“Before we begin,” Hyran said, looking up from his desk and fixing Serena with the level gaze of a mage whose patience for near-death experiences had been exhausted several missions ago, “let’s establish some ground rules for this retrieval.”

Serena looked at him.

“Rule one. We are going to attempt, with whatever collective discipline this group can muster, to complete an artifact retrieval without any member of this team being stabbed, impaled, speared, or penetrated by any object that is sharper than a dinner knife.”

“That seems reasonable,” Serena said.

“It seemed reasonable last time too, and you were stabbed. In a lake. With spikes. While I watched.” Hyran’s voice carried the specific irritation of a man whose protégé kept almost dying in bodies of water. “I am done watching you get stabbed, Serena and I am done with lakes entirely. If this artifact is near a lake, I am vetoing the lake.”

“Didn’t the ancestors say there would be another lake?” Serena asked. It was rhetorical because the answer was yes.

Aeron cleared his throat. “I would like to second the no-stabbing rule and extend it to include all edged weapons, projectiles, and environmental hazards including but not limited to collapsing structures, dark magic traps, and ancient defense mechanisms triggered by someone touching something they were explicitly told to leave alone.”

He looked at Serena when he said the last part.

“I only touched it once,” Serena said.

“You touched a warded artifact in a sealed chamber that had been locked for three centuries and the touching activated a defense system that nearly killed four people.”

“But it didn’t.”

“’But it didn’t’ is the battle cry of a woman whose survival strategy is retroactive luck, and retroactive luck is a finite resource, Serena.” Aeron’s voice was steady but his eyes were carrying the specific exasperation of a Beta who had been assigned to protect a woman whose self-preservation instincts operated on a delay.

Dex and Fin reacted identically. Both jaws locked. Both sets of eyes went flat. Both men received Aeron’s recap of Serena’s near-death history through the filter of Alphas whose mates had been referenced in proximity to the word “died” and whose response to that proximity was a synchronized shutdown of all facial expression that communicated “we are listening and we are memorizing and the memorizing is producing a list of safety protocols that will be enforced unilaterally.”

Neither of them found it funny. The identical not-finding-it-funny was becoming a trademark.

Hyran was about to continue when the study door opened.

Gavriel Sterling walked in.

“Sorry I’m late.”

Serena’s body stiffened.

The stiffening was automatic. Involuntary. A full-system response that started in her spine and spread outward to her shoulders and her hands and her jaw, her entire body going rigid for one half-second before she caught it and forced it back down with a breath that was too controlled to be casual.

She looked away. Fast. Her eyes found the far wall and stayed there. The staying was deliberate, fixed, the gaze of a woman who was choosing a wall over a man and whose choosing was a decision being made in real time and whose real time was producing a knot in her chest that the necklace was dampening but could never fully mute.

Surely this was the necklace. Aftereffects. Residual weirdness from dark magic jewelry that had been pressed against her skin for hours and whose pressing had rearranged her sensory architecture. The stiffening was a malfunction. The scent recognition on the training field had been a malfunction. The wolf saying “three” had been a malfunction.

Malfunctions. All of it. She was selecting that explanation. She was bolting it to the floor of her mind with industrial hardware and the hardware was holding and the holding was going to continue for the duration of this mission because she refused, categorically, without negotiation, to add another problem to this team. That would be a problem. She was already a problem. Her shifting was a problem. Her necklace was a problem. Her matebonds were a problem.

Adding a third one would be. No. She was stopping the sentence before the sentence completed itself.

Gavriel halted mid-step. Something hit him, subtle, fast, the scent or the proximity or the specific frequency of being in a room with her while both of their bodies were carrying information neither of them had agreed to carry. His jaw shifted. He shook his head. Once. Twice. The reset. The override. Brain grabbing body by the collar and dragging it to the present.

He placed the scroll on Hyran’s desk. The Scrolls of the First Accord. His to carry. His to produce. The parchment unrolled with the quiet weight of an artifact that predated every person in this room and whose predating was the reason they were all here.

“Ready when you are,” he said. His voice was steady. Casual. The Gavriel Sterling factory setting of easy composure, delivered without a crack.

Hyran looked at him. The looking was the looking of a mage whose diagnostic instincts were engaged and whose engagement was producing questions he was choosing to ask rather than shelve.

“Alaric approved this?”

“Yes.”

“He did not,” Hyran snapped. The snapping was immediate, reflexive, the response of a man who had collaborated with Alaric Kestrel for years and whose collaboration had produced a fluency in Alaric’s decision-making process and whose fluency was telling him that Alaric would sooner approve a bridge made of wet paper than clear Gavriel Sterling for field operations one day after a coma.

“I’m a big boy, Hyran. I can make my own choices. Relax.”

“’Relax’ is what people say before they do something monumentally stupid, and I have heard it from you specifically four times, and all four times produced outcomes that required my intervention.” Hyran’s eyes were sharp. “You were in a coma. Yesterday. The coma lasted days. You woke up with an energy signature that Alaric flagged as anomalous and I flagged as concerning. ’Relax’ is the last word I intend to apply to this situation.”