The ledger-keeping room smelled of old paper and colder ink.
Seren’s ribs didn’t complain anymore when she sat down.
That was the only way she’d been tracking time since the duel.
The new instructor was already at the lectern when she walked in.
Instructors came in after their students, always, some rule nobody wrote down but everyone obeyed, letting the room settle first.
He hadn’t bothered, which told her something about how he saw the students in this room.
Leandro Pryce.
Her stomach dropped before her mind caught up to why, the old animal drop that arrived before thought, before she’d even matched the face to the name.
Then it landed.
This was the man who’d drafted the language that took her son off the succession list and made it read like Aldric’s own failing instead of a knife someone else had turned in his back.
He’d spent two weeks on that language, as far as she’d ever been able to determine, and had never gotten it wrong enough to be challenged afterward.
Aldric’s instincts are not mine, Knox had said, in front of the full council, and Leandro had built that sentence somewhere to stand.
Resign yourself to what is, he’d told her after, and she remembered exactly how his voice had sounded saying it, flat and patient, like he was doing her a kindness by not pretending otherwise.
She had been thirty-seven years old and had no reason then to understand what that kind of patience from a man in his position actually meant.
She’d thanked him.
Her jaw went tight before she caught it happening.
She forced it loose.
Her hands, folded on the desk, pressed harder into each other than they needed to.
The cold came after, settling in from the sternum out—the particular cold of encountering someone you’d planned for and hadn’t expected this soon.
He was near the top of the list she kept, though not the very top.
Not yet.
She hated him.
It came up her throat like heat, immediate and ugly, nothing careful about it at all.
He didn’t know any of that.
He looked over the room like he was counting chairs, no idea he was standing three feet from someone who’d wanted him dead badly enough to have had a plan.
That was useful.
She had always worked better with more information than the other person, and right now the gap between what she knew and what he knew about her was wide enough to use.
“Bloodline inheritance,” he said.
“A Luna dies without issue.
Her mate remarries.
The second mate produces three sons.
Walk me through the succession order and flag any complications.” Not a beginner question.
Not even close.
Third-term material, and he’d only mentioned it at the tail end of the previous lesson.
The room knew it.
Nobody moved.
Hands stayed on desks, pens flat, eyes finding anywhere that wasn’t the lectern.
Leandro let the silence sit longer than most instructors would have.
Then his eyes found her.
“Seren Hawthorne.” Her spine straightened against her will.
A ripple went through the room, quick and pleased.
Whatever she’d done to Dorian, this was a different contest, and half of them were already picturing her stammering through an answer she didn’t have.
The other half were just watching to see which way it fell.
Nobody in the room thought she had it.
Seren set her pen down.
Her pulse hadn’t settled from the last five minutes, but her voice came out even, because it always did.
“Succession runs through the Alpha’s bloodline first,” she said.
“Second mate’s sons inherit in birth order, no complications, provided the bond was recorded before the first Luna’s death.
Recorded after, even by a day, the council can contest on the mourning interval.” She held his eyes.
“Your notes say thirty days.
The old code says forty.
The old code wins.
Your notes are wrong.” Nobody breathed for a second.
Leandro looked at her longer than the question deserved, his face doing the thing faces did when someone was working out a number they’d been wrong about.
“Correct,” he said.
“On both counts.” Beside her, Felize made a small, pleased sound under her breath and didn’t bother hiding it.
Across the room, Yena had stopped writing.
She wasn’t looking at Leandro anymore.
She was looking at Seren the way she’d looked at her since the Fiona trap—patient, searching, too smart to be safely ignored.
The look had weight, like a hand pressed to the back of her neck.
It wasn’t hostility, wasn’t admiration.
It was the steady attention of someone who had decided a thing needed watching and was in no hurry to stop.
Seren had seen that kind of patience before.
It was the dangerous kind, and she was going to have to decide how to handle it before Yena decided for her.
Seren didn’t look back.
Give someone a reaction and they spent the next hour working out what it meant.
Give them nothing, and they had worse information to work with.
Class moved on.
Leandro turned to the next case like nothing had happened.
Only two people in that room understood that something had, and only one of them knew what that something was.
By the time the bell rang, Seren hated him exactly as much as she had walking in.
That hadn’t changed and wasn’t going to.
What had changed was the nature of the problem, not whether to hate him, but whether hating him was worth more than using him, before he got close enough to Knox again to help ruin something else of hers.
Leandro had looked at her the way he’d looked at every other student—a face attached to a name, a piece of the room he hadn’t yet sorted into useful or not.
He had no idea what she was or what she’d been building toward since she first heard his name on the assignment list.
That was an advantage, a real one, and she intended to keep it for as long as she could.
She gathered her things.
Her hands were steadier now.
Yena was already deciding whether to say something, and would probably lose that argument with herself before they reached the door.