Chapter 321 - 312 — The Writ Still Stands I

Chapter 321: Chapter 312 — The Writ Still Stands I

James looked at the two frames for another minute and then closed them himself.

That was the difficult part. Everything on that wall was still true and there was nothing further in it — the same face, the same armour, the red on one and not on the other, and he had been standing in front of it long enough that he had stopped investigating and started staring.

He shut the comparison down. Then the six foreign archive windows. Then the Korean feed, which was still going, muted, on the far screen, and which he could watch later like everybody else.

The room came back.

The equipment hum. Somebody’s footsteps going along the corridor outside the glass. Two of the ops staff talking quietly at the far end of the operations level about a delivery, and a phone ringing four times somewhere and being answered.

Half six in the morning, in a building that had started working around him.

Maeve had gone to get coffee. Finn was face down on his forearms at the end of the table.

One of the public news panels along the wall refreshed itself.

James saw the surname before he read anything else.

**GANNER**

Not Guild Zero. Not Floor 30, or Floor 31, or the international board, or the word that had been the most searched thing in the country for six weeks.

Ganner.

His hand stopped over the controls.

**CORMAC GANNER CALLS FOR CHALLENGER BLOOD WRIT TO BE ENFORCED**

---

He opened it.

The clip was eleven minutes old. Cormac had done it outside a Bureau office in the city, in daylight, standing on the step where the light was good and the microphones would carry — which was not an accident, and James knew it was not an accident within about two seconds.

He looked different.

That was the first thing and it took a moment to place, because nothing about him had physically changed. Same build, same face, same fair hair cut short.

There was no glass in his hand.

His mouth was not swollen. He was not leaning on anything. He was standing with his shoulders square and his hands loose in front of him, and when three photographers moved at once and the shutters went off over each other he did not react to it at all.

The last time James had been within ten feet of this man, Cormac had been drunk in a function room with a drink in one fist, working an audience.

"Months ago I invoked a Challenger Blood Writ against James Ganner," he said. "He accepted it. In front of witnesses. The terms went on the public register the same night and anybody can go and read them."

He did not raise his voice for any of it.

"After that, the Langford business happened, and the restrictions that came with it, and I was told the writ couldn’t be pursued while that was live. I accepted that. I waited." A short pause. "I’ve waited while he cleared Floor 20. I waited while he founded a guild. I’ve waited through thirty-one floors and a business launch and every single thing that man has done since he signed his name next to mine."

Somebody asked him something James could not hear.

"No," said Cormac. "I’m not challenging him. There’s nothing to challenge. The writ exists. It was never withdrawn and it was never struck. What I’m asking for is for it to be enforced."

---

Then he brought up Derek.

James did not move.

"People will say this is about the company. It isn’t. I’ve nothing to do with the company anymore and the company will tell you that itself before the day’s out." Cormac’s hands stayed where they were. "It’s about my brother. And before anybody prints it — I am not standing here saying James Ganner killed Derek. I’ve no proof of that. If I had proof I’d have brought it to the Bureau and not to you."

He let that sit.

"Here’s what I have. Derek went looking into him. Derek disappeared. James Ganner came back from that stretch stronger than he went into it, and in all the time since — through every interview, every stream, every camera he’s stood in front of — he has never once told this family what happened."

He looked directly into the nearest lens.

"So no. I’m not accusing him of anything. I’m asking for a fight that both of us already signed for."

James watched all of it without any expression at all.

---

The channel cut to the old footage, because of course it did.

They had been running it for two years whenever the name came up and they ran it again now, and James, who had not watched it since it happened, made himself sit through the whole thing.

The function room. The light off the glasses. Cormac in the middle of a circle of people with a drink in his hand and his voice pitched to carry, saying the thing about James’s father.

The camera did not follow James across the room. It caught him arriving.

The sound of it was worse than the picture. There was a flat wet crack, and then about four seconds where every shutter in the room went off at once, and then the noise of the crowd changing.

Cormac on the floor.

Cormac getting up on one elbow with his mouth open and blood on his teeth, laughing.

He had got exactly what he came for and everybody in that room had watched James hand it to him.

Then the declaration, in a voice thick from a split lip: a Challenger Blood Writ, three months, no surrender, death decides it.

And an eighteen-year-old with his knuckles still bleeding saying *fine*.

Two signatures being registered, and the tone the registry made when it took them, which James had not heard in two years and which went through him like a hand on the back of his neck.

---

Finn had come up beside him at some point during it.

He had not asked what James was watching. He had seen four seconds of the function room and stopped where he stood.

Maeve came back with two coffees and heard Cormac’s voice before she was through the door, and put both cups down without giving either of them to anybody.

Ronan and Cillian came in about a minute later, one after the other, because Finn had put three words into the team channel and neither of them had assumed it was a news replay. 𝘧𝓇ℯℴ𝓂

Nobody made a joke.

That was the thing James noticed, and he noticed it because Cillian had made a joke about every single situation any of them had been in for two years, including a dead prince and a fallen angel in his kitchen.

Cillian looked at the frozen frame of Cormac on the floor with blood on his teeth and said nothing at all.

A Blood Writ was not a challenge. It was a death match with a legal file number.