My hand tightens briefly at her waist. “And Vira is still trying to help it.”
The name shifts the air in the room. Amelia’s expression sharpens, the heir returning behind her eyes. She props herself up on her elbows, hair falling around her shoulders in loose disarray that would scandalize half the coven if they saw it.
“We need proof,” she says. “Not suspicion. Not half-heard conversations. Not your instincts, even if they’re inconveniently accurate.”
“My instincts keep you alive,” I say.
“So do mine,” she counters, and there it is, her stubborn pride, the part of her I both admire and want to shake.
I shift closer, forearm braced on the mattress, our faces only a handspan apart. “Then we use both.”
She watches me for a moment longer than necessary. The intimacy of last night has not vanished with morning; it lingersin the way her gaze drops to my mouth briefly before she forces it back to my eyes. I pretend not to notice.
“Fine,” she says, voice deliberately brisk. “We use both.”
We talk quietly, plans shaped in the soft hour where no one is listening. Amelia’s mind runs fast when she is focused, leaping from threat to solution with the precision of someone who has been trained for leadership since childhood. She outlines the coven’s hierarchy, the access points, the way Vira moves through the compound with legitimate authority. She tells me which junior Purnas worship her, which elders are swayed by tradition, which guards are likely compromised or simply afraid.
“And I will get into her quarters,” Amelia says, as if discussing a minor inconvenience rather than breaking into an elder’s private chambers. “There will be ledgers. Correspondence. A ritual journal. Something.”
I narrow my eyes. “You are not going in alone.”
She gives me a look that I recognize as warning. “Don’t start.”
“I’m not starting,” I say calmly. “I’m finishing. If Vira is meeting someone, if she has wards or traps?—”
“Then I’m careful,” she interrupts. “And I don’t trigger them.”
“Amelia.”
She sighs, exasperated. “Zeidan, you can’t shadow me every time I move.”
The instinctive response is immediate: I want to. The thought is as possessive as it is honest, and I hate that my first impulse is still containment.
I force myself to breathe and choose the method that has served me better than force ever has: negotiation.
“Then we divide the work,” I say. “You take her quarters and the council chambers. I take the tunnels.”
Amelia’s gaze sharpens with interest. “The root tunnels?”
“Not the ones under the grove,” I say. “The older network. The caverns that predate the current coven grounds. If she is moving poison into the ley lines, she needs access and a supply route. Supply routes leave residue.”
She bites her lower lip as she considers it, and I have to look away because my mind insists on remembering what her mouth felt like last night.
“You’re thinking about tunnels,” Amelia says, amused.
I meet her gaze, expression blank. “I am thinking about evidence.”
Her smile deepens, clearly not fooled. “Sure.”
I clear my throat, ignoring the warmth in my cheeks that is infuriatingly human. “I will go after you eat.”
She lifts a brow. “After I eat?”
“Yes.”
I can already hear Ron’s voice from yesterday, stop martyring yourself, stop trying to win wars alone, and I have no intention of giving Amelia another reason to accuse me of making decisions without her.
She nods slowly. “Fine. After I eat. After you eat too.”