my thoughts. "Your mind runs in circles because you will not let it be still."
"I'm trying."
"You are not. You are standing in your room arguing with a cat and solving problems that will wait for you."
He wasn't wrong. He was rarely wrong, which was one of the more annoying things about being bonded to a dragon who'd been alive for centuries.
"The problems will still exist tomorrow. You will be better equipped to face them if you stop carrying them tonight."
I took a breath. Set the mug down on the counter next to the other three.
Fine. I could put it down for one night.
And underneath all the noise, the Draven bond hummed. New enough that I kept noticing it, the way you notice a ring on your finger the first week. He was somewhere in the Guild right now. Calm. I didn't have to reach for him to know.
Three days ago I'd been pinned under a hellfire barrier with twenty broken people.
Now I was fighting my cat for couch space.
Healing was weird.
The knock came while I was considering the floor. Two knocks—solid, unhurried, spaced the way Mason always spaced them.
I wanted company.
Mason filled my doorway with pizza boxes.
Four of them, stacked in one massive hand like they weighed nothing, grocery bag in the other.
He was wearing a black button-down that stretched across his chest, sleeves pushed up over forearms corded with muscle.
Three days of rest looked good on him. Unfairly good.
"Hey," he said.
"Hey yourself." I was already reaching for the top box. "How many people are you feeding?"
He didn't answer, because behind him the hallway had become a parade.
Kali came through first with a canvas tote, bottles clinking inside. She'd pulled half her braids up, the rest hanging past her shoulders.
"I brought drinks." She set the tote on the counter and started pulling out bottles. Wine. Sparkling cider. More wine. "The cider's for me. And anyone else who wants it, but mostly for me."
"Good cider?" I asked.
"The fancy kind. Mason tried to buy the cheap stuff and I vetoed it."
"She vetoed it," Mason confirmed. He set the pizza boxes on my bed—Whiskey scrambled—and his face did the thing it did when he talked about his sister. Not a smile, exactly. Quieter and bigger than a smile.
Raze came through next, already talking.
"—told Talven she couldn't come inside and she said, and I quote, 'The golden one would let me.
' Which—first of all, Thalon would not let her.
Second of all, she'd set the curtains on fire.
Third—" He stopped. Looked around. "This is cozy.
I expected more—I don't know. Swords on the wall. Battle maps."
"It's a librarian's suite, Raze. I'm a librarian who rides a dragon. The books are accurate."
"A librarian who rides a dragon and fights demons. I expected at least one sword." He dropped two more pizza boxes on the stack and threw himself onto the floor cushions.
Anya arrived with a candle—standard issue for nights like this—and dark chocolate truffles.
"Should I even ask how many pizzas—"
"Don't ask." She lit the candle on my side table, nudged my abandoned mugs aside, and settled cross-legged next to Raze.
Pippa was last, which meant she'd been orchestrating from the hallway. She walked in barefoot and went straight for the plates.
"Pepperoni on top, margherita second, the weird mushroom one Raze likes third, and the fourth one is—Mason, what's the fourth one?"
"Meat lovers."
"Obviously." She produced a wine opener from her back pocket. "Preparedness. It's a lifestyle."
Lunessa slipped in after Pippa. She carried nothing. Pippa pointed her toward the open spot on the couch and Lunessa sat, tucking her legs underneath her.
My suite was full. Loud and warm and smelling like pizza, and I hadn't done a single thing to make it happen.
I grabbed Mason's arm as he passed me heading for the kitchen. The mate bond pulsed—golden and sure.
He looked down at my hand. Then at me.
"Yeah," he said. Like that was an answer.
It was enough.
We settled in. Two slices in, Raze was telling a story about Talven trying to steal food from the dining hall.
"—she stuck her entire head through the window. The entire head. The kitchen staff scattered. One guy dropped a pot of soup and she just—" He made a slurping sound. "Inhaled it. Off the floor. Then she looked at me like why don't you bring me soup?"
"She's going to get banned from the grounds," Lunessa said.
"She's already banned from the south courtyard. She set a bench on fire during a tantrum." Raze took an enormous bite of mushroom pizza. "Rundel just watches her like a disappointed uncle."
"Rundel watches everyone like a disappointed uncle," I said.
Mason's mouth twitched.
Kali had claimed the chair by the window with her sparkling cider and a plate balanced on her knee. When Raze made the slurping sound, she laughed. When Pippa started organizing the pizza boxes by remaining-slice-count, Kali got up to help without being asked.
She was fifteen. She'd been living in Silvius's house for years. And here she was, pouring sparkling cider into a wine glass because Pippa told her fancy drinks deserve fancy glasses. Mason was sitting three feet away with his shoulders lower than I'd ever seen them.
"So," Raze said, pointing his pizza crust at the room. "Are we going to talk about it or not?"
The temperature shifted.
"About what?" Pippa asked, but she knew.
"The facility. The mission. The fact that we did that and came back." He took a swig of his drink. "I'm not trying to debrief. I just think it's weird that we haven't said it out loud."
A beat. Lunessa looked at her hands.
"It happened," I said.
"And Silvius." Raze said it straight ahead, no hedging. "Was anyone else clocking him at the extraction site? Because I watched him arrive, and that man was not there for the people."
"I noticed," Lunessa said.
"He asked Theron how we found the place before he asked about the victims," Anya said quietly.
My stomach tightened. I'd filed it away at the time because I was exhausted and bleeding. But now it surfaced.
"His concern was off," I said. "The timing was wrong.
Everyone else moved toward the people who needed help.
Silvius moved toward the information." I picked at my pizza crust. "And when he questioned Theron about the deployment, it wasn't curiosity.
It was inventory. He was figuring out what we knew. "
The room absorbed that.
"Okay," Pippa said. She set her wine down. "We're not doing this tonight."
"Pip—"
"No. We're not running ops from Tess's bed. Tonight is pizza. Tomorrow is for the scary stuff."
"She's right," Lunessa said, and the quiet firmness told me she wanted to pull that thread as badly as I did.
Raze held up both hands. "Pizza. Fine. But I'm bringing it up again."
"Noted. Eat your weird mushroom pizza."
Raze let it go, but I caught his eyes across the room. We're not done with that. I gave him one back. I know.
Pippa topped off everyone's wine. Kali topped off her own cider with an air of dignity that made Anya's mouth twitch.
"Okay, so who else had no idea what they were doing during combat and was just kind of—" Raze windmilled his arms. "Making it up?"
"You were not making it up," Lunessa said. "You threw a man through a wall."
"I threw a man through a wall on instinct. That's different. That's my body going 'do a thing' and my brain going 'okay, guess we're doing that thing now.'"
"That's exactly what combat is," Anya said.
"See, that's terrifying. I thought there was supposed to be strategy."
"There is strategy," I said. "It just happens faster than you can think about it."
"So strategy is just instinct with a better publicist."
Pippa pointed her glass at him. "I'm putting that on a shirt."
Mason was quiet through most of it, but he was present—following the conversation, reacting in his body language.
When Raze told the wall story, his eyebrows went up.
When Lunessa made her dry comment, the corner of his mouth ticked.
He had Kali's empty plate stacked under his own without anyone seeing him do it.
Kali had migrated from the window chair to the floor next to Lunessa. The two of them were having a quiet conversation I couldn't hear—Lunessa talking, Kali listening with her chin on her knees.
"Mason," Pippa said, turning on him. "Housing update. Go."
He looked mildly ambushed. "Working on it."
"That's not an update. That's a holding pattern. Details. Where? When? Does Kali get to pick her paint color?"
Kali's head came up. "Do I get to pick my paint color?"
Mason looked at his sister. His face cracked—the slow break in the stoic exterior, eyes warming before his mouth caught up.
"Yeah. You get to pick your paint color."
"I already know what color," Kali said.
"I know you already know what color."
"Teal," she said to the room.