Chapter 19: Cressida's Last Move

|HER POV|

She was waiting outside my seminar on Tuesday.

Cressida Vayne in a cream wool coat, her dark hair smooth and perfect, posture doing the deliberate work of someone performing composure because the alternative was admitting she didn't have it. She looked like a person who had made a decision and was not entirely comfortable with what the decision cost.

I slowed down. Didn't stop.

"Five minutes," she said, falling into step beside me without being invited.

"I have a lecture in nine," I said, not looking at her.

"I know your schedule," she said, and there was no smugness in it — just fact, which was more unsettling. "I'll be brief."

We walked. The corridor thinned — most students heading the other direction — and her heels clicked precisely and mine didn't and the gothic arches above us held their shadows at the wrong angles.

"The network's administrative move," she said quietly. "You know about it."

"Yes," I said.

"It's not going to work." She said it like she was reporting findings, not reassuring me. "The channel is closed. Whatever access they thought they had doesn't exist anymore." A pause. "I gave them the contact information."

I stopped walking.

She stopped too. Turned to face me, and her expression was doing something I hadn't seen from her before — not the calculated precision, not the social performance. Something beneath those things that was, under the right conditions, honest.

"Three weeks ago I thought the dossier was leverage," she said, her voice even. "Against Vire. Against whatever he actually is. I thought if I could demonstrate what he was, I could—" She stopped. Pressed her mouth flat. Started again. "It doesn't matter what I thought I could do. The point is I gave them the contact. Now I'm telling you because the move will fail, and when it fails they will look for another angle. The next angle is you directly."

I looked at her for a long moment. The cream coat. The perfect hair. The expression that was, under everything, making a choice.

Cressida Vayne was not someone who apologized. She was someone who calculated. What she was doing now was still a calculation — she'd decided that warning me was worth more than staying aligned with a dead move — but the information was real.

"You've decided which side of this is safer," I said.

"I've decided which side is right," she said carefully. "They're not always the same thing. In this case they happen to be."

I studied her. "The next angle. What is it."

"The scholarship channel," she said, holding my gaze steadily. "They're going to frame the access as fraudulent and attach your name to it. Make it look like you knew. Make it look like you were placed here deliberately by someone you were working with."

My name. The scholarship. Everything I had built on the assumption that I had earned it honestly.

I breathed. Kept my face where I'd put it.

"All right," I said.

"All right?" She looked slightly thrown, like she'd expected a different reaction.

"I heard you," I said. "Don't tell me anything else about the network's internal structure — the less either of us knows about what the other's been involved with, the better." I held her gaze. "But if you hear specifically when they're moving on the scholarship angle, tell me before they do."

A beat of silence. She studied me for a moment with the recalibrating expression of someone encountering evidence that their assessment was incomplete.

"Yes," she said quietly. "All right."

I walked away. Her heels stopped behind me.

Four days. The network had four days and a new angle and I had four days before Kae told me everything and then left, and somewhere between those two clocks I needed to figure out what to do about a scholarship that was about to become the thing they used to dismantle me.

I told him that evening at the library table, the moment I sat down and before I'd even taken my coat off.

"Cressida came to me," I said, watching his face. "The network's next move is the scholarship. They're going to frame the access channel as fraudulent and put my name on it."

He went very still. Not the patient, managed stillness — the other kind. The kind where something underneath the composure was doing something that the composure was barely containing.

"The scholarship is legitimate," he said, his voice flat and careful, the way he talked when he was managing something large.

"I know it's legitimate," I said. "The question is whether they can make it look otherwise." I held his gaze. "Is there documentation that connects the channel directly to the standard admissions process? Something that would survive an inquiry?"

A pause. He held my eyes. "Some of it," he said.

"How much is missing."

Another pause. Longer this time.

"Enough," he said.

I nodded. Turned to my notebook. "Then we need to make sure the rest of it exists before they move," I said, keeping my voice even, not looking at him.

"Eirlys—" He said my name with the low, direct weight he used when a conversation had moved somewhere that mattered.

"I'm not asking you to manufacture documents," I said, looking up at him. "I'm asking you to make sure the legitimate documentation that should already exist does exist. There's a difference." I held his gaze steadily. "You know there's a difference."

He looked at me for a long moment. Something in his expression shifted — the control doing its double work, and underneath it the thing that had been accumulating since September, warm and unmanaged and entirely his.

"Yes," he said quietly. "I'll handle it."

"Before they move," I said.

"Before they move," he confirmed.

We worked in silence after that, and the lamp held its circle, and four days felt suddenly very small against everything that was moving simultaneously, and across the table the Crown Alpha of a wolf dominion in a dark turtleneck read his briefing files with his expression giving nothing away and his eyes finding mine every time I looked up, like he couldn't help it, like he'd stopped trying to help it, like some decisions had already been made and the only thing left was the days between us and the truth he still owed me.

~~~