Page 61 of Shadowed

"Sybillis is selling intelligence to Frost Court."

No preamble. No softening. I give him the information the way I'd give a fence a price—flat, precise, final.

He goes still. Not frozen—still. The stillness of a predator reassessing the landscape.

I give him the rest. Varek's name. The questions asked. The specific details Sybillis provided—deployment capacity, sentinel responsiveness, restoration speed, the willing-choice mechanism. Everything I heard, in the order I heard it, exactly as it was said. My memory is not perfect but it is very good and I've been practising information retention since I was six, because in the rookeries the difference between a profitable fence and a ruined one is the accuracy of your inventory.

He listens. Does not interrupt. Does not ask how I came to overhear it. He knows I walk silently. He knows I map acoustics. He knows what I am.

"Thank you," he says.

Two words. No performance. No elaboration. The gratitude of a male who understands what was just handed to him and does not need it dressed up.

His face does something I've never seen before.

The predator is still there—Caligo doesn't contain anything as shallow as a single expression—but underneath it is something else. Written in the way his jaw tightens. The way his shadows stop their restless pattern at the window. The specific shape of a male watching the carefully ordered architecture of trust crack open.

Sybillis has been with him for centuries. Older than Ashworth. Older than the human civilisation he's been watching from Shadow Court. She turned that history into currency and sold it to Frost Court like it was a commodity with a price.

The shadows in the room deepen. Not a tantrum—something worse. Something controlled. The walls themselves seem to draw inward, and I watch him process not just the betrayal but the scope of it. How long has Sybillis been feeding intelligence? How many times has she stood beside him and smiled while planning how to strip his court bare?

I see it in the way he breathes—shallow, controlled, the breath of a male keeping something monstrous on a very short leash.

His shadows reach for me. Just for a moment. The same way they reached for me in the garden when I was breaking. Not comfort—Caligo doesn't deal in comfort. Witness. The shadows that know what it is to have trust weaponised, to be betrayed by something you believed was loyal. They've been part of him for eons. They know what she took.

I nod. I leave.

I'm three steps down the corridor before I recognise what I just did.

The south corridor leads to the dimensional passage. I walked through it on the way to the alcove. I was twenty feet from the exit—the passage that takes you from Shadow Court to Ashworth in three seconds of dark. Twenty feet from the alley off Lantern Row and the fog and the coal smoke and the flat in Coppergate where my siblings sleep in rooms that stay warm because a Fae prince pays the bill.

The dimensional passage pulls at the edge of my awareness like gravity. Between-worlds air, cold in a way that has nothing to do with temperature. A threshold that exists in the space between existing. I know the sensation of it down to my spine because I've walked it seventeen times now. Three seconds of dark and then Ashworth rain and stone beneath my feet that knows my weight.

My body knows the way home.

My feet knew it when I heard Sybillis's clipped voice through the alcove. When I was pressing myself against the wall and mapping the geography of betrayal, some part of me was already planning the exit. Left turn at the corridor's end. Twenty feet. The passage opens like a mouth. Walk through. Choose exile over whatever this is.

I heard Sybillis selling secrets. I had leverage—information that could buy me passage out, buy me freedom, buy me anything I wanted if I played the right fence. I'm a thief. Leverage is my native currency. I've been trading information for survival since I could talk. Sybillis's intelligence is currency in a different market, the kind that buys passage out of Fae courts entirely.

The Frost Court delegate would have paid. Gold, power, safe passage—any of it. I could have walked out of Shadow Court a rich woman.

Instead I walked past the exit.

I can mark the exact moment. My feet on the cool stone of the corridor. The passage shrinking behind me as I turned left instead of right. The cold between-worlds air still touching the back of my neck as I moved deeper into the court instead of toward it.

Every survival instinct I've spent twenty years sharpening was screaming at me to turn around. To walk the twenty feet. To trade the information for my freedom like a rational thief would.

I walked to the throne room instead. I gave him the intelligence for free.

The passage is probably still open. The dimensional door doesn't close just because someone with survival instincts walked past it. It's still there. Still cold. Still offering me a way out.

I don't go back for it.

"You walked right past the exit," I tell myself. My voice is quiet in the empty corridor. "Twenty feet. You heard her talking and you went to warn him instead of going home."

Home. The flat in Coppergate is not home anymore. I'm not sure when that changed. Somewhere between the garden and the blade and the forty-three girls and the knot and the shadows catching my tears. Somewhere in the last six weeks, home became a court made of darkness and cool stone and a male whose shadows tell stories he won't say in words.

I go to my room. Sit on the bed. Look at the shadow-marks on my wrists—darker today, the patterns more complex, spreading toward my elbows. They shift when I move. They pulse when I think about him.