Chapter 44 45

Chapter 44 45
Sera's POV

The bond snapped like a whip across his chest.

Damon was in the war room when it hit him. Not pain exactly. Worse than pain. The specific terror that was not his own flooding through a channel that had no off switch, no distance, no mercy, and he was moving before his mind caught up with his body, knocking the chair back, Percy saying something behind him that he did not hear.

He ran.

The east wing corridor was empty when it should not have been. That was the first wrong thing. Two guards on Sera's door every night since Rael. Every night without exception. He had made that order himself and he had confirmed it himself and now the corridor was empty and the air smelled like smoke.

Not the soft wood smoke of the hearths.

The other kind.

He turned the corner and the smoke hit him like a wall and through it he could see the orange line under the door, the door itself, and Percy behind him now making a sound that Percy almost never made.

He hit the door with his shoulder.

It did not move.

Barred. From the outside. The bar dropped into the iron brackets, the same brackets that were there for siege, for war, for the kind of threat that came from outside and not from inside and someone had used them for this.

He thought of nothing.

He took three steps back and drove his boot into the wood just below the bar bracket and the frame splintered and he did it again and again and on the fourth kick the bracket tore out of the wall entirely, iron and plaster and dust, and the door swung open and the smoke came out like a living thing.

He went in.

The room was not fully burning yet. The curtains on the far wall were gone. The rug near the window was black and eating itself. The heat was the kind that pressed against your face and made your eyes water before you even registered it consciously. He dropped low the way you had to, the way the air was better down there, not good, not safe, but better.

Sera was on the floor.

She had not made it to the door. She was on her side near the bed, one hand stretched toward the door she could not have known was barred, and she was conscious, barely, her eyes open and tracking him when he came through the smoke, and her other hand was pressed against her stomach the way it had been every night for weeks now.

Protecting the thing that was not yet here.

He got his arms under her.

"I have you," he said. "I have you."

She made a sound that was not words.

"I know," he said. "I know. Stay with me."

He got her up and moved back through the room the way he had come, low, fast, not running because he could not run with her and stay low at the same time and the smoke was the thing that killed you, not the flame, not yet, and he got through the door and into the corridor and kept moving until they were twenty feet from the door and then he went down onto his knees on the stone floor and held her against him and her chest was working, laboring, the cough starting now that the cleaner air was reaching her lungs.

"Sera," he said.

"Yes," she managed. Just the one word. Scraped raw.

"The baby," he said.

She moved her hand. Still there. Still pressed flat against herself.

"Still," she said. Another cough. "Still here."

Percy was there. And Rendal behind him. And two of the night guards who had apparently been somewhere they should not have been and were now looking at the smoke pouring from the open door with the particular expression of men who understood they were going to have to account for where they had been.

"Get Mira," Damon said. "Get her now."

Percy went.

Damon looked at the two guards.

"Where were you," he said.

The older one, Fenton, held his ground but barely. "Orders came down, my lord. Rotation change. We were told the wing was being covered by the inner patrol."

"What orders," Damon said. "From who."

Fenton looked at the other guard.

"Written orders," Fenton said. "Delivered by one of the hall runners. Signed and sealed. We thought—"

"Bring me the order," Damon said.

Fenton moved.

Damon looked down at Sera.

Her color was wrong. The grey-blue around her mouth that he did not like. But she was breathing and her hand was still flat against her stomach and she was looking at him with eyes that were exhausted and furious in equal measure, which meant she was still herself.

"Lena," she said.

"Maybe," he said.

She looked at him.

"Maybe," she said again. Not a question. Hearing the thing under the word.

"The door was barred from outside," he said quietly. "The bar does not drop itself. And there were two guards on this corridor and they had written orders, sealed orders, pulling them off the wing." He held her gaze. "Lena does not write orders that guards obey."

She was quiet for a moment. The cough came again and he held her through it.

"Someone above her," she said.

"Someone above her," he said.

Mira came around the corner at something close to a run, which Damon had never seen, and Percy behind her, and Mira went straight to the floor beside Sera without a word and put her hands on her face and her throat and then flat against her stomach and her expression was the professional one, the unreadable one, but her hands were careful in a way that Damon watched very closely.

"The child," he said.

"Is stubborn," Mira said. "Like its mother." She looked at Sera. "You are going to drink the bitter one and you are not going to argue with me."

"I am not arguing," Sera said, and coughed again.

"Good," Mira said.

Damon stood up slowly.

Rendal was at his shoulder.

"The room," Damon said quietly. "Before anyone else goes in or touches anything."

Rendal nodded. "Already."

"The bell rope," Damon said. "Check if it was cut."

Rendal looked at him. Something moved through his expression. "I will check."

"And the guard rotation records," Damon said. "Every order delivered tonight, written or otherwise. I want to know what was moved and when and what it was moved away from."

Rendal went.

Damon stood in the corridor and looked at his mate on the floor with Mira's hands on her and the smoke still rolling lazily from the room behind him and felt the cold settle into the place where the terror had been. Not the hot kind of anger. The other kind. The kind that did not burn out.

He had been reacting.

Every time. Voss. Lena. The gate. The ceremony. Each thing as it came, each fire put out as it started, each knife caught after it was already in the air.

Someone had been moving pieces and he had been responding to the pieces and never to the hand.

That ended tonight.

Fenton came back down the corridor with a folded paper. He held it out. Damon took it and opened it.

The orders were clean. Formal language, specific detail, the kind of specificity that came from someone who knew how the guard rotation actually worked. And at the bottom the seal pressed into dark wax.

He looked at it.

Looked at it for a long time.

Percy had come to stand beside him and Percy was looking at it too and Percy's face was doing the new thing again, the worse thing.

The seal was not Lena's.

It was not Voss's mark. Not Sabine's. Not any of the council signatures he had been cross-referencing for weeks.

It was older than all of them.

The royal seal. The one that predated his rule, that had been locked in the vault since his father's time, that could only be carried and used by the King's blood.

His blood.

Damon had not written this order.

He stood very still.

There was one other man alive who carried that blood. One man he had not looked at. Had not looked at because looking had felt like a door he could not come back through once he opened it.

He handed the paper to Percy.

Percy took it.

Read it.

Said nothing for a long moment.

Then, very quietly: "Damon."

"I know," Damon said.

Percy looked at him.

"Garrick," Damon said.

The name sat in the smoke-thickened air of the corridor and did not move.

And somewhere in the fortress, in whatever room he was sleeping in, whatever face he was wearing, the man who shared his father's blood and had used that fact to sign an order that was supposed to kill a mother and her unborn child was still breathing.

For now.