Chapter 344: Handled, My Fucking Ass

"Court gossip is hardly leverage. I have no idea what you are referring to. Please excuse me, Princess."

"Court gossip is what small men call intelligence they can’t control. If Lord Solandris receives an envelope from a mysterious sender containing evidence, you lose your position, your title, and your access to every Dragon Lord and Keep in Velkaris. Unless you and him have a prior arrangement about his wife. I looked into that." She paused. "You don’t."

"What do you want?"

"Who was the man you were just speaking with?"

Silence followed.

Then Marek laughed.

Blair’s heartbeat didn’t change. Her breathing didn’t change. But the air in the corridor did, thickening into something that tasted like ozone and intent, and Blair knew with the certainty of a woman who had grown up around predators that the next three seconds were going to decide whether she walked away from this corridor or was carried.

"Careful. Someone is going to get herself in trouble." Marek took a step forward. "That might work on the dragon lords. But here’s the thing, I’m not a dragon."

Dark magic erupted from Marek’s hands.

The blast came fast, purple-black, aimed at her chest with the precision of a man who had decided that killing was cleaner than negotiating and had made the switch without ceremony.

Blair didn’t flinch because it happened too fast.

The necklace at her throat, the one Kael had given her, the one that had belonged to her mother, flashed white. The light was immediate and absolute, a shield that intercepted the dark magic six inches from her skin and redirected it back at its source with the efficiency of a mirror that had been waiting its entire existence for this exact moment.

The blast hit Marek square in the chest.

His body left the floor. He traveled six feet backwards, hit the stone wall with a crack that echoed through the corridor, and slid to the ground with the boneless finality of a man whose consciousness had been forcibly repossessed.

She stood in the corridor, necklace still glowing faintly, breathing steady, already moving towards Marek because the body wasn’t going to search itself.

She glanced down at it. "Unexpected."

Damon came out of the alcove at a full sprint.

"Blair, what the FUCK."

The fury in his voice was layered. He was pissed that she had told him to hide. He was pissed that he had actually listened. He was pissed that a woman had just been attacked with dark magic while he stood in an alcove with a mage.

His legs covered the distance before his brain authorized the movement. His eyes found Blair first.

Brennan was a step behind him, eyes wide, hands already glowing with magic he had been loading since the second Blair left the alcove because following orders and being unprepared were two different things and Brennan Pike was only capable of one. Obedience and firepower were not mutually exclusive.

Blair was already crouching over Marek’s unconscious body, patting his cloak with the systematic efficiency of a woman who had been rifling through her brothers’ shit since she could walk.

"I have it handled," she said lightly.

"Handled," Damon repeated.

"Yes."

Her hands found an inside pocket, pulled a folded letter out, and tucked it into her own cloak without reading it because reading it here was sloppy and Blair Drakencrest was many things but sloppy was never one of them.

"Who is this guy?" Damon dropped into a crouch beside her, his voice shifting from fury to operational in two seconds flat because Damon Tavian was also many things and slow was not among them.

He matched her pace. Opposite pocket. Same rhythm. His hands moved through the cloak lining while hers moved through the inner breast. They had never worked together before. Not like this. But it felt like they had. That observation landed somewhere in Damon’s brain.

"Marek Navarre. Master Mage of House Solandris." She pulled a vial from Marek’s inner pocket, held it up to the dim light, and set it beside her. "He made Guinevere’s life a living hell. He put a demon jester hallucination over her bed and abducted her."

Blair listed Marek’s crimes like she was checking a pantry. Demon jester. Hallucination. Abduction. Dinner-menu voice. Somebody should have tipped her for the casual cruelty.

"Maddox has been aware and keeping tabs," she continued. "He can be briefed when he wakes up from his nap."

Damon watched Blair relay intelligence, cite legal precedent, and dismiss her brother’s absence in the same breath. She was kneeling on a stone floor next to a man she had just neutralized, organizing an interrogation she hadn’t been authorized to run, and doing all of it with the composure of a woman who had been underestimated so consistently that overperforming had become her resting state.

He was in trouble. The professional kind and the other kind. Both were accelerating.

She looked up, noticing Damon watching her.

Griffin Ironreach rounded the corner at that exact moment, holding a set of warded cuffs and zero context, which was Blair’s preferred delivery method for most people.

He slowed when he saw Marek’s body on the ground. His eyes moved from the unconscious mage to Blair to Damon to Brennan to the scorch mark on the wall and back to Blair with the hesitant look of a young warrior connecting dots he wished he could disconnect.

Blair grabbed the cuffs out of his hands.

"Blair, I didn’t know you were going to..." Griffin started.

"Exactly." She snapped one cuff around Marek’s left wrist and locked it. "You didn’t know. You arrived after the fact. You get zero blame and full deniability."

This wasn’t the first time. Blair gifted Griffin plausible deniability the way normal people gave birthday cards: with the understanding he would owe her a soul later.

She snapped the second cuff around his right wrist and stood.

"He just attacked me with dark magic. Velkaris law is clear on this. Any attack on the king, the royal family is an automatic death sentence." She brushed stone dust off her hands and looked at the three men standing over the body. "Everyone just ignores that law. But I am not everyone."

She straightened her cloak, adjusted her necklace, and gave Damon, Brennan, and Griffin a look that belonged on the face of a woman who had been running a kingdom from behind a curtain and was done pretending the curtain existed.

Blair looked at the three of them. Her eyes moved across Brennan, Griffin, and landed on Damon last. She held his gaze for one second longer than the others. The look of a woman who had been operating alone for a very long time and had just found someone who kept up without being told how.

"Whoever helps me drag his unconscious body to the interrogation chamber gets to question him with me."