“Then be honest,” Viktor says.
Faine folds her hands on the table.
“There’s a blood trade running,” she says without ceremony. “I don’t mean the trade your people know—the Syndicate taking magic-bloods into their facilities. I mean blood. People taken for it. Held captive and drained, in numbers, across a spread of territory too wide to be one appetite working alone.”
The room goes quiet, and no one moves to fill it.
Viktor’s face doesn’t change, but he’s gone very still. “This is the first I’m hearing of it.”
“I know. That’s part of why we’re here.” Faine’s voice stays level. “Understand something about the Court before you decide what you make of us. We have lived alongside humans a very long time, and others besides…wolves, your kind, the fae. We’ve done it by being careful. We take what we need, we leave no one dead, we draw no attention, because attention is the one thing that has ever cost us everything. Discipline isn’t a courtesy we extend. It’s the reason we still exist.”
“And someone’s stopped being disciplined,” Caleb says.
“Someone’s made blood an industry.” She lets it sit a beat. “We found it a while ago. We thought we’d handle it the way the Court handles its own: quietly, internally, without making waves. We were wrong. It’s outgrown us. It’s organized, and it has no regard at all for the thing that’s kept the rest of us alive: you do not leave bodies.”
“You think it’s coordinated?” Viktor says.
“I think whoever runs it has reach we don’t, and money we don’t, and a tolerance for exposure no one who’s lived in hiding would have.” Faine looks down the table, then back to Viktor. “I won’t stand in your house and name your enemies for you. But you’ve been pulling magic-bloods out of facilities successfully. You know who collects creatures with power in them as though they were stock. When I look for something big enough to run something this size, and careless enough not to fear what comes of it, I find myself looking the same direction you would.”
Nobody says the name. It’s in the room without being said.
Syndicate.
“Why bring it to us?” Dorian says. “If the Court can’t stop it, what do you think we’ll manage that you couldn’t?”
“You’re already at war with the people we suspect,” Faine says. “We’re not. We’d like to stay that way. But we can’t sit on this and watch it grow, because it’s only a matter of time before we’re exposed. We’re offering what we have. Corridors. Timing. The buyers we’ve identified. In exchange, we want it stopped. That’s all of it.”
Viktor is quiet for a moment.
“We’ll take what you have,” he says. “And we’ll look at it seriously. I won’t promise an outcome if I don’t understand the rest of it.”
“I’m not asking for a promise,” Faine says. “I’m asking for attention. You weren’t giving it because you didn’t know. Now you do.”
Viktor turns the folded page she’s slid across, reads it, passes it to Caleb without a word.
It’s Talon who turns the conversation; he’s been quiet, and when he speaks it’s with the care of a man who’s noticed something he doesn’t like the look of.
“It isn’t only the trade,” he says. “There’s been a wrongness across the board these last weeks. Small things out of line. Reports that don’t add up the way they used to.”
“I’ve felt it too,” Lila says. “The energies are shifting.”
Everyone looks at her. She doesn’t soften it.
“Elena feels it more clearly than I do—it runs stronger in her than in me. But I’ve felt it too. Something’s unsettled. The Heartstone hasn’t been quiet. For weeks now.”
“Unsettled how?” Viktor asks.
“Restless. I don’t have a tidier word, and I don’t like using one I can’t define at a table this size. But that’s the truth of it. It’s restless; I don’t know why, and neither does Elena.”
Leora Sky speaks for the first time since she sat. “The fae have felt it as well. Our wards read pressure on them they shouldn’t be carrying. We assumed it was local to us.” She looks at Lila. “If a Rossewyn witch is feeling the same thing, it isn’t local.”
“Two old things stirring in one season,” Faine says. “A blood trade outgrowing every limit that ever held it, and an artifact that won’t settle. I don’t believe in that much coincidence.”
Caleb glances at Dorian. “You should probably tell them, Dorian.”
There’s a long pause, and then his twin exhales.
“I don’t think the two are connected.” Dorian draws every eye at the table to him. “There’s something I should share, since we’re laying it all out there.” He turns his water glass a half-inch and leaves it. He’s fighting back a smile. “Juno’s pregnant. It’s why we haven’t brought her into any of the action lately.”
