The response comes back in seconds — Bael’s shadow touching my fire with a cold, ancient fury that tells me he understood every word.
And underneath the fury, the thing I’ve come to recognize as Bael’s version of fear: a stillness so deep it feels like the moment before an earthquake.
Then I sit at my desk and wait.
The file sits in front of me with its Priority Alpha seal and its crossed silver blades and its clinical language about the woman whose shadows are woven through my fire and whose mouth I can still feel against mine from three nights ago in a forest grovewhere the only thing that mattered was that we were alive and together.
The sun comes up.
Students begin moving through corridors below my window. Morning routines. Normal lives.
People who will eat breakfast and go to class and never know that a man in a third-floor office spent forty minutes committing treason because the alternative was letting the system do what it was designed to do.
I look at the file one more time.
Ashley’s name at the top. The data I altered underneath. The conclusion that no longer matches its own evidence and the referral that’s already been sent and the ADU team that’s being assembled somewhere in a building I used to think of as home.
Days. Maybe a week.
That’s what the altered evidence buys us — the time it takes for the ADU to arrive, review the current data, find the discrepancies between the referral and the records, and decide whether to proceed or request a secondary assessment.
If they request secondary, we get more time.
If they don’t — if the original referral is strong enough to override the corrupted data, if someone on the team is thorough enough to pull the archived versions that I couldn’t reach — then we get nothing.
I fold the file closed.
Put it back in the interdepartmental delivery tray where it will be returned to the records office and filed alongside thousands of other assessment documents, indistinguishable from the institutional noise unless someone knows exactly what to look for.
My fire burns steady in my chest.
The shadows in the stone carry my warning toward the two people who need to hear it.
And the clock starts on something that I can delay but not prevent — the arrival of a team whose sole purpose is to find what I just spent forty minutes hiding.
Four operatives with consecrated weapons and equipment built to strip away every layer of shadow disguise that Ashley, Bael, and I have spent months building.
Coming here. To this campus.
For her.
I stand up. Straighten my coat.
Arrange my face into the expression of a Hunter liaison beginning an ordinary day because the performance doesn’t stop just because the performer has switched sides.
The door opens.
The corridor is full of morning light and students and the small, oblivious routines of people whose lives aren’t balanced on the edge of a blade.
I walk into it.
The coat fits the same way it always has.
The man inside it doesn’t.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Ashley
