Chapter 193 Twenty Minutes

Chapter 193 Twenty Minutes
Twenty minutes.

That is what is left when the office door shuts and the sound of the gallery dies behind it.

Rhydan does not speak.

He walks me backward until my hips hit Corvyn’s desk and his hands land on either side of me, caging me in without touching anywhere it can turn into comfort. His forehead drops to mine. His breath is hot. Uneven. The gold in his eyes keeps trying to rise and he keeps swallowing it down like it hurts.

Through the link, I get everything.

His rage at Rine... his rage at the clock... his rage at me for still being the girl who lied to him before the world tried to end.

And underneath all of it... a fear so pure it makes my knees go useless.

The piece of him inside my chest lunges toward his body hard enough that I gasp.

He feels it.

His mouth twists.

“Even now,” he whispers. “Even now you pull me.”

“I am not doing it on purpose.”

“I know.” His voice cracks anyway. “That is the worst part.”

Corvyn is at the window.

She has not looked at us yet. Her splinted wrist is locked to her ribs. The bruise at her eye is darker than it was in the entrance hall. In the glass, her reflection looks older than any headmistress should.

“They will not give us the full half hour,” she says.

Torren stands by the dead hearth, coat gone, pack black sharp on his shoulders. “Then stop spending seconds on manners.”

“I am spending them on keeping your son’s school from becoming a graveyard,” Corvyn answers.

A testing boom rolls up from the gates.

The silver basin on her desk jumps. Water spills across the maps in a dark rush. Somewhere below us, a student screams... high and brief... cut off like a hand covered their mouth.

Rhydan’s claws prick out against the wood beside my hips.

“Rhydan.”

“I can feel them.” His voice is a growl forced into words. “Cold... patient... looking for the soft place to target.”

I put my palm over his heart.

The fragment inside me answers his pulse with a hard answering throb, and for a second we are not two people in an office. We are one panicked animal in two bodies.

Corvyn turns from the window.

“Zael.”

“She wrote the book on ancestral containment.”

He is already there, half in shadow by the bookcase, as if he knew she would need the ugly truth sooner than later.

“If Rine steps onto school stone,” Zael continues quietly, “she will not throw a spectacle first. She will take the foundations into her hands and freeze every supernatural being in this academy. You will see. You will think. But you will not move. Then she will take everything she needs from every statue she will create and walk away.”

Petra swears.

Cassian’s face goes blank the way it goes blank before a fight he does not know if he can win.

Dara makes a small broken sound.

“Can we stop her before she steps in?” Torren asks.

“Outside, maybe,” Zael says. “Inside... once she roots into the ley-lines... you are already late.”

My mother’s ring burns.

I close my eyes and reach down to the supernatural being beyond the foundation.

Not carefully...

I reach down like a girl with eighteen minutes and no clean options left.

The static hits me so hard my stomach turns.

Alive... heavy... huge.

The static is not silence. It is not a wall. It is a pressure like a mountain leaning its whole forehead against the underside of the world and breathing through stone.

My eyes snap open on a choked breath.

Rhydan catches my face at once.

“What.”

“The ground,” I manage. “It is... full. Something is... pushing. Something is pushing harder... harder than before... like it is almost through.”

Corvyn goes still in a way that is worse than fear.

“The fracture?” she whispers.

Zael’s eyes lift to mine, sharp. “If the dragon has been working since the Great Hall...”

“Then pray it finishes before Rine does,” Petra finishes.

Seventeen minutes.

Another boom.

This one closer.

A ward-light in the corner of the office flares white, dies, flares again. Dust sifts from the ceiling beams. Through the link I feel Rhydan’s wolf slam against his skin from the inside, desperate to put teeth in something he can actually kill.

“Downstairs,” Torren orders. “Immediately. Elders, with me. Wolves on high walls, Cassian handle that. Students will stay behind stone. Coach Adler and the Professor will hold the courts. No one plays hero for applause.”

Bodies move.

Cassian first... Petra dragging Dara and Maren... Zael pausing only long enough to look at me... not with longing, but with warning.

“Third pass,” he says under his breath. “If she starts the cage, do not let her finish the third pass.”

Then he is gone.

Torren stops at the threshold and looks at his son.

At me.

At our joined hands and the unfinished thing rotting and burning between us at the same time.

“Whatever you do out there with Veyra,” Torren says, low, “you do it as truth... not as armor. Rine will smell a crack in a vow from fifty paces and put her whole hand in that crack.”

Rhydan’s throat works.

“I know what she is to me.”

Torren’s eyes soften by a fraction... then harden again.

“Then survive long enough to prove it.”

He leaves.

Corvyn comes to me, uninjured hand cradling my cheek for one brief second.

“I cannot hide you behind my coat this morning,” she says. “They will look for that.”

“Then we do not hide,” I whisper. “Stand with me.”

Her eyes shine once.

She goes.

Sixteen minutes.

The office is suddenly too big and too small at once.

Rhydan stares at me like the clock is inside his skull.

“I keep waiting for this night to stop taking,” he says.

“Me too.”

“I keep waiting to have one clean second with you that is not blood or betrayal or someone at the gates.”

He pauses and cups my face with both hands.

“And I am still so angry I could put my fist through the world.” His voice drops. “And I still cannot stop putting my body between you and it.”

My eyes burn.

“Then do not stop.”

He makes a sound that is almost a laugh and almost a sob and he kisses me like the minutes are teeth... hard, brief and shaking.

When he pulls back, forehead to mine, the fragment in my chest is no longer thrashing.

It is braced.

It is eady.

It is his.

“Together,” he says.

“Always.”

We step out and run the tower stairs.

The gallery is a held scream of house colors and pale faces and faculty with unfinished workings in their hands. Outside the open gates, dawn has begun to thin the dark into cold silver. Seven gray cloaks wait on the approach stones as if they grew there overnight.

Speaker Rine’s hood turns toward us the moment our boots hit the entrance hall.

She does not look hurried.

She looks amused.

Rhydan’s hand locks around mine in full view of the school, of the pack, of the Tradition, of every story that will be told about this morning by people who were not brave enough to stand where we are standing.

Under my feet, the pressure rises again... closer... heavier... a vast ancient patience finally running out of stone to break.

Twelve minutes.

Maybe less.

Rine takes one step forward on the approach and the ward-light over the gates flickers like a dying heartbeat.

Rhydan bares his teeth.

I lift my chin.

And the morning begins to open its mouth.