"Plan's done," I say, clapping my hands once because motion hides tremor better than stillness. The sound snaps through the library, too loud, and several spirits flinch. "Ira, I need silver wire, salt, and something heavy enough to keep me inside a containment circle if my body gets ambitious. Aven, I need Ellis to give us the location of the primary ward-stone. Foundation level, load-bearing point. If I miss the active node, none of us have time for that."
Aven lifts his head. His eyes narrow faintly, not at the words but at the speed of them. "You found something."
"I found the part where my grandmother proves she was insufferable and correct, which is rude but not new."
"What did she say?"
"Soren."
There's steel in Aven's voice now. It would stop me on any other day. Today, Cain is sitting in a tower, and I choose the lie with both eyes open.
"The absorption will hurt," I say, letting the partial truth carry enough weight to distract from the rest. "It might get ugly. You'll need to cleanse what vents off me, but not until I tell you. If you touch the active blood magic directly before I ground it, it could use your light as a second conduit, and then we have two problems instead of one."
Aven absorbs that. His fear has nowhere to go, so it becomes focus. "I can do that."
"I know."
Ira hasn't moved.
He looks at the too-bright smile, the way my shoulders sit half an inch too high, the way one hand keeps drifting toward the pocket where Vera's letter rests against my ribs.
"Soren," he says.
My name in his mouth isn't accusation. That's the problem.
I look at him. "Yes, darling?"
"Tell me the price."
The room tightens. Aven looks between us, sensing the shift but pulled back toward Cain every time the bond pulses. Ellis stays near the shelves, expression unreadable. The other spirits watch me with the kind of attention I usually charge extra to tolerate.
Ira stands at the map with both hands braced on the table, choosing not to become the cage he promised he'd stop building. That choice makes the lie taste worse.
"The immediate price is pain, likely collapse, and several hours of me being unbearable in a horizontal position."
"Soren."
"I need twenty seconds. Thirty if the tower fights dirty, which it will." I hold his gaze because looking away would be confession. "I can do it."
"That isn't what I asked."
"No." My voice softens despite me. I hate that too. "But it's the answer I can give you before we get Cain home."
Ira's jaw tightens. For a moment, I see every instinct in him rise. Save me from myself because he knows, he knows, that I'm deciding something in the part of me that doesn't ask permission when love is cornered.
Then he breathes in.
He remembers.
The apology in the library was real. He said he'd learn the difference between protection and control. He said my choices had to be mine even when they scared him. I'm using that promise against him now, and the cruelty of it lands in my chest before he even nods.
He nods anyway.
It costs him visibly, in the flex of his hands against the table, in the way his shoulders settle as if he's accepted a wound he can't tend yet.
"Thirty seconds," he says. His voice is rougher than before. "That's all I can promise inside the active structure. If you're not finished, I'll have to choose between dragging you out and reaching Cain."
I smile because the alternative is apologizing, and apologies are for later if later is kind enough to exist. "Then it's fortunate I only need twenty."
