“I tell you everything.” I pull him toward the bed. “Starting with the middle of the session. She asked about you. Whether you knew. Whether you’d like it. Then she told me a story about a manwho kept her safe instead of teaching her, and let me hear what I was supposed to hear in it.”
His jaw tightens. “And what were you supposed to hear?”
“That you cage the women you love.” I hold his eyes. “She’s working from old maps. You tried that once. It didn’t survive contact with me.”
The line does what I built it to do. His shoulders come down a degree.
“And this. She asked me a question at the door tonight. She asked why I took the assignment myself.”
“What did you tell her?”
“The truth.” I sit, and look up at my husband, and give him the sentence I gave her. “If someone’s going to teach her how to be dangerous, it’s going to be the person who’ll have to answer for it.”
He’s quiet. Then, low: “She’ll have understood that as a warning.”
“Good,” I say. “It was one.”
Chapter
Eleven
The supply caches burn fast.
Konstantin kept them spread across north Georgia and into Tennessee, small hardened sites buried under legitimate businesses, each one feeding a piece of his network that the three hubs used to coordinate. With the hubs gone, the caches are orphaned. No comms, no resupply, no orders. Julian’s been mapping them off the intelligence we pulled from the northern hub’s servers, and tonight we take the first four.
I lead the south pair. Maximus takes the north. First time we’ve split on an operation.
Don’t think about it.
The bond stretches between us as his convoy turns north and mine turns south, and the distance opens with the taut clean pull I’ve learned to trust since the hub assault. He’s there. Moving. Focused. The rest is mine to handle.
Kyle drives. The compound driver who’s been on every operation since the hubs. Good behind the wheel. Good at silence. The convoy is small. Two vehicles, Erik’s south wolves in the leadtruck, and the night outside the windshield is country-dark, the kind of dark where the stars are low and thick enough to give the road a ghost-light and the pines stand close on both sides.
The south cache sits under a livestock feed warehouse off the state highway. The kind of place you drive past and never look at twice. Chain-link fence, gravel lot, a loading dock with a rusted rolling door and a sign that says PEACH STATE AGRICULTURAL SUPPLY in letters gone to rust and peel. Konstantin hid his operations behind businesses so ordinary they were invisible. The man understood that the best camouflage isn’t shadows. It’s boredom.
We stage in a tree line up the road. Erik’s wolves clear the perimeter while Mira walks the ward line, palms low, her fingers spread just off the ground. She doesn’t touch it. She reads it, the faint hum of layered magic registering through whatever frequency her training lets her hear, and when she lifts her head the look on her face is the one I’ve learned means the world just told her something useful.
“These aren’t Konstantin’s wards,” she says. “The signature is his coven’s, but the structure underneath is older. He built on top of something that was already here.”
She presses her hands flat to the earth, and her eyes go distant, and she’s somewhere I can’t follow.
I follow as far as I can. I crouch beside her and put my own palm to the clay, not because I can read what she reads but because I want to feel the edge of it, and the edge is there, faint, the same press the hub wards put against my teeth. The ground is humming. Not sound. Pressure, a low structural thrum that comes up through my palm into the bones of my wrist, and underneath it, when I stay still, the thing that stops my breath, which is that the thrum isn’t one note. It’s hundreds, woven into one. Each one a little different. Each one a site. All of them running the samerhythm, and the rhythm is alive in a way machinery never is. For one second I feel the scale of what Konstantin built, not as a map on Julian’s screen but as a living thing breathing under the whole of north Georgia, every cache and hub and ward anchor a node in a body that knows when you cut it.
The twins press toward it. Of course they do. It’s power, and they reach for power the way they reach for their father.
I take my hand back.
Mira comes back a breath later, her voice dropped into the register she uses when she’s certain. “There’s a root system. Magical, not botanical. It runs between the sites. Every cache, every hub, every ward anchor he’s placed in this region, they’re all threaded into the same underground network. Pull one thread and the others feel it.”
“Feel it how?” I say.
“The estate feels it.” She straightens. Her hands come off the earth and she wipes them on her jacket, the red clay leaving streaks on the dark fabric, and what Mira just did is the magical equivalent of putting her ear to a railroad track and hearing the train three counties away. “Every time we take a site, the estate’s wards register the loss. He knows we’re coming, and the system is how he’s tracking where.”
Great. So every win we take is also a signal flare.
“Can you cut the thread before we hit the cache?”
“I can muffle it. Delay the signal. Not stop it entirely.” She looks at me, frank, assessing, pricing one more impossible problem. “Give me four minutes before breach. I’ll give you a window where the estate hears static instead of screaming.”
