The scrolls still lay across the war table, glowing faintly under the low torchlight, but the tension in the room had shifted.
It wasn't Kael's looming silence or Drekken's barely-restrained growl vibrating through the floorboards.
It was the sharp, amused look Vireya shot across the room as she leaned back in her chair and side-eyed Iska.
"So..." she drawled, casually spinning a knife she'd stolen from Kael's desk, "how long you and the Beta been sneaking off for moonlight knife fights and hot-blooded hate-sex?"
Kael stiffened.
Iska choked on her tea.
"What the hell, Flameborn?"
Vireya smirked. "Don't 'Flameborn' me like you're not blushing right now."
"I'm not blushing." Iska threw the scroll she was holding dramatically onto the table. "This is witch exhaustion. It's very real. Documented. Shut up and mind your own business."
Kael narrowed his eyes. "Which Beta?"
Vireya grinned wider. "Oh don't play dumb. Your second-in-command. The one who wouldn't even look in my direction the first week I got here."
Iska made a strangled sound and turned away, muttering something about "needing to hex this whole damn castle and how undeserving these ass holes were for everything she did."
Vireya didn't stop. "You definitely bicker like a couple. Also he totally almost smiled at me earlier when I called you out. That man's icy-ass façade cracked."
"Beta Theron does not smile," Kael muttered.
"EXACTLY!!! But he does when Iska's in the room," Vireya sing-songed and waggled her eyebrows.
Iska turned, pointing dramatically with a half-melted candle. "Okay, you know what? I liked you better when you were chained up and unconscious."
"You're just mad I woke up and caught on to you and lover boy...."
"I don't have a lover boy" Iska shriekds
Kael rubbed his temples. "Gods, there are worse things than war."
Vireya just cracked up laughing.
Later, when the scrolls had been rolled and re-shelved, and Kael retreated to the adjacent chamber to take another meeting, Vireya and Iska stayed behind in the war room.
Vireya sat on the edge of the table now, legs swinging, the obsidian focus stone turning over and over in her hands.
"I was being serious earlier," she said quietly. "About you and the Beta."
Iska groaned. "Not this again—"
"Girl. You're glowing when I bring him up."
"I'm glowing because I summoned power from a six-century-old bloodline with my bare hands this morning."
"Okay, but also you haven't blinked once since he walked by the doorway fifteen minutes ago."
Iska flipped her off. "I'm immune to men. Completely. Fully vaccinated."
Vireya burst out laughing again.
It felt... good, really good, actually.
The first time in days that something like joy cut through the weight sitting on her chest. For all her sharp edges and cursed blood, Iska didn't treat her like glass. Or a prophecy. Or a weapon.
She treated her like... a person.
A deeply unhinged person, maybe.
Vireya didn't realize how badly she needed that until now. Because it was better than the whispers she could hear about herself seeping into her room from the servants and guards in the hall.
"Hey," Iska said after a pause, voice quieter now. "You know that scroll with the wolf's name?"
Vireya nodded. "The one that says I'm carrying the soul of some ancient death queen who made the council piss themselves? Yeah. Hard to forget."
Iska rolled her eyes. "The last part of that scroll... the part I didn't translate out loud?"
Vireya stilled.
"Why?"
Iska hesitated. "Because I don't know what it means. Not fully."
Vireya's voice dropped. "Tell me anyway."
Iska blew out a slow breath and leaned back against the stone wall.
"It said... 'If the Flameborn rises again, the balance will break. The wolves will wake. And what sleeps beneath the bloodstone will rise to meet her.'"
Vireya's brow furrowed. "What the fuck is the bloodstone?"
"No one knows," Iska said. "But Kael's family crest? It's carved into black stone over the oldest vault in the kingdom. One that hasn't been opened since his grandfather was king."
A chill skated down Vireya's spine.
"You think that's what the council's afraid of?" she asked. "What's buried under their rule?"
Iska's expression turned grim.
"I think you weren't the only thing the gods sealed away."
The door creaked open behind them.
Beta Theron stepped inside, jaw set, shoulders squared, his presence low and intense as always.
"Kael needs you both," he said. "Now."
"Why?" Iska asked.
He looked at Vireya.
"Because something just tried to breach the veil line of the Hollow Grove. A flare of magic. Old. Traced to her blood."
Vireya stood.
Iska grabbed her satchel.
And the three of them left the room in silence.
But not before Vireya caught the look the Beta shot Iska when she passed him.
It was not subtle.
"Oh yeah," she muttered under her breath with a smirk, "you're so in trouble, witch."