Chapter 28 HE’S COMING FOR HER
Professor Maren was already packing when I got there. She wasn’t panicking. she wasn’t the type. She was just moving, pulling files from her desk drawers and stacking them with the kind of focused quiet that told me she already knew everything I had come to tell her. I stood in the doorway for a second just watching her and something cold settled in my stomach.
“Vianney told you,” she said without looking up.
“Yes.”
“Close the door.”
I did.
She kept moving folders, documents, a small locked box from the bottom drawer that she tucked under her arm without explaining what was in it. The practice room felt different with her moving through it like this. Smaller and more urgent like the walls had shifted inward while I wasn’t looking.
“How long have you known?” I asked.
“Dara sent word an hour ago.” She finally stopped and looked at me properly. “He contacted two members of the faculty administration last night. Old connections, people who owe him. He’s building a misconduct case against me. Inappropriate involvement in student personal matters beyond my instructional role.”
I stared at her. “That’s what he’s calling it.”
“It’s smart,” she said simply. “He doesn’t need to prove anything specific, just enough doubt to trigger a formal review. And once the review is open I’m suspended from all faculty activity until it concludes.” She looked at me directly. “No more sessions, no more practice room, no more involvement.”
The room was very quiet.
“How long does he have?” I asked.
“If he files the complaint today which I think he already has, the review board convenes in forty eight hours.” A pause. “Two days, Ariana.”
Two days before Professor Maren was out of the picture.
Six days before my father arrived.
I didn’t say anything for a moment. Just stood there doing the math and not loving the result.
“Where will you go?” I asked.
“Nowhere.” She said it like the question was slightly insulting and I almost smiled despite everything. “I’m restructuring how the network communicates so my suspension doesn’t break anything. And I’m making sure you have everything you need before the review board sits.” She pulled open the bottom desk drawer and took out a sealed envelope and held it across to me.
I took it.
“Don’t open it until you need to,” she said. “You’ll know when. Inside is Sylvia’s direct contact, the emergency communication protocol, Dara’s location, and she paused, just briefly “a letter from your father. He wrote it three weeks ago when Dorian first told him you were here. He asked me to give it to you when the time felt right.”
I looked down at the envelope.
My name on the front in a handwriting I had never seen and somehow knew immediately.
My throat moved.
“Go to class,” Professor Maren said. Her voice was quieter now. “Be normal, be vidible and give him absolutely nothing to read in your face or your behavior.” She looked at me steadily. “Six days, that’s all.”
I put the envelope inside my coat.
“Thank you for everything, from the very beginning.” I said.
She looked at me for a moment.
“Get through this first,” she said. “Then thank me.”
I went.
Being normal was almost impossible.
I sat through Combat Theory copying notes about formations I couldn’t have repeated two minutes later. I ate lunch with Ivana and responded to things she said and asked questions in the right places and the whole time there was this low hum underneath everything. The envelope inside my coat, my father’s handwriting on the front of it, Maren packing her office two floors below me.
Ivana clocked it by the end of lunch.
She didn’t push, she just leaned over and said quietly “Later.”
“Later,” I said.
Sera caught me between afternoon classes. One look at my face and she said “Tonight at north courtyard by eight?”
“It’s fine.” I said.
I didn’t open the envelope until I got back to room 307 and confirmed Ivana was still at the library.
I sat on my bed and took it out from inside my coat.
Just my name. The letters slightly uneven like he’d had to stop and start again. Like his hand wasn’t entirely steady when he wrote it.
I opened it.
Three pages, both sides. Dense handwriting that got more uneven as it went. The handwriting of someone writing faster than they could think, trying to get everything down before something stopped them.
The first line
Ariana, I’ve tried to write this eleven times and failed every single one so I’m going to stop trying to get it right and just tell you the true things and hope that’s enough.
I stopped, read it again and kept going.
He wrote about the last night. The night before the disgrace, before everything collapsed. He had come into my room while I was sleeping, he said. Stood in the doorway just looking at me because something in him had known that what was coming was going to change everything and he had wanted to hold onto the image of me small and safe and asleep for as long as he could.
You were five years old and you were the most important thing in the world and I am so sorry I couldn’t protect you from what came after.
I put the letter down.
Picked it back up.
He wrote about the hiding. Not the where or the how, just what it felt like. The specific, particular grief of being alive and absent from your child’s life at the same time. The way he had counted the years in the things he was missing. First days of school he didn’t see. Birthdays marked alone in whatever room he was in that year. The specific torture of wondering what I looked like as I grew up and having no way to know.
Dorian has told me things about you over the years. Small things, I kept every single one the way other people keep photographs. I know that you are quiet in rooms and fierce underneath it. I know you carry your name without flinching even though the world has given you every reason to flinch. I know these things and I am so proud of you that it sits in my chest like something too big for the space it’s trying to occupy.
I was crying. Not the careful kind, the real kind. The kind that doesn’t ask permission, that just arrives. I sat on my bed with his letter in my hands and tears running down my face and I didn’t try to stop them or manage them or make them smaller than they were.
I just let it happen, I let it be as big as it actually was.
The last paragraph was short.
I know you are afraid. I know you have been carrying things alone that you should never have had to carry alone and I know that is because of choices that were made without your consent and at your expense. I will spend the rest of my life making that right if you’ll let me. But right now, hold on. Just a little longer. I am coming. I will be there.
I sat with those words for a long time.
The room was quiet around me. The evening light moving across the stone wall. The forest outside the cracked window doing its permanent thing. Present, indifferent, older than anything happening inside this building.
I pressed the letter flat against my chest with both hands and just breathed.
The door opened. Ivana came in, dropped her bag, turned around and stopped.
She looked at my face.
She didn’t say anything. She crossed the room and sat beside me on the bed and put her arm around my shoulders and I leaned into it and she held on and we stayed like that for a while without either of us speaking.
Eventually she said very quietly “Good or bad?”
I laughed, wet and broken but real.
“Good,” I said. “Really good.”
She squeezed once.
“Okay,” she said.
We sat there a while longer and I held the letter and the night settled in around Ironfang and five days sat on the clock and somewhere out there my father was moving through the dark toward me and that was enormous. It was just enormous and I was done trying to make it fit into something more manageable than that.
Then my phone buzzed.
It was a text from an unknown number,
Miss Von, We need to speak tonight, come alone.
I stared at it.
Then the initial at the bottom was V.
I was sure it wasn’t Vianney as she never signed herself V and the number wasn’t one I had for her.
I read it again and then it landed.
It was Voss.
Headmaster Voss was contacting me in secret.
At night.
Alone.