Gavrail leans forward. His voice drops and I swear the room seems to shrink. “Maybe,” he says. “But sometimes shadows are cast by something real. I don’t like him. He’s hiding something—I can feel it. The way he talks around everything. The way he brought her here. To this school.Hisschool. That kind of care is not benign.”
Noa scoffs, rising from his stool. “You want to what, break into his office? Tear through his files and hope he’s left behind a signed confession?”
Silence settles for a beat too long.
Gavrail looks at me the way someone reads a map: slowly, cataloging every weakness and every strength. “We could do it.”
“I never said I would—” I begin, but he cuts me off cleanly.
“But you’re thinking it.” The certainty in his voice leaves no room for debate. “You want answers.”
My pulse ticks upward. Not just because he’s right, but because I hate that he knows me so well.
“If there’s something in those file cabinets… records, correspondence, anything. Maybe the letter he said my father wrote to him. At least just to know that it wasn’t a lie. I need to know what happened on the lake that day. What their history is. Why Thorne knew so much and said so little. If he knows the truth about me and my family’s history.”
Noa pushes back from the bar, standing now. “You’re both insane. Thorne is dangerous. He’s protected, powerful, and he’s watching you already. You think you can sneak past him without consequences?”
“I think,” Gavrail says slowly, rising with the deliberate grace of someone whowantsto be underestimated, “that therisk of not knowing is starting to outweigh the risk of getting caught.”
“No,” Noa says, jaw tight. “You’re not dragging her into this.”
“She’s already in it,” Gavrail snaps. “Her family’s buried in secrets and the one man who might know the truth is playing mind games. She deserves answers.”
“I’m right here, by the way,” I say, sharper than I intend to. “And I’ll decide for myself.”
They both fall silent. The tension crackles, like a storm about to break.
“I’m not saying we go in blind,” Gavrail says after a moment, quieter now, controlled. “We plan it. Timing. Entry. You know the office now, Celeste—what’s inside, maybe even ideas of where to look.”
Noa runs a hand through his hair. “This is a mistake.”
“Maybe,” I say, voice steady. “But it might be the only way to get answers.”
Gavrail meets my eyes, then nods once. “Then we do it.”
Noa turns away, pacing once before stopping, his back to us. “You’d better not get caught,” he says, low and frustrated. “Because if you do?—”
“We won’t,” Gavrail says—less a promise than a verdict. His voice is smooth and dangerous, like a storm banked beneath clouds. Hidden. Waiting. Final.
I don’t say anything. But somewhere deep beneath the silence, I know: the choice has already been made.
* * *
We settleon the following week, a Wednesday night. The Administration building closes early, and Headmaster Thorne starts late on Thursdays, giving us a buffer if anything goes sideways.
Noa is still not totally on board with our plan, but he doesn’ttry to stop us either. Having spent the most time in the Admin building out of the three of us, he tells us what he knows and manages to “borrow” a keycard from Madame Vanderwall, the office secretary.
Gavrail, meanwhile, catalogs any security measures with a glance—cameras, locked doors, wards. Everything is inventory. He corroborates with Noa, the two of them going over every detail like they’re calibrating a weapon—angles, timing, sight lines—until everything clicks into place with a cold, perfect certainty.
We plan and re-plan: entry, egress, contingencies, safe windows, fallback signals. Every potential failure is a vector Gavrail quiets before it can breathe.
I want to look at the map, maybe Thorne’s scheduler to see where he was that day in August. Look through the file cabinets too—letters, records, anything that might tie Thorne to my father.
At some point between the maps and the watch rotations, I realize precisely how dangerous Gavrail is. Clandestine missions are not improvisation for him—they’re choreography. When he moves, the air seems to hold still for him. He doesn’t just anticipate risk; he dismantles it.
Secrets and shadows aren’t just things he uses.
They’re areligion.
