Chapter 377

“She said “I stopped, because the memory of what Ivory had said was producing the red again, faintly, at the edges of my face. “She was very calm about it.”

“She was enjoying the central grounds,” he said, with the tone of someone who’d been there for it. “Significantly.”

“The crowd enjoyed it more,” I said.

“The crowd,” he said, “has been enjoying this since Martha got to the kitchen.”

We sat with that.

Outside, muffled by the walls, the ordinary sounds of Shadowmere going about its day. The pack that had cheered twenty minutes ago was now back to its other business-training, working, eating, discussing, being the specific complicated place it was.

My pack. Who had just collectively celebrated something that wasn’t real, that I’d invented on the spot to destroy a weapon, that had gotten away from me faster than I’d known information could travel.

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Who had cheered for it. Who had positioned themselves on balconies and in central grounds to watch what happened next.

Who were, underneath all their complicated feelings about my presence here, constitutionally unable to resist an interesting development in the territory.

I thought about the pearl, warm in my pocket. About the floor, solid under my feet.

“What do we do,” I said, “about the fact that it’s circulating.”

Kael considered this with the measured attention he brought to pack management questions. “We don’t address it directly,” he said. “Addressing it directly makes it larger. Shadowmere doesn’t respond well to direct corrections of interesting stories – they tend to survive corrections and become both the story and the correction.”\

“So we just-”

“Let it exist,” he said. “It will evolve in the retelling. Become something different. These things always do.” He paused. “The important thing is that Sera’s weapon is gone. That was the goal. The side effects are-” he looked at the door, in the direction of the central grounds, “-a secondary consideration!

“Ivory,” I said. “I should talk to Ivory!”

“Yes,” he said.

“Not to explain the bluff,” I said. “She clearly knows about it. But because-“I stopped. Found the honest version. “Because she made a joke in the central grounds that required her to say something she wasn’t obligated to say in a way that helped me rather than embarrassing me. And I want to acknowledge that.”

Kael looked at me with the expression that was warm in the quiet way. The way that didn’t announce itself.

“She did that,” he said.

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10:45 am P Ppp.

Chapter 377

“In front of thirty people,” I said. “And Jordan and Nina and Elite on a balcony.”

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“Elite was smiling,” he said, and the words came out with the specific quality of someone who’d registered that particular detail and was still processing its implications. “An actual smile.”

“I saw it from the grounds,” I said. “It was remarkable.”

“It really was,” he agreed.

We sat in the conference room for another moment, the conversation having reached the natural place where it had covered what it needed to cover and was settling toward its close.

“The recording device,” he said. “The curtsey.”

“In my desk drawer,” I confirmed.

“I would like,” he said, carefully, “to hear the curtsey.”

I looked at him.

“At some point,” he said. “Not today. At a point when the appropriate time presents itself.”.

“The appropriate time,” I said, “for listening to Sera Quinn curtsey and read a document aloud.”

“It seems like it would be useful,” he said, with the composure of someone making a reasonable administrative suggestion.

Shadowmere, I thought. Completely impossible. Absolutely terrible influence. Entirely, specifically mine.

“I’ll let you know when the appropriate time presents itself,” I said.

He stood. I stood. We moved toward the door with the practiced ease of two people who’d had a conversation that hadn’t resolved everything but had resolved what it needed to for today, which was the unit of resolution that Shadowmere seemed to operate in.

He opened the door.

The corridor outside was not empty. Three pack members were in it who were very interested in their own business and not at all interested in who was emerging from the conference room.

Kael looked at them.

They found additional things to be interested in.

We walked out into the corridor and in our respective directions, and the pack went back to its ongoing conversation about what had happened in the central grounds and what it meant, and Martha was presumably still in the kitchen, and the recording device was still in my desk drawer, and Ivory was somewhere in the clinic doing her afternoon work with whatever was in her expression when she thought about what she’d said to the assembled crowd.

I was going to find her later. When the afternoon had settled and the clinic was quieter and there was space for a conversation that wasn’t the middle of something else.

I had things to say that weren’t in the poly bluff. Things that were just mine, and honest, and probably overdue.

The floor was there. I was standing on it.

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10:45 am

Chapter 377

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One day at a time.

That was how all of this got done.

a/n: would you look at that? fluff between aria and kael. aria even got to make him laugh. i only posteed this much cause i found an ivory shipper like me, ivory through and through haha.