Page 126
“I have to go.” I turned to face them both.
“I'm coming with you,” Lily said immediately.
“Absolutely not.” The words came out sharper than I intended. “If he even suspects what you are—”
“He already suspects something.” Her chin lifted. “Especially after last night. You're not facing this alone.”
“She's right,” Garrick added quietly.
“No.” I looked at him. “I've dealt with him my whole life. You stay here with her.”
“August, please. . .” Lily began to argue, but I cut her off
“After last night.” I lifted her hand to my lips, pressing a kiss to her knuckles. “I cannot let you be near him. If he realizes what you mean to me, he'll use it against us both.”
“Whatever happens in there, whatever he says or threatens—remember that none of it changes what we decided,” I said.
Her smile was small but fierce. “I know.”
As I watched her walk away, the quiet intimacy of the morning already slipping into memory, replaced by the sharp edges of reality.
But I'd glimpsed something worth fighting for. Something worth choosing over duty.
Whatever trap my father had set, I would hold onto that.
The Spire loomed against the gray morning sky like a monument to everything I'd spent the night deciding to destroy. The same stones that had housed the Hunter's operations for generations had become prison walls now.
I'd left Lily at my home with Garrick, but not for long. I'd made my decision in the pre-dawn hours, watching her sleep: she needed to go to the Weavers. Today. It was the only way to keep her safe from what was coming.
The weight of my mother's pendant pressed against my chest as I climbed the Spire's familiar steps, each one heavier than the last.
The guard at the entrance barely looked at me as he opened the door. “Commander Hawthorne is in the war room.”
Of course he was. The war room—where strategy became execution orders. Where I'd signed my first death warrant at sixteen, proud to follow in his footsteps. I forced the thought away.
The door stood open, but I knocked anyway. Old habits.
“Enter.”
Elias stood before a large map of Oxford spread across the table, marking locations with small black pins. He didn't look up, but I could feel his attention like a blade against my throat.
“You're late,” he said without lifting his eyes.
“I came as soon as I could.”
“Did you?” Now he looked up, and I saw something I'd never seen before in his pale eyes. Disappointment. Not anger. Somehow that was worse. “Tell me, August, what kept you so. . . occupied last night when there was a Weaver to catch?”
The question hung in the air like smoke. I kept my expression neutral, though my pulse quickened. “I was recovering from the ambush. The blow to my face—”
“How thoughtful of you to prioritize your comfort over duty.” The words carried the same cutting precision he'd used when I was ten and claimed the broken vase had fallen by itself.
He moved around the table with that predatory grace that had terrified me as a child. Now it just made me tired.
“The girl escaped, August. Under your watch. A Weaver—a child, granted, but still a threat to all we've built—simply vanished from the most secure location in Oxford.”
“As I reported, I was escorting the prisoner when they lunged out of the dark. Tall, almost my height. Fast. Masked. They struck with something that sparked blue—static arcing off the sconces. By the time I drew steel, the child was gone.”
Father studied me for a heartbeat—long enough for silence to spider-web through the war room.
