Chapter 380: Cute Little Formation, Boys

"Kael Ashenvale." She turned to the column. "Ten. Obviously. Self-aware about it, which drops him to a nine. The self-awareness is a performance, which bumps him back to a ten. The performance is hiding something genuine, which makes him an eleven, but I’m capping the scale at ten because his ego already is an issue."

Kael’s face gave her nothing.

"The dumb one." She squinted. "Six. Generous six. But he’s got cute energy and a jawline that’s doing more work than the rest of him combined, so I’ll bump him up to a seven. He also tried to slow clap earlier, which tells me his instincts are right even when his brain is on a lunch break. That’s endearing. Don’t let anyone beat it out of him."

Griffin mouthed "seven" at Ryker with pride on his face.

"The wolves I don’t know." She glanced at Nicholas and Damon. "Can’t rate what I haven’t researched. I have professional standards."

"Who sent you, Emma?" Blair tried again. Third attempt.

Emma sucked air through her teeth. "I love that you keep circling back. Tenacity. That’s a Drakencrest trait. Your brother has it too. Different flavor. His is more I will burn the world. Yours is more I will organize the world and then burn it. Superior approach, in my opinion."

"Emma."

"Fine. But first." She held up a finger. "The nautical theme. We need to discuss."

Blair’s eye twitched.

"The navy was brave. Too cold for Kael’s coloring, but brave. The man reads grey-blue. Warm silver. Storm-adjacent. You dressed his room like a winter coastline when he’s an autumn forge and the dissonance has been keeping me up at night. I rearranged the accent pillows twice to compensate and YOU MOVED THEM BACK and I had to pretend I didn’t notice and it almost broke me as a person." She pressed a hand to her chest. "The white bedding was flawless. I wept internally. The anchor motifs were a choice so specific and so correct that I had to excuse myself from the room and walk a corridor to process. The rope detailing on the curtain ties? I would have gone fringe. Fringe would have been wrong. You went rope. I am devastated by how right rope was." Her voice dropped. "But the throw pillows mixed thread counts and I would rather DIE than let you walk out of this conversation without knowing that. Four hundred against two-eighty. It’s a crime. The afternoon light will expose you in seventy-two hours. I’ve been counting."

Blair’s jaw tightened by a millimeter.

"Also," Emma added, "I have the rug."

"You have Gerald?"

"Of course I do," Emma laughed. "Gerald is mine now."

"Emma." Blair’s voice dropped into the register that preceded buckets, pokers, and career-ending decisions. "You have given me nothing. You are stalling."

The playfulness drained from Emma’s face. The transition was instant. The smile didn’t fade. It was removed. Pulled off like a mask that had served its purpose, and what sat underneath was still and quiet and sharp in a way that the performance had been designed to obscure.

"Fine." Emma’s voice leveled. "You should check on your girl."

Blair went still.

"The white-haired one." Emma said it the way a person mentions the weather. Offhand. Conversational. "She’s running out of time and none of you are looking at the right clock. You’re welcome."

The sentence hit the throne room and every person in it stopped breathing at the same time.

Blair’s gold eyes locked onto Emma’s with a force that could have bent metal. "What does that mean?"

Emma closed her mouth. The closure was deliberate. Final. The snap of a vault door that had been open for exactly as long as its owner intended and not one second longer.

"That’s the freebie," she said. "Everything else costs."

Nicholas moved. The stillness he had maintained since entering the throne room broke like a dam, and the man who replaced it was a wolf king whose mate had just been named.

"What did you do to her?" His voice came out in two registers. His and his wolf’s. The dual tone filled the throne room the way thunder fills a valley, rolling off stone walls and coming back louder.

Emma looked at him. Really looked. The assessment was fast, professional, and stripped of every ounce of the flirtatious performance she’d been giving the dragons.

"I didn’t do anything to her. But the person who sent me did. And the clock I’m talking about is one that started ticking before I ever set foot in this Keep."

"Who sent you?" Blair asked. Fourth time. Last time. The question carried the weight of a woman who was done asking and was about to start taking.

Emma looked at Blair. Something moved behind her eyes that could have been respect or pity or the specific sadness of a woman who knew the answer and understood that the answer was going to break things that hadn’t been built to bend.

Blair’s eyes flicked to someone Emma hadn’t named who was waiting patiently. Lux Nash gave a single nod. Every man in the room moved at the same time.

Emma’s head turned in a slow arc, tracking the convergence the way a woman tracks weather she’s been watching build all afternoon.

Then she laughed.

The laugh was bright, unbothered, and completely wrong for a woman who had just been surrounded by armed men in a throne room. It bounced off the vaulted ceiling and came back louder than it left.

"Oh, princess. This is adorable. Really. The choreography alone." She clapped once. "But this is where you and I disagree on how this ends."

Her hands came up.

Dark magic poured from her palms like smoke given teeth. It coiled around her fingers in ribbons of black and violet that pulsed with a light that wasn’t light at all, the opposite of light, the thing that eats light and leaves the room colder for having tried.

The temperature in the throne room dropped by ten degrees in under a second. Every torch on the wall flickered. Two of them went out.

"I am not going to your dungeons, Blair. Nobody puts me in a dungeon. Not your brother. Not your wolves. Not your cute little formation." Her eyes swept the room. "And definitely not the dumb redhead."