What Comes Through The Wall

I feel it at two in the morning.

It was not a sound, not a movement either. It was something else, something that comes through the bond like a signal through a wire, low and jagged and wrong, and it pulls me out of the first real sleep I have had in weeks so fast I am sitting upright before I am fully conscious.

The room is dark and quiet.

The city glitters below the window.

And the bond is pulling toward the corridor with an urgency that my wolf is already responding to, up and alert and oriented before I have finished deciding whether to trust it.

Something is wrong with Thalrion.

I don't think about it. I am out of the bed and through the door before the rational part of my brain gets a vote, padding down the corridor in the dark, following the pull the way you follow a sound you can't unhear, and I find his door and I push it open without knocking because knocking feels absurd at two in the morning when the bond is doing this.

He is standing at his window.

Alive. Upright. Not injured in any physical way I can see, which should be a relief and is, but the thing coming through the bond is not physical and it is not small. He is in dark trousers and nothing else and his back is to me and his shoulders are carrying something that even from across the room I can feel the weight of.

"Thalrion."

He turns.

His face in the dark is very controlled and underneath the control is something raw and tired and old, the kind of tired that doesn't come from one night but from years of something, and I have worn that exact expression in enough mirrors to recognize it without a name.

"You felt that," he says. 

"Through the bond," I say. "It woke me up."

Something moves across his face. Complicated and unguarded and there before he can arrange it. "I didn't know it worked that direction yet."

"Neither did I." I come further into the room and stop a reasonable distance from him. "What's happening?"

He looks at me for a moment. The city is behind him all light and distance and he is very still and I watch him make the decision, the same one he keeps making, truth over management.

"Three years ago," he says. "Before I knew what the bond thread was or where it led. I had a general, not Soren, someone before him, a man I trusted completely." He stops. "Noctyros got to him. I don't know exactly when it started, I just know that by the time I found out, three people who worked directly under me were dead because of information that only went through that office."

The room is very quiet.

"What happened to the general?" I ask.

"He's alive," Thalrion says. "I made sure of that. But he is no longer in my circle and he is no longer in this city and what he did cost this house things that cannot be fully recovered." He looks at me steadily. "I have not trusted anyone inside my inner circle fully since then. Not even Soren knows the complete version of that story."

"Why are you telling me?" I ask.

"Because you deserve to know what you walked into," he says. "This is not a clean house, Vaelis. This is a house that has been bled from the inside before and is still watching its own walls for the next cut." His jaw tightens. "And because you noticed something today that I want to ask you about."

I go still.

"Caius," I say.

His eyes don't change. "What did you notice?"

"A half breath," I say carefully. "When Soren mentioned how long he'd been in the inner circle, something that didn't sit flat." I hold his gaze. "I don't know what it means, I'm not accusing anyone of anything. But you doing truth over management and I'm giving you what I have."

Thalrion is quiet for a long moment.

"I know," he says finally.

"You already know something."

"I have a thread," he says. "Nothing confirmed, and nothing actionable. But it is a thread I have been pulling carefully for six weeks." His silver eyes hold mine. "And you felt it in one encounter this afternoon."

"Eight years of reading rooms," I say. "You get good at the things that don't sit flat."

He looks at me with an expression I don't have a full vocabulary for yet, something that sits between respect and something warmer and more complicated than respect, and he says, "I need you to keep that between us."

"Obviously," I say.

"Not Soren. Not anyone."

"I understand."

He nods once.

We stand in the dark with the city behind him and the bond sitting warm and awake between us and the silence is different now, it has weight and shape and something shared inside it that wasn't there this morning.

"You should sleep," I say.

"I know."

"You're not going to."

"Probably not." Something in his expression shifts, lighter, just slightly. "Are you going to stand in my room until I do?"

"I'm considering it," I say.

He looks at me for a moment.

Then he crosses to the chair by the window and sits in it, long legs stretched out, and looks at me with those silver eyes and says, "Then sit down."

I sit on the edge of the windowsill across from him.

We don't talk.

The city moves below us and the bond is quiet and warm between us and Thalrion Bloodryn sits in his chair with the weight of a house he has been protecting alone for years and I sit in his window and I don't leave, and somewhere around three in the morning his breathing evens out and his head drops slightly and he is asleep in the chair.

I stay until the sky starts going grey.

I watch him sleep with his guard finally down and his face finally still and the bond sitting in my chest like something that was always supposed to be there, and I think about six generations of Nyther blood and command voices and power that consumes and all the ways I have been dangerous without knowing it.

And I think about a man who read a file for two years and found me himself and put not a strategy in a legal document and put his hands on my face in a kitchen and meant every feeling of it.

I think about what it would mean to stop runnin, not because I have nowhere to go, but because there is somewhere I want to stay.

I don't examine that too hard.

But I don't leave either.