Crimson Veil

Chapter Twenty-Three — Run or Fight

✦ Eve's POV ✦

He told me on a Thursday morning, three days after the second informant, with the specific quality of someone who had been thinking about how to say something for long enough that the thinking had become its own kind of weight.

I had come to the command room for the morning session. The maps were on the table, Caine was in his usual position, everything looked the same as it had every morning for the past two weeks. And then Adam looked at me and said, "I need you to consider leaving the stronghold."

I set my kit down on the chair.

"Temporarily," he said. "There's a safe house two days' ride north. Secure, monitored, outside Aldric's known network. You'd go with Bowen and Sev and two others and you'd stay until this is resolved."

I looked at him steadily. "No."

"Eve—"

"No." I kept my voice even because the thing moving through my chest was not going to help this conversation and I knew it. "I'm not leaving."

"The timeline has accelerated. Aldric is going to come to you within days and when he does the danger—"

"Is something I already knew about when I agreed to help." I held his gaze. "You said together. In this room, three days ago, you said together. Was that conditional?"

Something moved through his expression. "That was before the timeline changed."

"The timeline changing doesn't change what I said." I crossed to the table. "Adam. Listen to me. If I leave, you lose the only person who can identify faction members by reading them. You lose the ability to know whether Aldric's offer is a genuine approach or a trap. You lose the inside information my gift gives you during any negotiation." I paused. "And Aldric will know I ran. Which tells him we're onto him, which collapses whatever advantage we still have."

The command room was very quiet.

"You're not a soldier," he said. Not dismissively. Just as fact.

"No. I'm something more useful than a soldier right now and you know it." I watched his jaw tighten and kept going. "I'm not running while people I care about are in danger. That is not something I'm willing to do. So either we figure out how to do this with me here or we have a problem."

The silence stretched.

Caine was studying the map with extreme concentration.

Adam looked at me with those dark eyes and I looked back and neither of us moved and the air between us had the specific quality of two immovable things in close proximity, working out which one was going to give.

It wasn't going to be me.

He knew that. I watched him know it — the fractional shift in his expression, the slight release of something held.

"You stay behind the shielding when he approaches," he said. "You read him but you don't project. Nothing that shows activity."

"Agreed."

"You tell me everything he says within an hour of the conversation ending."

"Agreed."

"And you don't meet with him alone. I want Mira present or someone I trust."

"Agreed." I held his gaze. "Are we done?"

A pause. "You're infuriating," he said. Quiet. Almost wondering about it.

"You're trying to send me away," I said. "I think that's worse."

Something crossed his face — fast, and then gone. He turned back to the map. "Session starts in ten minutes," he said.

"I know," I said, and sat down.

Caine waited until Adam's back was fully turned before he glanced at me with an expression that was as close to well done as his face apparently got.

I looked at the window and did not smile.

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