Chapter 370: Grand Theft Token Dictatorship

Ryker abandoned his mimosa mid-sip, which was how everyone knew the next sentence was going to hurt.

"The question isn’t whether she did it. The question is whether the Luminari believe she did it. Because the warrant exists regardless of the truth. The charge is real. The manhunt is active. And Marek just told us Lord Solandris is obligated to turn her in if he sees her."

The silence was unanimous, which was impressive, because this group hadn’t agreed on anything yet.

Little did they know, a dictator was about to take over and get shit done.

"He does not step foot in this keep without me knowing," she stated. "If he stops by, we keep her away from him. Problem solved."

She reached into the pocket of her coat and produced a velvet pouch with the casual showmanship of a magician whose trick was a takeover. Gold tokens clattered on the obsidian table.

Kael’s mouth opened.

"Credit to Kael for his tokens," Blair said, sliding one to every person at the table without looking at him. "Moving on."

Translation: I stole your shit, credited you for it, and now we’re past it, so shut the hell up and keep up.

Kael’s mouth closed. The look that crossed his face belonged to a man watching a woman commit grand-theft-token after she had already committed interior-design assault.

He may have invented the token system but Blair Drakencrest was about to perfect it. History would remember only one of them.

Ryker turned his token over. Looked at Nicholas. Nicholas looked at Damon. Damon looked at Brennan, who was holding his token up to a candle like a man inspecting a suspicious coin at a market.

"What are these for?" Griffin asked.

"You’ll see," Blair replied.

She looked at the table the way grandmasters look at amateurs: with patience that bordered on pity and strategy that bordered on cruelty. Then she slid one token to the center of the table.

The room went quiet, because the move was unmistakable. Every person who had ever sat through one of Kael’s briefings recognized the method: token in the center meant a bullet point in the conversation.

"Marek used the term kill switch and he used the term failsafe."

The words sat on the obsidian beside the token and every spine in the room straightened. Damon’s glass hovered at the exact midpoint between table and mouth, suspended in the no-man’s-land between casual drinking and oh-we’re-doing-this-now.

"That’s what I heard him say in the hall," Blair continued. "The reason why I bring this up is because ’failsafe’ is also the term Lux Nash used to describe the mechanism inside Maddox’s Mirrorlock that we did not want to trigger. The reason why we kept Guinevere away from him for a week. Failsafe is bad." She glanced up at the room. "Confirm?"

The confirm was a courtesy the way a firing squad asking if you’d like a blindfold was a courtesy. She knew the answer. They knew she knew. The whole damn circus was just her letting them feel like participants before she steamrolled the rest of the shit into place.

"Confirmed," Ryker, Kael, and Sterling said at the same time.

"Confirmed," Griffin echoed, two seconds behind them.

Every head turned to him. Griffin met the collective stare of the room with the quiet dignity of a golden retriever who just brought back the wrong stick and was expecting a gold star.

Blair placed a second token beside the first.

"So we’re all speaking the same language." She glanced at Damon and Nicholas. "The Mirrorlock is what Lux Nash described to have taken Maddox’s memories. Three weeks, gone. Matebond, blocked. While that was happening, Drakencrest was under siege. Maddox was missing. Guinevere and I took a throne room and freed four hundred hostages in dragon iron."

Blair delivered the number without emphasis because emphasis would imply she was impressed with herself, and Blair Drakencrest did not have time for self-congratulation when there was still a table to run.

Kael opened his mouth.

Blair held up one finger. The finger did more damage than any punch. His jaw locked mid-syllable, teeth clicking shut, the sound of a man being publicly leashed by a cunning, "credit-giving," woman who staged a coup on his entire operational identity.

"Kael, Nicholas, and Damon helped," she continued without pausing. "The man leading the siege wanted Guinevere. Mentioned a bounty. Thought Kael was also there collecting on it. Maddox was carried out unconscious and woke up with zero memory of his wife and a hostility toward her that none of us had ever seen from him. We identified two layers of dark magic woven into him. The first was designed to make him hate Guinevere. That signature was different from the Mirrorlock."

She placed a third token on the table.

"Two casters. Two goals. One target."

Nicholas had been silent since Blair started. His amber eyes tracked every token she placed with the focus of a king running a war on a different continent who was only now seeing the full map of the one that had been fought here. He had entered that throne room after she had been in there for at least fifteen minutes. He missed the first part. He also was separated from her for part of the night during that siege.

He knew Maddox lost his memory. He’d been in Drakencrest during the aftermath, had watched the Dragon King look at Guinevere like a stranger, had bandaged her hands and her neck and held her while she cried from the fallout. He knew dark magic was responsible. He’d been briefed on the basics.

But hearing it organized, laid out in sequence, connection to connection, the architecture became visible. Pieces he’d been carrying separately clicked into position behind his eyes. His jaw tightened. Wheels turning. The wolf king was recalculating, and recalculation from Nicholas Shadowfell looked like stillness, which made it easy to miss and dangerous to ignore.

"Can we rewind to the dark magic bit? The dark magic layered on top of it. The one that made him hate her. That isn’t related to the Mirrorlock."

Brennan spoke for the first time, and every head pivoted because Brennan speaking voluntarily in a room full of commanders was either a gift or a catastrophe, and the house always paid out in body bags or medals, never in the middle.

"I’ve seen that before," he continued. "When there’s a bounty on a target, but the target has a protective mate or person who would be a blocker, that kind of spell is cast as insurance. If the siege goes sideways, the mate turns hostile towards the target, and the target loses their biggest shield. Dark-market playbook. Ugly as hell, but done."

Kael stared at Brennan. Brennan stared at Kael.

"Oh right." Brennan gave a knowing nod. "I was the dark mage running that operation. I can confirm that I was not involved with any dark magic on the Dragon King." He lifted his head. "I have standards."