Chapter 201 A Maiden's Love
POV: Valentina | Clerkenwell, the approach
Three months ago I would have told you I was not capable of this.
Not the raid, not the fighting, not the violence, all of which I have been capable of for long enough that capability is not the right word for it anymore, it has moved past capability into the territory of second nature, the thing you do without consulting yourself about whether you can. What I would not have said I was capable of three months ago is this, which is standing in a street in Clerkenwell in the dark with the specific quality of someone who is about to go through a door to get something that is not yet a person and which is more important to me than anything I have protected before.
I have been running toward danger my whole life and I have done it because running toward danger was the right strategic choice or because it was the only available option or because I was being paid to do it or because I owed someone a debt, and each of those reasons is real and each of them is different from this, which is that Lucia is my daughter and she is in that building and nobody is going to stop me from reaching her.
I did not expect to become a mother. I did not plan for it and I did not want it and I did not understand what it meant until the months of hunting made it impossible not to understand, because hunting for something changes your relationship with it, and three months of Fell always three steps ahead and the notes on abandoned lab tables and Violette's documents confirming a viable heartbeat in a preservation chamber built a thing in me that I do not have better language for than the word mother, which I have been avoiding and which is simply accurate.
I have changed. Callum told me once, early in the running dhampir days, that I had the quality of someone who had decided nothing was going to touch her, which was not the same as being untouchable but was a reasonable approximation of it. I do not have that quality anymore. Something touched me. Something small and not yet born and currently in a basement in Clerkenwell, and the fact that it touched me is not a vulnerability, it is a different kind of armor, which is the armor of having something to move toward rather than only something to move away from.
The coalition assembles at midnight. Parliament vampires at the eastern perimeter. Rookeries wolves at the south and west. Fae through the underground access points Tom identified. Cormac leading the ground team through the main entrance with six of the Rookeries' best, Ash's layout intelligence mapped onto every hand-held plan.
I am at the front of it. This is not strategy, this is the only position I am capable of occupying tonight.
Callum is beside me. He has been beside me for the better part of a year in ways that are different from the early months, when beside me was a tactical position, and which have become something else over time, something I have also not been looking at directly and which is simply true the way things are simply true when you have stopped managing your distance from them.
"Ready?" he says.
"I have been ready for three months," I say.
The building is dark. The power fluctuation is due in twelve minutes, based on the interval pattern Ash mapped. The preservation room door will disengage.
"That's my daughter," I say. "Nobody stops me."
Callum looks at me. He looks at the building. He looks back at me with the expression that means something has been decided, settled, the door-closing quality of a thing that was in motion arriving at its position.
"Our daughter," he says. "Nobody stops us."
Twelve minutes. The power fluctuates. The door releases.
The walls come down.
Inside, Fell is at his workstation, alone, the Grandmaster gone, the Order gone, everything gone except the hum of the preservation chamber and the three months that stand between this moment and the only thing he has left to believe in.
Valentina reaches the basement door.
The mysteries of London had led them here. To this moment. Where everything could be lost or won. The Fallen World had tested them. The revelations would transform them. And whatever came next would define them.