Chapter 208 The Husband, The Wife, and the Unfortunate Woman
POV: Callum | The Feral Den, war room
Two hours.
Isolde's message arrives through a chain of three people and it is eleven words and it is the most important eleven words I have received in three years and I stand in the war room with Tom and Isla and Cormac and Dante and I read it aloud once and then I put it on the table and I look at the people around it.
Dante has been in London for three days and he has the quality of someone who has compressed three days of context into the focused operational understanding of a trained hunter, which is to say he is already thinking about this in the same terms the rest of us are thinking about it, which is as a problem with a solution we have not yet found.
"Parliament building," I say. "Execution at noon. Two-hour delay gives us until two o'clock. What do we know about the building?"
Tom has been building the file for six hours. He puts it on the table beside the message. "Three entrances. Main, service, and the underground access which Mordaunt had sealed after the Silas incident. Sealed does not mean impassable. The main entrance has six guards on execution days. Service has two. Underground has the seal, which is magical, which means fae can bypass it."
"The fae won't help," Dante says. "Valentina told me."
"They won't help officially," Tom says. He says it with the specific distinction of someone who has learned that unofficial help and official help are different resources. "I have one contact who is not bound by the community decision. She will open the underground seal. One time. That's all she will do."
"One contact, one opening," Cormac says. "How many people does that get inside?"
"As many as move fast enough," Tom says.
Isla has been quiet at the end of the table with the expression that means she is working through something, the specific focused quality she has when she is building a plan rather than receiving one. "I'll create the distraction," she says. "Main entrance. Medical emergency, supernatural health crisis, I know the language that makes Parliament officials move, they have requirements about being seen to respond to community health situations." She looks at me. "It gives you the service entrance gap. Two guards instead of six while they're managing the front."
"Isla," I say.
"It's not suicide," she says. "It's a distraction. I am a community healer with documented work at the shelter. I have standing to be at that building. Nobody's going to hurt me for presenting a medical concern."
"Valentina wouldn't want you risking yourself," I say.
"Valentina," Isla says, and she says it with the specific quality she says things when she has made a decision that she is not asking for approval on, "would absolutely want me doing exactly this. We do not leave pack behind. That is the rule. We made that rule together."
I look at her and I think about three years and the specific weight of people who have been beside you for all of them.
"Callum," Valentina's voice in my memory, from last night: "Don't throw your lives away for me."
"We don't leave pack behind," I say. "Never."
Tom arrives as I am assigning positions, which is what Tom does, he arrives at the moment the plan needs the next piece. He is moving with the specific quality he moves with when something has changed the situation and he needs to tell me before the situation gets worse.
"Fae won't help," he says. "Not even the unofficial contact. I had the conversation twenty minutes ago. The community decision is final and she's been warned specifically that any individual assistance will be treated as a breach." He sets his phone down. "The underground seal stays sealed."
Two hours. One entrance with six guards reduced to four by Isla's distraction. No underground access. Thirty minutes from the Den to Parliament by the fastest route.
I look at the table. I look at the map of the Parliament building and the eleven words and the two hours and I look at the people who are looking at me.
"We find a way," I say. "That is not a strategy yet. It becomes one in the next thirty minutes."