Chapter 553

ARIA

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I made it,” she said, without turning around “Second year of the curse. After I removed the one from myself. I needed to be able to do it again if it came to that.” She continued the organizing. “The channeling took three months. I had to do it in pieces because channeling moon-metal requires bloodline-adjacent energy and mine is adjacent rather than direct, so the intervals-”

“You made a weapon,” Kael said.

“I made a tool,” she said.

“Ivory.”

She turned around.

“It was the second curse year,” she said. “I’d just extracted a parasite from my own body with a regular knife that was nowhere near adequate for the job, and I’d survived it, and I needed to make sure that if it happened again to me or to anyone else in this pack I could actually do the job correctly.” She held his gaze. “So yes. I made a weapon. That is what the second year was.”

Kael was quiet.

“You didn’t tell us,” Jordan said.

“I told you what you needed to know,” she said. “The knife existed and lived in the locked cabinet. If I’d needed you to know more, I’d have told you more.”

“You removed a parasite from your own body,” Nina said.

“Yes,” Ivory said.

“Alone,” Nina said.

“The relevant people were unavailable,” Ivory said.

“And then you made a weapon,” Nina said.

“A tool,” Ivory said.

“Ivory,” Nina said.

7

–

the full “It was the second year,” Ivory said again, and the words had the specific weight of that period weight, the weight that they’d all been carrying for years and that Ivory had been carrying in particular. alone, in ways they still didn’t have complete access to. “I did what the second year required. That’s all.”

The clinic was quiet.

Killian, on the floor, said: “I would very much like to not be on the floor.”

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“You can be moved to the recovery table,” Ivory said. “Carefully.”

“Kael,” Killian said, with the specific tone of someone requesting assistance from a person they were still calibrating their relationship with.

Kael looked at him on the floor. At the stisches. At the marks on Ivory’s throat that he’d made with hands that hadn’t been his.

He went to Killian.

He got him up.

Not with resentment

–

with the specific efficiency of someone doing a thing that needed to be done and doing it properly. He got Killian to the recovery table with Jordan help and made sure he was positioned correctly and then stepped back.

Killian looked at him.

“Thank you,” Killian said.

“Don’t thank me yet,” Kael said.

“For the wall,” Killian said. “When I came in. You came in and you went for her first.” He paused. “You always went for her first.”

“Yes,” Kael said.

“That’s what you do,” Killian said.

“Yes,” Kael said.

“I understand now,” Killian said, and the words carried something I didn’t have full access to, something between the two of them that was older than the room.

“He’s going to be fine,” Ivory said, without being asked. “He’ll need rest and the wound will take tune to heal properly, but the death eater is out and the instructions are gone with it.” She tied off the last stitch. “Someone needs to stay with him.”

“I’ll stay,” Jordan said, without hesitation.

He said it with the specific tone of someone who had decided that remaining in this room was preferable to whatever was about to happen next, and i understood quickly because the expression on Ivory’s face was one i had never actually seen before.

She was furious.

Not the managed version. Not the clinical version. The version that came from somewhere below all of that, the version that had been building since approximately the moment she’d understood that Killian had been implanted and Vela had done it, and that the clinic – the space she’d built for healing, the space that had protocols and structure and was supposed to be a place where people could be safe – had been used as the delivery mechanism for an assassination attempt on someone she–

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I watched Ivory pick up the dagger.

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Ivory picking up the dagger and walking out of the clinic, with a destination in mind, sent alarm bells ringing in my head.

Kael followed her immediately.

I followed Kael. Nina fell into step beside me

The guards at the dungeon entrance saw Ivory coming and their expressions went through a journey that I would have catalogued differently on a different day. The gate was unlocked before she reached it. The man on the left said something under his breath that I didn’t catch but whose meaning was clear from his face.

Vela’s cell.

Ivory didn’t announce herself. Didn’t give the specific beat that interrogators gave before they began, the moment of orientation that established the power dynamic. Vela stood up from the floor, started to say something.

“Well well, well, coming to pay me a visit, it seems killian did not even the job–”

The dagger went into her stomach before the taunt finished.

Vela gasped. Her hands went to Ivory’s, not fighting – past that, the body’s instinctive reaching toward the person who’d done the thing, the involuntary seeking of the wound’s source.

“Why don’t you give them a message from me,” Ivory said. Her voice was very quiet. The clinical layer was still there and underneath it was something much older and much colder and it had nothing clinical in it at all. “I’ll hunt every one of you down. I didn’t kill you before because I needed a moon child and any of you could have worked for breaking the curse. I got one. I don’t need to keep you alive anymore.”

Vela was going.

I felt it – something dying in the specific way that something died when it was connected to a larger thing, and the connection carried the signal of the dying outward. Silver went very still.

“She’s connected to her coven,* Silver said.

“I know, I said.

“They felt that, Silver said.

“How will they know she’s dead,” Kael asked. His voice was even. Not approving, not disapproving attending.

“They’ll know,” Ivory said. “They’re connected. Aria won’t feel it – different coven – but when one dies, the network feels it.” She turned.

Alaric Vesper’s cell was two doors down. The man who’d lost three fingers to Ivory during a confrontation that had appeared in the files as a single sentence and had clearly been rather more than a single sentence Kael had taken a hand from him more recently, after the kidnapping of Ivory and Kael had decided in incentive was enough to make Vesper crow like a canary and give him the information he needed. He was

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still healing. The sight of Ivory crossing toward his cell produced, in Alaric Vesper, the response of a man who’d been through enough encounters with Ivory to have accumulated a very specific and very personal understanding of what she was capable of.

He was crawling backward before she’d unlocked the cell.

The dagger found him too.

“Tell them game on,” Ivory said. “They want a wax I’ll give them one.”

*Ivory has a dagger that can kill us,* Silver said.

*I know,* I said.

*Let’s try not to piss her off.* Silver’s voice had the quality of something sincere. *I doubt we can hold our own against a human who’s been going toe to toe with our kind for years and kept surviving out of sheer pettiness. She built a bunker that can kill us. She has a dagger that turns us to ash. She trained us on the

rauma from other moon children. Let’s just – let’s be reasonable.*

Noted, I said.