Chapter 116 In Motion
ADRIANA
A sound burst out of me. A real laugh, full and open and completely uncontrollable, the kind that starts in your stomach and refuses to stay small. It echoed off the walls of my room and I couldn’t have stopped it if I’d tried.
“Let me know when you’re finished.”
I wasn’t finished yet. Not even close.
“Yara. Please.” I said in between heavy chuckles. “You cannot be serious. Go back where? To do what exactly? Stand up in front of people who spent years treating me like furniture and announce that I’ll be taking over now? Please. If you’re having me on, just say so.”
“Why would I be joking about something like this?” She actually sounded offended but I wasn’t falling for any of it.
“Because it’s completely absurd—”
“Nothing about this situation is absurd!” Her voice came sharp and sudden, and I went still immediately. “Why do you always do this? Every time I tell you something that matters, something that carries actual weight, you laugh it off like I’m performing for you. As though I’m here to entertain you between the moments you actually decide to pay attention. Do you understand how serious this is? Do you have any idea what is at stake right now?”
I opened my mouth.
“No.” Her voice cracked at the edges, and that more than anything made me close it again. “Don’t tell me you were just asking a question or that you didn’t mean it. I know you didn’t mean any harm, Adriana. I know that. But this isn’t the time for laughter and it isn’t the time for doubt. The world you’ve been hiding from is moving, and it is moving toward you, and I need you to meet that with something more than jokes.”
The silence that followed was heavy.
She was right. I knew she was right. It was easier to laugh than to let the thing land properly, and I’d been doing that for as long as I could remember. Laugh first. Feel it later, when no one is watching.
“Yara, I wasn’t dismissing you. I’m sorry. I hear you.”
Nothing. She had already gone quiet. Which meant she was done for now.
I didn’t push her. She’d come back when she was ready, and when she did, I’d listen properly. That was the least I could do.
I left my room and went to find Leo.
He was exactly where I’d expected him to be. Sitting in the middle of his bedroom floor with his toy train making careful loops around a little track he’d arranged with absolute precision. The second he looked up and saw me in the doorway he abandoned all of it, scrambling to his feet and running straight at me with full unguarded enthusiasm.
I caught him and held on tight, and something in me unknotted.
“Where were you?” He pulled back to look at my face with that serious expression he got when he’d been genuinely worried. “Dad said not to bother you this morning. Are you sick?”
“Not at all. I was just very tired and I needed extra sleep. My body was asking me nicely so I listened.” I tapped his nose. “But I’m here now and I’m completely fine.”
He seemed to assess the truth of this for a moment, then apparently decided he believed me, because he wriggled out of my arms and went straight back to his train, looking up at me with an expression that very clearly meant sit down and watch.
I sat.
My mind, however, was still back in that conversation.
Go back to your pack. Take the throne.
I turned the words over and over while Leo ran his train along the track and occasionally looked up to make sure I was still watching. I kept reaching for Yara quietly, testing the connection. Nothing. She was giving me silence, and I’d earned it.
But still, it was hard not to take what she had said as a joke.
THIRD PERSON POV
“Hey. Cover for me a few minutes, I think something I ate is disagreeing with me.”
The guard on the adjacent post barely looked up. “Fine. Go.”
Luke moved quickly once he was clear, keeping to the shadowed side of the courtyard where the afternoon sun cast everything long and dark. He’d been assigned to this property long enough to know its bones, which corridors were watched, which weren’t, which routes the senior guards considered too routine to bother with.
The stairwell at the top of the lower level was unguarded. The problem came at the bottom.
Four guards were positioned at the gate. Two facing outward toward the corridor, two facing inward toward the cells beyond. There were no gaps he could slip through unnoticed.
He didn’t try to slip through. He walked straight toward them.
“What do you want?” The nearest stepped forward, his hand already moving.
Luke didn’t answer. He held his position and let them come to him because that was the only way this worked, they needed to be close enough. Both outer guards closed the distance, confused by his stillness, irritated by what read to them as disrespect.
He raised his hands.
All four dropped at once, folding to the floor without a sound, pulled under by something deep and immediate that had no name in any language they would have recognized. Luke stepped over the nearest one, unclipped the keys from his belt, and pushed through the gate.
The Grandmaster had come to him the previous night with the full shape of the plan laid out clearly and without room for deviation. Luke had lain awake afterward turning it over, looking for the part where it fell apart. He hadn’t found one. That should have been comforting. It wasn’t.
He moved down the corridor at a steady pace, counting cells.
He was four past the gate when his senses snagged on something and he stopped walking.
He stood very still. Then stepped back one pace.
The cell to his left had no window. No light source of any kind. No sound came from inside. But something inside it was awake and aware, and whatever it was, it knew he was there. He could feel the attention pressing through the door like a hand on the other side of glass.
He opened the cell without speaking and kept moving.
The second cell was the one he’d been given coordinates for. He could see the occupant clearly now, half of their face in the shadow, their eyes already tracking him. They made full eye contact.
“What are you—”
Luke pressed a single finger to his lips then shook his head once.
Not here. Every second spent in this corridor was a second closer to someone noticing four unconscious guards and asking the wrong question.
The lock disengaged as he pulled the door open and stepped aside.
One glance back at the first cell he’d opened. Both pieces were in motion.
The first step was done.