"And the man's reference to Phoenix," Ignatius said, his voice dangerously quiet. "He used that name specifically?"
"He said 'the man who tried before didn't find me, and he had considerably more resources than a hockey player with a drug problem.' He was talking about your investigation after the All-Stars. He knew you'd looked. He knew you'd failed."
The silence that followed was the longest I'd ever endured from Ignatius. Not empty silence—loaded silence, the kind that preceded seismic shifts, the kind that meant centuries of calculation were being rerun in real time behind those gray eyes I couldn't see but could somehow feel through the phone.
When he finally spoke, his voice had changed. Not louder. Not angrier. Colder—and I knew cold better than anyone alive.
"You should have told me immediately."
"I know."
"You should have told me before you pulled away from Cinder. Before you let this man dictate the terms of your life. Before you sat on a bench in Las Vegas and fell apart in front of eighteen thousand people and a national broadcast audience."
"I know."
"Then why didn't you?"
The question was simple. The answer wasn't.
"Because he was right," I said, and the admission tasted like blood on frozen metal. "Not about the blackmail. Not about the threat. About the math. Cinder's proximity to me is a vulnerability. The data exists. The exposure risk is real. And I couldn't—" My voice fractured, a hairline crack running through decades of composure. "I couldn't be the reason this team burns, Ignatius. Not after everything they've given. Not after what Cole went through. Not after you spent months protecting Phoenix and rebuilding something that mattered. I couldn't be the one who—"
"Stop."
The command was absolute. Not raised. Not harsh. Just final, in the way that mountains were final—immovable, unarguable, older than the language being used to challenge them.
"Taranis Rees," Ignatius said, and the use of my full name sent ice cascading down my spine that had nothing to do with my own nature. "You are not a liability. You are not a variable to be optimized. And you do not get to make unilateral decisions about the safety of this community by sacrificing the one person your dragon has chosen in nearly three decades of solitude since you were relocated to Canada."
My eyes burned. I pressed my free hand against the frozen wall and felt the ice melt under my palm, reforming instantly, a cycle of thaw and freeze that matched the chaos inside my chest.
"He will find me," I said. "If I go back to Cinder, he'll release the story."
"Let him."
I blinked. "What?"
"Let him try." Ignatius's voice dropped into a register I'd only heard twice before—once when Cole's father had attempted to reclaim his son, and once when a Council member had suggested that urban dragons were an acceptable loss. It was the voiceof something ancient and territorial and utterly without mercy. "This man has been operating in shadows because shadows are the only place he has power. He approached Phoenix with cash and threats because Phoenix was alone and vulnerable. He approached you in a hallway because you were isolated and afraid for your mate. He preys on separation, Taranis. He succeeds when we fracture. He fails when we don't."
"The data—"
"The data is already being handled. My team identified and contained the cloud breach within hours of our meeting. Every copy Gavin downloaded has been traced, flagged, and is in the process of being rendered forensically useless. The draft article your hallway ghost showed you? It references data points that, as of seventy-two hours ago, no longer exist in any accessible format."
I went still. Completely still—the dragon kind of still, where even my heartbeat seemed to pause.
"You—"
"I told you I would handle it. Did you think I meant eventually?" A thread of exasperation wove through his voice, almost fond. "The digital containment was phase one. Phase two was identifying every outlet and individual who'd received any version of the data and ensuring it was discredited, deleted, or both. Phase three—which is ongoing—is building a counter-narrative robust enough that if a single number surfaces in public, it will be attributed to equipment malfunction and outdated monitoring software, supported by documentation from three independent medical technology firms who owe me favors older than your hockey career."
My legs gave out. Not dramatically—I just slid down the wall until I was sitting on the concrete floor of a Vegas arena corridor, frost spreading beneath me in a circle that would have beenbeautiful if I'd been capable of appreciating anything beyond the sound of my own world rearranging itself.
"The data is gone?" I whispered.
"The data is neutralized. There is a difference, and the difference matters, but for your purposes tonight—yes. Whatever leverage this man believed he held is already crumbling. He simply doesn't know it yet."
I pressed the heel of my hand against my eye socket. The frost on my lashes crackled.
"And Gavin?" I asked, because the timing—Gavin dead the same week I'd been threatened—couldn't have been coincidence, and the shape of that non-coincidence terrified me in ways I couldn't fully articulate.
"That," Ignatius said, and his voice went flat in a way that meant he was genuinely unsettled, which was itself unsettling because Ignatius was never unsettled, "is what concerns me most. Gavin was a tool. A blunt, desperate, easily manipulated tool. His usefulness ended the moment the data was no longer viable leverage, and his debts made him a liability to whoever had been extending his credit."