Chapter 34

They spent the next six hours arguing about what to actually offer her.

"A curated version," Rhys said, pacing Kade's study while Ivy sat with Rowan on her lap, half-listening to the debate and half-watching her son try to eat one of his own socks. "Show her the community. The land conservation angle, the private family compound, people who value privacy fiercely enough to look suspicious to outsiders. Let her write that story. It's true enough to satisfy her conscience, and it's boring enough that her editor loses interest once there's no monster in it."

"She already suspects more than that," Elena said. "A curated tour reads as exactly what it is — a performance for an audience. She'll know we're managing her, and principled people don't usually appreciate being managed."

"Then what's your alternative? Tell her everything and hope she keeps quiet out of the goodness of her heart?"

"There's an old rite," Odalys said quietly, and the room went still at the sound of her voice. "Ashgrove kept it, though I suspect Voss once did too, before secrecy hardened into simple silence instead of something more deliberate. A binding vow. Offered freely, taken freely, tying a human's word to something older than paperwork or professional ethics."

"What kind of binding," Kade asked.

"Not violent," Odalys said, catching the wariness in his voice. "Not a curse, if that's what you're imagining. A vow, spoken and sealed, that simply makes it impossible for the one who takes it to speak the truth to anyone who hasn't also taken it. Not silenced by fear. Silenced by their own given word, made unbreakable by old magic instead of by threat."

Ivy looked up from Rowan, something in the idea catching at her. "That's not so different from what Dani's doing right now. Except Dani's keeping the secret because she loves me. This would let someone keep it because they chose to, permanently, with nothing forcing the choice except their own decision to take it."

"It's not something to offer lightly," Odalys warned. "It changes a person, in small ways. They'll feel the weight of the vow every time the truth gets close to slipping out, for the rest of their life."

"Then we tell her that too," Ivy said. "The whole cost, not just the offer. Let her decide with everything on the table, the same way I wish someone had let me decide, at the very start of all this."

Kade looked at her for a long moment, something proud and tired both moving across his face.

"Then we ask her," he said. "All of it. Tonight, before her deadline runs out."

Sarah met them again at the same cracked-vinyl diner booth, phone sitting face-down on the table between them, twenty-six hours left on her editor's clock.

"You look like people about to tell me something big," she said.

"We are," Kade said. "But before we do, I need you to understand there's a cost to hearing it. A real one, not a metaphor."

He explained the vow as plainly as he could — what it was, what it would ask of her, what it would permanently change about her relationship to the truth for the rest of her life. Sarah listened without interrupting, notebook closed, phone still face-down, expression unreadable through most of it.

"So if I take this vow," she said finally, "I get the whole truth. And I can never write a word of it, tell a soul, not ever, not even off the record to someone I trust completely."

"That's the cost," Kade confirmed.

"And if I don't take it?"

"Then we part ways tonight with whatever you already know," Ivy said. "No hard feelings, no threats, no old-law solutions we're not willing to use on you. You write whatever story you can build from what you've already found, and we handle whatever comes from that as honestly as we can."

Sarah was quiet a long time, turning her phone over in her hands without checking it.

"Twenty-six hours," she said finally, "isn't a lot of time to decide something permanent."

"No," Kade agreed. "It isn't."

She looked between them, something searching and uncertain in her expression that Ivy recognized instantly — the exact same look she must have worn herself, sitting in a locked clinic office a year and a half ago, deciding whether to stay in a chair or walk out a door.

"Tell me one thing first," Sarah said. "Not about the vow. About you two. Is whatever's actually going on here something worth protecting? Or is it just something worth hiding?"

Ivy looked at Kade, at the year they'd built together out of a contract that started as nothing more than desperate money and a stranger's terrifying secret, and answered without hesitation.

"Worth protecting," she said. "Every single part of it."

Sarah nodded slowly, something settling behind her eyes.

"Okay," she said. "Tell me how this vow actually works."