Chapter 410

“She killed thirty of them,” he said. “She killed thirty of them herself. Alone. In various combinations of injured and tired and compromised and she killed thirty of them and documented the outcomes and kept going.”

“She’s very capable,” Nina said.

“I know she’s capable,” he said. “I watched her be capable for three curse years. Every day. In conditions that would have broken other people she just kept being capable.” He stood, because sitting apparently wasn’t sustainable, and moved back toward the damaged wall. Not to hit it again – just to stand near it and look at the gap. “She could have asked for help. She should have told me. I knew she was looking for a cure. I knew she was going places and doing things. But all of this-” he turned back, “-torture, Nina. They tortured her. They waterboarded her and she came home and treated it and didn’t tell anyone.”

“We didn’t know,” Nina said, and her voice had moved into a different register. Not the security chief’s professional neutral. Something older. The version of her that existed before the position. “You and I both. She kept it from both of us. That’s not something you did wrong and I didn’t catch. That’s her specifically being very deliberate about what she shared.”

“You would have pushed harder,” he said. “If you’d known she was in that kind of danger-”

“I pushed as hard as I knew to push,” Nina said.

“She gave me what she wanted me to have. There’s a version of this where I’m in that room too, on the bench, asking the same question you’re asking.” She held his gaze. “You know how she is. I know how she is. We both love someone who has decided that telling people what she goes through is more dangerous than going through it alone because at least alone she can control who gets hurt.”

Kael was quiet.

“She did it for you,” I said.

They both looked at me.

I hadn’t planned to say it. But it was sitting in the room and it needed to be named directly rather than circled around. “All of it. Every incident. Every red-tab and yellow-tab and whatever color the target practice got. She did it because the alternative was the math she’d done on your timeline.” I looked at Kael. “She chose sixty-nine incidents over that math. That was the trade she made.”

He looked at the floor.

“I know,” he said. And this was the full version of those two words, the one that had everything in it

“The woman who attacked last night,” Nina said, pulling the conversation toward something actionable because that was how Nina handled the things she couldn’t fix – she moved to the things she could. “She didn’t touch Aria. You noticed that ”

I had noticed that. In the moment I’d been too focused on the shield and the darkening and calling through the bond to process it fully. But looking back at the sequence of events, the attacker had come at Ivory specifically. The bolts had been aimed at Ivory Even in the trees, before she’d stepped out, it had been Ivory she’d announced herself to.

“She went around Aria to get to Ivory,” Kael said.

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Chapter 410

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“She had to know Aria was there,” Nina said. “She’d been watching the slope. She would have seen both of them on the training path.”

“She didn’t target Aria,” Kael said.

“No,” Nina said. “She targeted Ivory specifically.”

“Which means she wasn’t there because of me,” I said. “Or not primarily. She wasn’t trying to get at Kael through Ivory. She had he own reasons.”

“Eighteen months of following her,” Kael said.

“The information Ivory took. The things she did during the search.” He looked at Nina. “That’s personal. That’s someone who’s been hunting her specifically for something Ivory did to her specifically.”

“The collector at the beginning,” Nina said, thinking through the folder’s contents. “Incident one. The three fingers and the research materials. If the attacker was working for him—”

“Or was connected to the people whose information Ivory accessed further along the trail,” Kael said. “The collector was the entry point but Ivory went deeper than him. There are people higher up in whatever this structure is who have more significant reasons.”

“And none of them,” Nina said, “went after the pack. None of them went after you, or me, or any of the other pack members. They went after her.”

“Because she built the pack’s defenses specifically to be impenetrable without pack invitation,” I said. “I heard her mention the modified plants. The measures she put around the grounds.”

“She spent months after the amnesia quietly upgrading every security measure she could touch, especially during that period that the ghost council came and she was temporary deaf while battling with a wild plant she created” Nina said. “I thought it was the aftermath of the head injury at the ceremony. Being more careful about personal safety after a violent attack.” She paused. “It wasn’t. It was her knowing she had a hunter and making sure the hunter couldn’t get into the pack territory to come after her. And she might have not had the memories, but probably had documented it down somewhere in her personal journals, that still told her what to do, even without her memories being the context for eight months.”

“She built a fortress around everyone else,” Kael said. “To keep her problem from becoming their problem.”

“Yes,” Nina said.

“So the woman last night,” I said. “She couldn’t get into the pack territory. She’d been trying to find Ivory outside it for eight months now and possibly ten months before I even got here. And when Ivory went to the training slope”

“Outside the main territory boundary,” Nina said. “Just past it. The slope is pack adjacent but not formally within the primary perimeter markers.”

“Ivory went outside the main perimeter with a trainee,” Kael said.

“With a trainee who turned out to be somewhat more capable than expected,” Nina said.

“With a trainee,” he said. The two words carried something. “She knew the risk. She knew someone was hunting her. She knew the slope was past the primary perimeter. And she went anyway.”

“Because the training required it,” I said. “The traps were on the slope. She needed the terrain.” I paused. “And because she’d been managing the hunt for eighteen months and had built enough defenses that she’d calculated the risk as acceptable.”

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“Her calculation was wrong,” he said.

“Her calculation got the attacker through the traps,” I said. “Her calculation put the crossbows on the slope and told her which path to run down when the time came.” I looked at him. “Her calculation was the reason we got out.”

He was quiet.

“She’s not reckless,” I said. “She planned for the contingency. She just planned for it alone and didn’t tell anyone it existed.”

“That’s the problem,” he said. “Not the planning. The alone.”

“Yes,” I said.

Nina looked between us with the expression of someone who was doing multiple assessments simultaneously. “The attacker said the curse’s root is intact,” she said. “That breaking the bond open didn’t destroy the construction.”

“Yes,” Kael said.

“Ivory confirmed it,” Nina said. “The root is dormant. The deterioration stopped but the root is still in the construction.” She looked at Kael.

“Do you feel it?”

“No,” he said. “Nothing. No deterioration, no progression, no indication that anything is active.” He paused. “But the wolf-”