Page 22 of Alpha’s Divine Claim

She lets the quiet sit instead of filling it. Her hair is pushed back over one shoulder, silver-white against the dark green of her sleeve. She keeps her eyes up. She meets every face that’s looking at her. The violet in them has gone gold, and she doesn’t do anything to hide it. Her hands stay open at her sides.

I’m standing close enough beside her that I’m the only one who catches her fingers close once against her thigh.

Dane’s the one who finally breaks the quiet. “Are you okay?”

“There’s more,” she says.

Everyone goes still, waiting on it.

“Faelan’s magic is already inside Briarstone’s foundations,” she says. “Faint. Old. It’s been there long enough that nothing about the stone flags it as wrong.”

Evren’s head comes up fast. The heat coming off him reaches me from three feet away, sharper than it was a moment ago.

“How long?” he says.

“No way to date it exactly,” Nyxiana says. “Long enough that nobody there ever caught it.”

“I grew up on that floor.”

“I know,” she says.

His hands open and close once at his sides. “Does my father know?”

“Niko was told before we left,” I say.

“If he got that deep into Briarstone,” Callum says, “what stops him getting into ours?”

“So far the trail runs through that family’s blood,” I say. “And through Kari’s.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“That’s what I’ve got right now.”

Callum holds my look a moment, then nods once, his eyes still on me.

She moves straight into the next part of it. “When we started back,” she says, “the portal turned wrong the second we stepped onto the platform. The current answered to Faelan. I didn’t wait to find out why.”

Callum says the name under his breath. Ben swears low at the floor.

“The exit was closing,” Nyxiana says. “Every other time I’ve stood on that platform, the current has run one direction, straight toward home. This time it changed under our feet, going cold and turning somewhere else entirely. I recognized what was underneath it: Faelan’s signature. Wherever it was taking us, it wasn’t taking us home. I pulled Valen off the platform and phased us both out blind instead of finding out where.”

“That’s what happened to Rhonan,” Evren interjects. “His portal got sabotaged the same way. That’s how he ended up stranded on Earth.”

“Yes,” Nyxiana says.

Kari looks at her, then at Dane. “We crossed those same portals into the North Range and back, tracking the ward stones,” she says. “Once each way. Nobody told us the current could turn like that.”

“We thought it was already fixed,” Nyxiana says.

“That’s worse.”

She sets the shard on the table where everyone can reach it. It sits in her palm, dull gray. One edge is broken, but the break is smooth, not jagged.

Lyanna leans in first. Her hands glow green as she holds them above it, then the light fades. “The resonance is clean,” she says. “Nothing riding it. I’d still rather we kept it somewhere warded.”

Dane picks it up. Turns it over once. Sets it back down without a word.

Nova’s been watching the whole exchange without a word. She picks her moment. “How did you actually find it?”