Chapter 139: Seam 1

BRADLEY

I still tasted copper and marrow on my lips. The Delicate’s blood had sprayed across my tongue when her skull ruptured, and now it sat there, thick and metallic, refusing to fade no matter how many times I swallowed. I shouted for the doors to be sealed, my voice cracking against the walls of the main hall, raw from the run and from screaming over the ringing still lodged in my ears.

"Nobody leaves. Nobody enters." I wiped my face with the back of my hand, smearing red across my knuckles. "Lock down every exit from this wing. Now."

Sentinels moved, boots striking marble as they secured the doors behind us, the same doors Madeline had blown clean off their hinges only minutes earlier, now dragged shut and braced with whatever heavy furniture they could find. Iron bolts slid home on the side entrances with a sound like bones snapping. I stood in the center of the hall, my chest heaving, my clothes soaked through with a dead woman’s blood, unable to shake the image of what I’d left behind in that private room. I hadn’t stayed to look at what remained of her. I hadn’t needed to. The sound alone would stay with me long enough.

Madeline stood beside me, her barrier dissolving into golden sparks that drifted toward the floor. She hadn’t flinched when the blood hit her shield. Her eyes tracked across the crowded hall now, cataloging faces, measuring breath rates, watching the trembling line of Omegas and healers who’d been caught in our path and pressed themselves against the far wall the moment we burst through.

"Whoever did it, they are definitely here," she murmured.

I turned to face the crowd. Twenty-three people, maybe more. Healers in white aprons stained with old medicines. Omegas in gray shifts. Three sentinels who’d been stationed along this corridor before the chaos had even found them.

All of them wide-eyed. All of them breathing too fast or too carefully slow.

"Line them up," I ordered.

The sentinels moved to corral the group, gentle but firm, guiding them into a single file that stretched the length of the hall. I walked it, my boots sticky, leaving red footprints on the tile behind me. I studied each face. I did recognize one. A healer named Cora. She was middle-aged, and her hands were shaking so badly she couldn’t clasp them together. It could not be her. So I kept looking. There was an Omega boy, fourteen perhaps, with his eyes fixed on the floor. There was another healer who looked even older than Cora, his jaw set in something closer to anger than fear.

Madeline started at the far end. She approached the first healer, a young woman with dark hair pulled back in a severe bun, and held up her palm. Golden light bloomed from her fingers, not the healing kind this time, but something sharper, more invasive, sweeping across the healer’s face, dipping into her pores, tasting her scent.

"Clean," Madeline announced.

The healer exhaled, her shoulders dropping.

I watched the process repeat itself again and again as Madeline moved with methodical precision, and no wasted motion, to the second healer. Then the third. Each time the golden light probed, searched, withdrew. Each time she declared them clean, and each time I felt the knot in my stomach tighten rather than loosen.

The killer was still among us. I could feel it in my bones, a vibration beneath the skin that had nothing to do with the explosion and everything to do with predator recognition. I’d spent plenty of years learning to read men who wore masks. Something in this hall still smelled very wrong, and it wasn’t the blood still drying on my own collar.

That had its own stink, copper and the sharp ammonia of released bladders. This was different. A sweetness underneath, like flowers left too long in standing water.

I reached the middle of the line. A sentinel stood there, young-looking, dark hair cropped close to the skull, eyes forward in proper military attention. He was in the standard uniform , and he had the silver pin of the northern guard on his collar. His hands rested loose at his sides, breathing steady.

Too steady.

Everyone else in that hall reeked of panic sweat. Their hearts hammered loud enough that I could pick out the chorus of them, rabbit-fast and frantic. This one’s pulse was slow and controlled.

They stayed fixed on a point above my shoulder, exactly where they should be, exactly where training dictated.

Exactly.

A good Sentinel was supposed to be a little psychotic. Paranoid enough to expect danger in an empty room, twitchy enough to hear a threat in silence. The others at least had a little ring to their hearts, the kind that told me they understood what they were standing in front of.

This one had nothing.

I almost laughed.

Not because they were calm. Because they were either the best-trained Sentinel I’d seen in years or completely insane, and for some reason, I found the distinction disturbing.

"Your name," I snapped.

The sentinel’s eyes flicked to mine. They were brown and ordinary. "Kaelen Voss, sir."

An unremarkable tenor voice, carrying a faint accent. Perfect diction and still no tremor in sight.

"What is your service date?" I pressed.

"I do not remember the exact day, but I was recruited in the spring of the third year of the late King’s reign, transferred to royal detail six months prior."

The answers came too smoothly. No hesitation. Most men stumbled reciting specifics under this kind of pressure, their minds scrambling for paperwork details while adrenaline scrambled their thoughts. This one recited like he was reading from a ledger he had memorized.

Madeline had drifted closer, three feet behind me now, her attention shifting fully away from the Omega she’d been checking. I felt her gaze land on the back of my neck like heat.

"Six months," I repeated, stepping closer to the sentinel, invading his space, close enough to smell him beneath the blood still clinging to my own clothes. "Do you know why there is a lockdown right now?"

"Some patient was killed... Judging by the blood spatter on you."

"Ahh... You are right. I am a bit concerned that you’ve been posted here for just six months, and you don’t flinch at the idea of that? The others seem to be."

The sentinel’s jaw tightened. Not much. It was a micromovement, barely there, but I’d spent decades cataloging exactly this kind of tell. "Training, sir. We’re taught to maintain position during crisis events."

"Crisis events." I circled him slowly, my boots squelching against the blood pooled thick on the tile, a slick lake that threw the overhead lights back at me in broken fragments. "Is that what we’re calling this? A crisis event?"

"Sir, I don’t know what else to call it."

I stopped in front of him again. His eyes tracked me the way protocol demanded, never dropping below my chin, never wandering toward the sealed corridor or the sentinels now flanking us or anything that might betray curiosity, fear, guilt.

"Where were you posted this morning?" I demanded.

"East corridor, the ground level. I was rotated to infirmary duty at noon."

"Who authorized the rotation?" In my mind, I wondered if it was Rourke.

"Captain Rourke, sir."

I filed the name away, already certain it would come back either half-true or entirely fabricated, the kind of detail chosen specifically because it was verifiable enough to sound safe and vague enough to survive a hurried check.

Madeline stepped up beside me, her hand hovering near the sentinel’s shoulder, not quite touching, golden light already gathering at her fingertips like something alive and waiting.

"May I?"

I nodded.

She extended her palm toward his face. The light reached out, thin, gilded tendrils that carried a scent of honey and ozone, and brushed against his cheek.

Nothing happened.

The light sank into his skin and simply vanished, absorbed the way water disappears into dry sand, leaving no trace of resistance, no flicker of anything hidden pushing back against it.

Madeline’s frown was small, but it was the first crack I’d seen in her composure since she’d stepped out of that car.

"Well?" I asked.

"He’s clean," she murmured, though something in her voice refused to fully commit to the word, like she was reporting a reading she didn’t entirely trust the instrument for.

I studied Kaelen Voss a moment longer. Clean didn’t mean innocent. It meant her magic hadn’t found what it was built to find, and I’d learned a long time ago that the things worth fearing most were rarely the things any single tool could catch on the first pass.

"Then we keep looking," I said as I stepped away from the dude. Madelina followed, and I could not help but ask, "You did not sound so sure back there."

She sighed before she spoke. "The spell reads him as part human and part wolf."

"So he is a halfling," I said.

"That could be it. But..."

"But what?"

"Some people are good with certain magic. I am a great user of healing magic. The same could be true of a shapeshifter wearing another face and body. An untalented person could leave a residue," Madeline said, keeping her voice low enough that it wouldn’t carry down the line. "A seam, if you know what to feel for. I can shapeshift too. But I would be figured out more easily. Just like most witches can heal themselves, but they will still need extra help."