Chapter 404: Damon Wasn’t Going To Say It

DRAKENCREST - WAR ROOM

ONE HOUR PRIOR TO TABLE BANGER’S INTERROGATION

Everyone in the inner circle was at the obsidian table except for two. One was an unconscious man in the infirmary with three knots stacked on his skull. The other was also concussed and in the infirmary, a dark mage whose mother had just tried to kill everyone in the throne room.

Maddox stood at the head of the table. Nicholas sat at the opposite end. The two kings who had been fighting twelve hours ago were now united because of one woman and both of them were prepared to go to war to get her back.

Neither of them was aware that Kael Ashenvale was currently on the best and worst date of his life. Or that Guinevere had asked for a copy of Kael’s mugshot as a souvenir at that moment.

The door opened.

Beta Draven entered the war room the way a man enters a room he’s been waiting his whole career to sit in. Unhurried. Measured. The posture of a man who understood that first impressions in rooms like this were permanent and he intended to make his count.

He was in the running for the smartest one at the table, which was saying something because this table included Damon Tavian and Blair Drakencrest, and both of them were intellectual felons.

Maddox gave him a single nod. The nod was small and loaded with context that only two men in this room understood. Beta Draven and Maria were both alive because Maddox had negotiated with a monster and won. A seat at this table was the next Chapter of a deal.

Maddox had been toying with the idea of keeping the Beta title for him too. The Beta of Drakencrest. A new seat, specifically for him and a fifth-in-command rank if he earned it. This was the audition.

Damon Tavian also gave him a single nod. Draven returned it. There was mutual respect between the two Betas.

Next to Damon, Reed Cross, the Gamma of Shadowfell, rubbed his eyes once.

Reed: Didn’t Renwick say that man was dead?

Damon: Yes.

Reed: Renwick lied.

Damon: He did.

Reed: We sent condolences, Damon.

Damon: You outdid yourself, Gamma.

Reed: To a living man.

Damon: Our condolences were for Renwick losing the second best Beta on the continent. Those still apply.

Reed: The best being you.

Damon: I wasn’t going to say it. But since you did. Yes.

Beta Draven took the chair next to Ryker, settled into it like he’d been sitting there for years, and said nothing. Because good Betas weren’t loud. They were patient. They listened. They waited for the exact moment when speaking would do the most damage to the problem and the least to the speaker.

???

THIRTY MINUTES LATER

"No casualties. We do not get caught. We extract," Maddox finished.

The extraction plan sat on the table like a loaded weapon. Clean. Surgical in concept if catastrophic in consequence. Two kingdoms’ worth of military assets aimed at a civilization that ran on holy light, all because one woman had been arrested for a crime that half the room believed she committed and the other half believed was bullshit.

Griffin rubbed his hands together with the enthusiasm of a man who had been waiting for a prison heist mission his entire military career and was physically incapable of containing it.

"Let’s bust out the most dangerous criminal the Luminari have ever had and I’m not talking about Ashenvale."

Blair laughed. The laugh was short, bright, and broke through the tension like a rock through a window. She covered her mouth a half second too late.

Two of Nicholas’s men cracked grins that they buried immediately.

Reed, who had been silent since entering the room, allowed himself exactly one exhale through his nose that might have been amusement if anyone had been brave enough to call it that.

Nicholas did not laugh.

Maddox did not laugh either. His jaw was set in the concrete position it had been in since his wife was escorted out of his throne room in cuffs and his body had been frozen to a floor by her magic while he watched it happen.

"Are we going to acknowledge that?" Ryker asked, looking between the two kings who had turned into matching statues of parental disapproval. "No? Great. Moving on."

Beta Draven spoke.

The voice that came out of him was the voice of a man who had spent twenty years in a room with Renwick Lunaris and survived every single day of it by being the most useful person at the table. He didn’t raise it. He didn’t project. He delivered his words the way a sommelier delivers wine: precisely, at the correct temperature, and with the full expectation that you would taste the quality without him having to tell you it was expensive.

"Before we extract anyone, do we have clarification on the weapon used? Or the condition in which they found King Solveil?"

The table went quiet. The good kind of quiet. The kind where people stop talking because somebody just said the thing that everyone should have been thinking and nobody was.

Ryker answered first. "No clarification to my knowledge. We’ve been operating on assumptions. The assumption being the dagger she was carrying."

Maddox’s eyes flicked to Beta Draven for one second. His wife had told him something in confidence and he was going to honor that to the best of his ability.

"Guinevere told me she had picked up the dagger off the floor in the corridor. The stab wound she had was an accident, during one of the white light travel episodes. She had landed on it."

He left out the part where she thought Maria was about to stab herself. Maddox or Guinevere would pull Draven aside for that.

Nicholas gave a slow nod. "I never thought she did it. I still don’t. There is zero chance she stabbed someone. She confessed to destroying property and running from police. If she had stabbed a king, she would have opened with that. The woman surrendered herself to armed officers and offered to serve a five-year sentence for trespassing." He looked around the table. "I never believed she did it. Her behavior has been consistent. Compulsively honest. She couldn’t lie about a fountain. She’s incapable of concealing regicide."

Draven didn’t react to Nicholas’s assessment. He tracked it. Filed it. Then he asked the question that rearranged the table.

"The dagger you’re referring to. Is it the one she was holding when Maria was with her?" He looked at Maddox. "The one she had in her hand when I walked in on them?"

Ryker answered. "Yes."