She turned from the map on the wall, and the look on her face dropped my stomach through the floor. Her gaze landed on Rhiot, still gently wrestling the marker out of Mephistral's grip.
"Can you take this seriously for five seconds?" Her words came out sharp, edged with something way too close to contempt. "Just once. Five seconds where you're not making jokes or being fucking ridiculous. Demons don't use toilets or sewer systems. So stop wasting our time just because you want attention. No one even wants you here."
The marker hit the table. Mephistral froze mid-reach, head swiveling toward Seph, shocked silent for maybe the first time in his life.
Rhiot's hand stayed where it was. The half-smile didn't leave his face. That was the worst part. It stayed exactly where it was, fixed there like he didn't dare move.
The room stopped breathing.
Seph heard herself. I watched it land in her own ears a half-second late, watched the recoil cross her face. Her hand went toher throat. Color climbed from her collarbones to her hairline. Her mouth opened and shut on words that wouldn't come.
She hadn't meant it. Not like that.
Nobody spoke. This silence had a different effect than the one before Mephistral crashed the table. Rhiot lowered his hand to the table and ignored the marker. He kept his eyes on Seph, and what lived there wasn't anger. It was pity.
Mephistral sank onto his haunches, wings folding tight. Even he knew when noise was the wrong answer.
Seph's mouth worked. Nothing came out. The bond between us flared, not Grayson's warm hum or Rhiot's steady pulse, but Seph's wild electric current, full voltage straight into my sternum. I felt it. Her whole body wanted to fold in on itself and was unable to.
Grayson's eyes had closed, just slightly. Trux still hadn't looked up. Ryker had pressed himself further into the wall, hood lower, angled away from the table like the scene itself was a physical thing he could dodge. Kearan stood frozen by the kitchen door, mug at the exact height it had been when she said it.
And nobody offered an out. Nobody made the joke that would've papered over the crack and let everyone pretend.
Mephistral sighed. Such a small, human sound that it cut through the silence anyway. His wings drooped. He picked up the marker he'd been fighting over and set it down beside Rhiot's hand, careful, precise. Not an apology. An acknowledgment.
The room started moving again. Not the way it had before, but the air shifted. Rhiot's fingers closed around the marker without looking at it, his other hand scrolling his tablet with focus too deliberate to be real.
Seph turned back to the wall map.
Grayson pushed off the wall and took three unhurried steps to fuss with a stack of papers, giving everyone something to lookat that wasn't each other. The man could de-escalate a room by walking across it.
Trux still hadn't looked up. His fingers worked the stone.
Kearan appeared at my elbow without a sound. His breath warmed the side of my neck, voice pitched so low it simultaneously made me excited and nervous.
"Kitchen doorway. Now."
Not a request. The tone he used for emergencies and missions gone wrong. I followed without arguing, cold glass of coffee still in my hand. He parked us just inside the kitchen, still technically in the room, far enough that his words wouldn't carry. The others did the polite thing and pretended not to watch.
He looked at me, his gaze deadly serious.
He kept his voice flat. "The Hesolga is accelerating. Trux's episodes are getting more frequent and lasting longer. His baseline cortisol is past what his body should be able to take. The beast side of him is closer to the surface than it was three days ago."
My stomach dropped.
"And now it's spreading to Seph." Same stern tone that didn't leave room for doubt or arguing. "Seph is showing early markers. Elevated heart rate. Irritability way out of proportion to the trigger. Her energy signature is fluctuating just like Trux's."
The snap at Mephistral, the raw edge in her voice, the fingers that kept wanting to break something.
I straightened. "We're running out of time."
"Yes, all of us." His jaw tightened, barely. "The incomplete bond between you and us is a risk factor. When the Hesolga goes full manifest, we're all going to snap. I've done research. These bonds are rare, practically unheard of. Between that and the propaganda, there's very little reference information."
"Which means?"
Kearan made several flustered hand gestures before he seemed to get his thoughts together. "This goes one of two ways. The better option is that at the end of the lunar cycle, if the bond isn't complete, we all snap at the same time, taken over by the Hesolga."
That was the better option of the two? Maybe I didn't want to know what could be worse.