Chapter 8 #2
"You can keep her running. That's not the same thing." I hold his gaze. "She refused you once. You want to take that choice from her?"
His jaw tightens, the scar pulling across his slightly disfigured face. I hit a nerve.
"Then what?" He leans against the passage wall. Arms crossed. The posture is casual but the tendons in his forearms are taut. "Because I came down here betting that you're not just another council dog in a nice coat. But I've been wrong about men like you before."
"Men like me."
"Men with clean hands and long titles who care right up until it costs them something.
" He pushes off the wall. Steps closer. Close enough that I can see the fresh scab splitting on his lip, the dried blood still under his fingernails.
His chin drops. Eyes level with mine. "So tell me I'm wrong.
Tell me you're not going to sit in that room tomorrow and follow the rules while they sign her over. "
I don't step back. Kage isn’t worth it and I’m not a fucking council dog.
"I testify that she's improving. That the incident was provoked. That pulling her out now wastes everything the council invested—"
He actually laughs. Short, ugly, mostly air. "That's a prayer, not a plan. You think three adjudicators care about channeling numbers when there's a blood claim on the table? That's old law. Older than you. It doesn't bend for progress reports."
He's right. I let the admission sit.
"I've made other arrangements," I say.
Kage's eyes narrow. "What kind?"
"The kind that don't concern you."
"Everything about her concerns me." The performance falls out of his voice. "My blood is in her. Twice. I can feel her heartbeat right now from the other side of your chest. So try again."
The impulse to hit him arrives clean and complete. I could kill him, tear his head off with my bare hands and Devenir would run just the same as when scum like him walked the campus. My hands stay at my sides.
"I contacted my family. My father is making inquiries through older channels—if the Vane claim is upheld, there may be a counter-claim.
The incident occurred on academy property, during a council-sanctioned event, involving a subject under council supervision.
The liability argument is that House Vane's grievance lies with the institution, not with Calypso. "
He goes quiet. Actually quiet—his whole restless body going focused in a way that tells me he's sharper than three centuries of playing the idiot would suggest.
"That's not going to work," he says finally. "Is it?"
"I don't know."
He stares at me. "That's what you've got? Her life is on the table tomorrow and you don't know?"
"The claim is legitimate. Emric Vane is dead. Her magic killed him. No procedural argument changes that, and Leopold has spent two weeks making sure the Vanes go in with teeth bared."
"So he's rigging the room."
"He's making sure the outcome is as bad as it can be.
The documents he gave their advocate—I'd bet my name those are ammunition.
Her incident history, her file, maybe things even the council hasn't seen.
" I press my thumb into my palm again. "He wants her buried. And he's handed the Vanes the shovel."
Kage is quiet for a long time. The dripping fills the space between us.
"You're not going to let them take her." Statement, not question.
"No. But I need the inquest to happen."
His head snaps back to me.
"If we run before the ruling, Leopold's version of events stands.
Calypso is a fugitive. The fail-safe stays active, and the council hunts her with cause.
" I hold his gaze. "If I make the case inside the tribunal—the rune, the sealed file, the sequence at the Revel—I put Leopold's involvement on the record.
Even if the ruling goes against us, it creates grounds for formal challenge.
And old law mandates a transfer period between ruling and handoff.
Forty-eight hours minimum while the terms are processed. "
"Forty-eight hours," Kage says, processing.
"That's the window. If my argument doesn't land and the Vanes get what they want, we have two days before she's formally transferred into their custody."
"Two days to do what?"
"Whatever we have to."
The corridor goes quiet enough to hear the bulb filament buzzing. Kage studies me like he's recalculating everything he thought he knew.
"So tomorrow you play the game."
"Tomorrow I play the game. And if the game doesn't work—"
"Then I play mine." He says it flat. Final. Like he’s ready to murder all of Louisiana if it means keeping her as far away from danger as possible.
"I need you to let me try the tribunal first. If I can raise enough doubt about Leopold to delay the ruling, she stays at Devenir. Stays in training. That's the best outcome."
"And the worst?"
"The worst is the Vanes walk out of that room with a blood claim upheld and forty-eight hours to collect. But I still have the fail-safe." I let that sit. "They can reassign custody. They can't reassign the device without a separate proceeding."
Something moves through his face. Quick. One caged thing seeing another. Then it's gone.
"And Leopold?" Kage asks quietly. "When this is done? Whatever happens in that room?"
"Leopold engineered the death of a student to destroy a woman he's been hunting since she stepped foot on this campus. That doesn't go unanswered."
"Good." He rolls his neck. "Because if you don't handle him, I will. And I won't be filing paperwork about it."
"Noted."
He straightens. The performance slides back into place—the grin, the loose shoulders, the man who doesn't care about anything.
"You're not what I thought you were," he says. Already turning.
"What did you think I was?"
"An asshole."
His boots take the stairs two at a time and the sound fades up through the stone until the cellar eats it.
I go back to my room. Sit on the cot. One knee drawn up, back against the wall, the stone cold through my shirt. Her heartbeat finds me even here. Sixty-two. Steady.
I run the outcomes.
Best case: I present the evidence. Leopold’s rune, the file, the engineered cascade.
The tribunal delays the ruling pending investigation.
Calypso stays at Devenir, stays in training, stays mine to protect.
Weeks. Maybe months. Enough time for her magic to become something they can't afford to cage.
Middling: the tribunal hears me, acknowledges doubt, but upholds the Vane claim on principle. The forty-eight-hour window opens. I file an appeal. I leverage my father's call. I buy more time, piece by piece, until time stops being the problem.
Worst case.
I close my eyes.
Worst case, the tribunal rules and the window closes and Kage's route is the only route left. He takes her. Disappears with her into the kind of nowhere a man like him knows how to find. And I—
I stay.
The realization is precise and immediate, the way the worst ones always are.
If it comes to Kage's plan, I can't go with them.
Someone has to hold the institution's attention.
Someone has to absorb the fallout, feed them false leads, keep the fail-safe from being transferred to a handler who'd use it without hesitation.
Someone has to stand in the room where she was and make sure nobody follows her out.
That someone is me.
It was always going to be me.
My hand closes. Tight enough that the knuckles ache. There's a pressure behind my sternum that I haven't felt in centuries—old and enormous and completely useless, the kind of pain that doesn't respond to logic or discipline or five hundred years of learning how to put things down.
I would be here.
She would be out there.
With him.
I let myself feel the loss and heartbreak. The full scope of it. Then I fold it up, put it away, and note what's underneath: it doesn't matter. Not the distance, not the time, not who's beside her in the interim. If I have to let Kage take her to keep her breathing, I let Kage take her.
And then I dismantle every obstacle between us, one by one, until there are none left.
Because she's mine.
She doesn't know it yet.
But she's mine, and I will always find her.