Page 12 of Legacy Ascended

He looks at her as if he’s only just remembered she’s in the room.

“She goes into the old storerooms,” he says. “Stone walls, one door, no windows. Somewhere half the valley can’t wander past to stare at her.”

“No,” Elise says.

“There are nineteen children here.”

“And moving her underground protects them how?”

“Her mates will come looking for her. So will the academy and the Council. We don’t know who else they’ll bring or what they’ll do when they reach the valley.”

Anyone with sense knows Luke, Torres, and Soren won’t simply accept that I disappeared.

“Let me contact them,” I say. “One message. I’ll tell them I’m alive and the children here aren’t responsible for what happened.”

“So they can trace it?”

“I don’t know where I am.”

“You know more than you did this morning.”

“I know you have a courtyard, a gate, and an old man who thinks kidnapping counts as protection. That should narrow it down.”

His face darkens.

“Jessica,” Elise warns quietly.

“No. He came in here threatening to bury me in a windowless room. He can listen.”

Klaus looks past me to the ring on the table.

“Frances bowed to you,” he says. “Now half the valley has forgotten that you killed five people before you ever crossed the gate.”

“They attacked me.”

“My brother is still dead.”

“And I’m sorry for that. I am. But you don’t get to make me responsible for the fact that Frances sent him after a direwolf with a net.”

Klaus flinches as if I struck him.

For a moment I think he might come at me. Benny must think so too, because he steps through the doorway and places himself between us.

Klaus turns his anger on him. “You were there.”

“Yes.”

“You saw what she did.”

“I saw what we did first.”

Something in Klaus’s expression closes.

“She goes downstairs when the corridor shift changes,” he says. “You’ll take her.”

Benny doesn’t answer.

“That’s an order.”