Chapter 371: Damn. Wait. How.

Kael looked at Brennan the way a man looks at his dog when it solves a puzzle that was supposed to be above its skill level. Damn. Wait. How. That’s suspicious. Now I’m a little offended.

"He’s correct." He turned his token between his fingers. "We came to that conclusion. One caster did a sloppy job with the first layer. Quick, blunt, designed to create immediate hostility. A second caster did something astronomically more complicated with the Mirrorlock. Different skill levels. Different objectives. The first was a hired hand. Amateur Hour. The second had motivation and was a professional."

Ryker gave a nod and slid a token into the pile.

"I’m not the magic guy. The Mirrorlock’s goal was to block their matebond. Solveil said he healed Guinevere and Maddox on Diplomat Row. Their matebond was unblocked. Twelve hours later their matebond was blocked again, except this time it wasn’t just Maddox. It was all—" He stopped mid-sentence, choosing his words carefully. "All the matebonds were blocked. Poof. Memories gone too. The whole point of a failsafe is that it triggers when the first plan failed."

Ryker set another token down flat, pressing it into the obsidian with his thumb.

Kael looked at Blair. Blair looked back. The siblings held the stare for two seconds, and the exchange carried the mutual understanding that whatever they were about to untangle was going to get worse before it got anywhere near better.

"That tracks," Kael said. "Maddox was receiving the symptoms from whatever was inside Guinevere’s mind so everyone assumed it was in Maddox. Logical assumption. Wrong assumption. It was inside her."

He placed his token in the center beside Blair’s.

"Which means whoever built this understood how a dragon matebond functions. The flame recognition. The sensory bridge. The instinct architecture. The dragon shift even. They knew how to sever every thread connecting a mated pair without killing either half." His eyes swept the table. "That’s a very short list of people on any continent. And most of them are dead."

Silence held the room like a closed fist as the words ’most of them are dead’ echoed in everyone’s minds. Comforting, really.

"So to summarize," Brennan said. "We’re looking for a dark caster who understands dragon matebonds, Failsafe and Mirrorlock architecture, AND had access to Maddox at the right time."

"Yes," Kael said.

"And this person is alive?"

The question hung there, and every person in the room felt the specific gravity of being hunted by someone they couldn’t identify, couldn’t locate, and couldn’t outthink, because outthinking requires understanding the opponent’s architecture, and this opponent had already proven they understood theirs first. The caster knew how dragon matebonds worked. Knew Mirrorlock construction. That wasn’t a criminal. That was an engineer who had been inside the machine, and the machine was Maddox, and the machine was Guinevere, and neither of them had ever felt the hands.

"Presumably alive," Kael replied.

More silence followed. The kind that suggested the comfort level in the room was somewhere between "spider you lost track of" and "the stove might still be on but your house is an hour away."

Blair slid another token into the center of the table.

"We hid that she was his mate because we had zero idea what would trigger the kill switch inside the Mirrorlock. The failsafe that would lobotomize his brain." She let the word lobotomize do its own heavy lifting. It did. "Night of the Gala, Maddox figured it out on his own. Marked her. Couldn’t feel a matebond after marking her, and has been marking her ever since like a toddler with zero impulse control."

"Blair," Ryker started.

"I said what I said." She didn’t look at him. "But that aside. That same night, we had a visitor and a letter. The next day, Guinevere starts seeing jester hallucinations. Coincidence?" She placed her finger on the token like she was pinning a butterfly to a board. "No. Marek Navarre."

Kael slid a token into the center beside hers. The motion was smooth, deliberate, the move of a man who’d been sitting on this thread like a loaded gun and finally got to fire it.

"Seconded. Jaxon and I went to Navarre about the letter. He pretended to have no idea what it said, but he was reading it. His eyes were tracking left to right. You don’t track left to right on a script you can’t read. Lord Solandris as well. The old bastard recognized something, even if he didn’t give us the full translation."

Brennan straightened in his corner. "Can I see the letter?"

"No," Kael replied immediately.

"Absolutely not. Tampering would affect the signature," Sterling agreed.

The Fourth and Third in command were having a rare moment of alignment. Both were using bureaucratic bullshit as the excuse. Their verdict lasted exactly as long as it took Nicholas Shadowfell to lean forward and vaporize it with four words.

"Let him see it."

Every head turned. Nicholas’s tone suggested he would be asking once and only once.

"Why would we hand classified Drakencrest intelligence to a mage who sieged this Keep a few weeks ago?" Sterling’s voice carried the temperature of a man whose security protocols had been personally insulted.

"Because that mage punched through Luminari wards that your mages couldn’t scratch," Nicholas replied without looking at Sterling. "He solved a feather portal anchor crisis, built a portal over an ocean, and has contributed intelligence to this conversation." His eyes stayed on Kael. "He’s more than proved himself. And this letter has to do with my mate."

The last two words landed in the war room like a stone dropped into still water.

My mate. Spoken out loud. In front of Blair. In front of Damon. In front of Ryker, Sterling, Griffin, and every ranking officer at the table. Nicholas Shadowfell had just claimed Guinevere Lunaris with the casual certainty of a man who had been holding the words behind his teeth for weeks and was done with the taste.

Blair’s eyes moved to Nicholas. She knew this already. But knowing and hearing him finally declare it were two different things.

Sterling’s glass paused.

Griffin’s mouth opened. Ryker reached over and shut it before any threesome jokes escaped.