Page 75 of Kazimir

My voice did not rise. It never needed to. What sharpened it was certainty, not volume.

“The council is an administrative convenience,” I said. “Not a sovereign body. I permitted its shape because structured dissent is more useful than whispered treachery. If Broussard and Crow have mistaken tolerated function for actual power, then they have confused the furniture for the foundation.”

A flicker moved behind Nikolay’s eyes. Approval, perhaps. Or the old satisfaction of hearing truth put in its proper clothes.

“I can carry that message,” he said.

“You will.” I stepped around the desk, the Persian rug muting my footfall. “With precision. No embellishment. Tell them that I am aware of their delight. Tell them I encourage it if it helps them sleep while history approaches the bed with a knife.” I paused beside the window. “And tell them this also: Sariel is not their opportunity. He is my unfinished business.”

The curtains were already half-drawn against the late hour, but I pulled one panel aside and looked down over the rear grounds.

Floodlights had been kept low by design. Moonlight did the finer work, anyway. It silvered the estate’s private training court, touched the worn edges of stone, and caught on moving steel below where the night drill was underway. The gravel runs and marked circles of the lower yard looked almost gentle from this height. They were not. I had designed those grounds to break bodies into competence.

My eyes found Devon instantly.

They always did.

She rose above the courtyard in a clean, hard arc, wings opening wide enough to seize the moon and throw it back. Deep purple at the base, gold along the tips and primaries where the light kissed them, they cut the night with a living authority that still struck me at the sternum every time I saw them. She banked left, dropped suddenly, and reversed with a snap of disciplined power that left one of the guards below adjusting his stance too late. Practice weapons flashed up to meet her. She twisted between them with brutal grace.

Pride moved through me before I could call it by a more respectable name.

Concern followed immediately because love had made caution intimate.

“She improves each night,” Nikolay said behind me.

“Yes.”

Below, she folded one wing slightly, using the asymmetry to turn tighter than the men expected. The sound reached me a heartbeat later through old glass and open stone—a rushing cut of air, silk dragged over a blade. She came down at an angle that would have terrified any sane opponent and corrected just before impact, landing light, spinning, driving the blunt edge of a practice sword against one throat while her other hand stripped a second opponent of his weapon.

Even at this distance, I knew the line of her shoulders. The stubborn set of her jaw. The braid down her back, pale as winter wheat in moonlight, whipping once as she pivoted. Nine months ago she had awakened nameless in a park, stripped of history and certainty. Now she moved like the first version of herself had returned through fire to collect what had been stolen.

I rested my fingertips against the cool pane.

“When Sariel is defeated,” I said, still watching her, “I will turn my attention inward.”

Nikolay did not ask what I meant. He knew.

“Broussard. Crow. Any who wished for my destruction and mistook this attack on my mate for providence.” I let the words settle with the same measured weight I used when pronouncing sentence. “They will face my judgment.”

Below, Devon rose again, moonlight running bright along gold-tipped feathers as if the night itself had crowned her for battle.

Nikolay came to stand a respectful distance at my side. “Shall I begin drafting the terms?”

I watched her dive, recover, and turn her enemy’s strength into his humiliation.

“Yes,” I said softly. “Let them have time to imagine mercy. Disregard my earlier instructions. Let them believe they plot without consequence. It makes the truth hit harder.”

Nikolay continued. “On the matter of Sariel’s proxies; we’d traced some to Devon’s past. The Iron Valor wolves have arrived and have kept Margie’s Diner under surveillance. There was an inquiry about Devon’s whereabouts; however, no other threats have emerged. The apartment complex where she lived has been purchased, and our people are in place. All traces of Devon’s presence were removed, but there have been possible hunters in that area. We continue to monitor. Sources indicate that Sariel is in Philadelphia. It won’t be long.”

"We'll continue to stand ready. Good work, son."

A confident nod accompanied Nikolay as he left me to my musings.

I stepped out onto the stone balcony, where the night air came cold off the trees and clean with the scent of turned earth, steel, and Devon’s exertion rising from the training court below.

From here the estate showed two of its faces at once. Behind me lay carved doors, old money, polished floors, and inherited ceremony. Below me waited a ring of packed ground and stone where ceremony had no rights at all.

Devon stood at the center of it all.