Chapter 205 The Bride and Bridegroom
POV: Callum | The Feral Den, then private
She tells me at midnight, which is when she comes back from wherever she has been processing it, and I know before she speaks because I know the quality of her face when she has been carrying something for hours and has decided to put it down, which is the face she had when she told me about the embryo and the face she had when she told me Fell had threatened to destroy it, and which she has now, standing in the doorway of the room I use when the Den is too crowded to think in.
"Parliament called an emergency session," she says. "Execution order. Me. Tomorrow."
I hear the words and I hear them correctly and for a moment the room has the specific quality of a place where something large has just arrived and which has not yet been fully processed by the people in it.
"We run," I say. "Tonight. Take everyone we need to take, leave London, find somewhere the Parliament's jurisdiction doesn't reach."
"Lucia is still here," she says.
"Lucia is three months from birth and Fell has her in a facility we know the location of. We can come back for her."
"Running means they win," she says, and she says it with the flatness of someone who has already worked through this argument and arrived at the end of it. "Mordaunt calls the session and we run and he tells the Covenant when they arrive that the resistance fled at the first sign of legal authority, that they were never a real governing force, that London needs external management because its supernatural community cannot maintain order." She looks at me. "We have been fighting for three years so that London governs itself. I am not giving that up because the law has been pointed at me."
I know she is right. I know it in the specific way I know things that I do not want to be true, the knowledge that sits in the chest rather than the head and which the head cannot argue away no matter how many arguments it constructs.
"Twenty-four hours," I say. "We have twenty-four hours before Parliament acts. That is enough time."
"For what?"
"To find a way through this," I say. "I am not sitting here accepting it. I am not planning a rescue or a run. I am telling you I am going to find a way through it and I need the twenty-four hours to do it."
She looks at me with the expression that means she is deciding how much to let herself believe what I am saying.
"We have never done this the easy way," she says.
"No," I agree. "But we have done it. Every time."
We are quiet for a moment with the weight of the twenty-four hours and everything in them.
"Our relationship," I say. "We have never made it anything formal. Always fighting, always moving, always the next thing." I look at her directly. "If we survive this, marry me. Properly. Whatever that means for people like us."
She looks at me for a long moment in the specific way she looks at things she is deciding whether to let herself want.
"When we survive this," she says. "Yes."
The night has the quality that nights have when they might be the last of something, the specific attention you pay to things when you understand they are not guaranteed to continue. We sit with that and with each other and with the twenty-four hours, and I spend the part of the night she is asleep going through everything I know and everything Tom knows and everything Jack knows and everything Isolde suggested, looking for the way through.
In the morning, Parliament guards arrive at the Den's front door.
"Valentina Corvino. You're summoned for trial. Today."