Chapter Text
She’d half-hoped this was just a cleverer-than-usual assassination attempt. Another shapeshifter trying to pass themselves off long enough to get at her. That would have been predictable. Manageable.
It really is Jayce Talis. Looking underfed, rangy, wild, even compared to those wanted posters she has filed away. He’s not the overgrown boy she first met: the square jaw all filled in with home-cooked meals, meticulously trim fresh meat underneath his too-tight uniform. But neither is he that resigned dead-man-walking she parted ways with. Those deep lines between his brows, around his eyes have given way. A renewed vitality. Some fresh mania propels the tall almost-stranger wrapped in his slightly ragged fur-lined greatcoat.
A man she’d known as a ghost for weeks, now stumbling flesh and blood into her inner sanctum. Her life in Piltover resurrected. Some deep part of Mel sings like fine glassware beneath fingertips.
Jayce leans on his walking stick, looks a little dopily around the throne room—like there’s going to be a helpful sign of court protocols tacked up on the high wall behind her—and then dips himself into a completely inadequate bow. “It’s so good to see you, Mel,” he says halfway through it, straightening back up with a guileless grin.
A whisper like the first warning breath of an incoming hurricane ruffles through the gallery of courtiers and lesser nobles.
It’s her advisor who climbs the steps to kneel beside the throne, presents the confiscated device she’d been carrying: a blue glimmer from within a shape she cannot quite decipher. Oh, Talis. Bringing Hextech here?
Mel should be furious, but she has to fight down a smile. Jayce’s painful earnestness is cool water over the perpetually reapplied burn of Noxian courtly machinations. Even Piltover’s straightforward, materialist politics ate the boy alive. He wouldn’t last five minutes in the writhing viper’s nest of Noxus.
And then that thing sidles out from behind him.
Mel tenses, even though she’d seen the sketches, heard it described in advance; reading their leader’s body language, her two mages and dozens of soldiers are suddenly primed to attack.
It looks around at the raised blades, methodical, unconcerned. Beneath a thick blue cloak, the steel battle armor of interlocking plates. Shiny reddish alloys peek through in patches, glimmering with Hextech blue highlights. The only hint of humanity is the pale cheeks showing through the slats of a helmet.
Gods, it really does look like him. It leans to murmur something to Jayce. But the lips are closed—the entire face isn’t moving, isn’t reacting. Just more metal.
Mel descends from her throne, straight towards it. The unemotive puppet face turns to regard her. Beneath the slitted visor, the independently pivoting eyes have pupils of shining, projecting gold. “Step aside, Talis,” she says, waving her hand.
Jayce does not. His hand actually goes out, supporting a metal shoulder. “Mel, it’s Viktor.”
“That’s hardly comforting,” she tells him, curt with disbelief.
Jayce eyes off her guards warily. As if, through some self-delusion, he believes he can fight his way out. “Can we go somewhere? Talk? Please?”
“Hello, Mel,” it says. She startles—hadn’t quite processed that it would be able to sound almost human. It shows two palms—the claw hovering over its shoulder drops down too. “I believe I owe you an apology—”
Her jumpy house mage Llewelyn interposes himself—addressing Jayce. “We do not permit magic within the sanctum. Your golem must be—”
“It’s Hextech,” Jayce interjects. Another ripple through the onlookers. “Not magic. Hextech. And he’s not a ‘golem’, he’s a person.”
Mel’s mouth is too dry to speak. She’d seen him deranged with grief, deranged with the weight of responsibility—but he had seemed to regain himself. Before that final battle.
“He is in there. The Viktor you know is in there,” Jayce insists, a fragile grate to his attempted emphasis. He evaluates the great mass of onlookers yet again, grimacing. Leans towards Mel, dropping his voice. “Can—can we please talk, privately?”
Her mouth is a tight line. No more public blather about Hextech—she can sense the warmongers salivating over this new prey walking into their outstretched talons and sharpened teeth. Jayce just doesn’t get it, or he would never have shown up so defenceless. In Noxus, they torture technological advances out of foreign scientists. “Your—” machine. No, he’s not going to like that, “—partner will be placed into House Medarda’s custody for the duration of our conversation.”
The huge fingers tighten. “He’s not leaving my sight,” Jayce says, flat, direct. As if he can still dictate terms after he’s walked right into a foreign stronghold like this.
“Viktor almost killed me, Jayce. I’m hardly going to be in a room alone with him.”
“That wasn’t—look, I’ll explain this all to you. And you won’t be alone with him. I’ll be there,” Jayce points out.
She resists the urge to press fingers into her temple. “That is not helpful, Mr. Talis.”
“I’m willing to go into House Medarda’s custody to facilitate your conversation.” It sounds like Viktor did: his typically monotone, constrained commentary that came out occasionally thoughtful, mostly terse. (Mostly terse around her, she tended to suspect.) But up closer, Mel notices that the timbre isn’t quite human. Shades of that hideous metallic shell that attacked them in the Council Chambers—almost strangled Jayce to death.
She feels the skin of her forearms prickle. The Arcane spiking up through her skin like hackles going up on a beast.
It is murmuring something to Jayce. She tries to focus in, let the Arcane sharpen her senses, drag out the truth from the pair in front of her. She feels, rather than hears, it finishing the sentence: “—you need to trust Mel.” So baffling she wonders if her powers are misleading her. She can sense it, almost like a person. Not all machine. And there’s something bizarrely familiar in the arcane energy radiating off it.
She is not reassured.
“Don’t damage—hurt him,” Mel tells her guards. “Minimal restraints. Place him in one of the mage-proofed cells. Give him… water? A meal?” she asks the thing that Jayce is calling Viktor.
A shake of the head. He’s going along quietly. Ominous.
“A book from the library, then. Something… scientific,” she says, waving her hand vaguely.
“Any technical work on runecraft would be appreciated. You can imagine Piltover has spurned a great deal of modern scholarship,” it says civilly to her. Almost friendly, really.
That’s all the proof she needs: this thing is not Viktor.
She gives a curt, acquiescent nod to her head of security.
Jayce just stands there, practically quivering with indecision.
“They follow my orders, Jayce. He will not be harmed. …your weapon will be secured.”
“He’s not a—” Jayce starts.
“I mean what you had confiscated out of your bag,” Mel cuts in, gesturing towards the throne. “The… Hextech,” she says, quieter.
“Oh. Thank you,” he mutters sheepishly. Still, he is paralyzed until the machine is led out of sight. Only then, locked up, skittish, does he trail her into one of the well-secured smaller chambers behind the throne room.
There is not much of the thin northern sunlight inside—but windows have their own dangers. A great wood carving depicts one of Ambessa’s triumphs. Mel should have it taken down.
Jayce stares up astonished at the carved scene, then folds himself into a chair. He rubs at the still-braced thigh, hides a wince before he turns to her. “I’m …sorry about Ambessa,” he finally says, in his over-sincere way.
She can only blink. She doesn’t think she’s heard a single consolatory word on her mother. Not even before she departed Piltover. He must know what happened; everyone knows what happened. “It had to be done.”
A deep, contemplative nod. Then, staring up through his lashes: “I know. It can still hurt.”
I don’t let it hurt. But she can’t tell a man like Jayce Talis that. She finally sees what her mother meant, after all. He makes her weaker.
Jayce keeps shooting furtive glances in the general direction they took that thing in. Like he’s worried about its comfort.
She hardens herself, sits down beside him. He reeks of stale sweat, of months of aggregated dirt. “Jayce, you’ve been through a lot,” she says, sweetly. Absolutely nothing compared to what I’ve been through. Look at me, am I undone? Have I wilfully descended into madness? She can think all these things, and more, and the mask of his kindly, understanding Mel Medarda stays in place. She was crafted for this hideous world.
He nods. Self-pitying bastard. “But I’m here. Thanks to you,” he says.
“...yes. I saved you before. So you must trust my sincere desire to protect you again when I tell you that—”
“No,” he interjects. “Well, I mean, yeah, I am alive thanks to you; you saved me from the explosion. But—” His fingers jitter. For a terrifying, mesmerizing moment she thinks he’s about to kiss her. Oh, there’s no more self-delusions that she might actually be capable of simple, boy-meets-girl love—not after all she’s done. But she can preemptively feel his weight on top of her: wild, untouched, desperate for human affection after lonely weeks on the road. And then Jayce takes her hand like he’s launching into a sermon. “Mel, I went to another world. The version of you there saved Viktor’s life. By extension, my life.”
She jerks back. The daydream is cut down like an axe through the back of the skull. “Come again?”
The explanation is not much more satisfying the second time. Jayce elaborates—talks almost half an hour with only the occasional clarifications from Mel. A bizarre story about unimaginable cosmic stakes and incongruous timelines. Far too bizarre to be an intentional deception; but maybe he’s completely lost his mind.
Wasn’t that boy, Ekko, talking about something similar? That Heimerdinger had died somewhere else, beyond their reach? She’d been preoccupied. She'd been done with Piltover.
“The Monkey Claw worked.” Jayce finally concludes. He gives an odd, pained smile. “You were so glad to see your Viktor again. He really meant the world to you—to her.”
“How touching,” Mel says icily.
“That’s why Viktor trusts you. He saw the side of you that I’ve always seen.”
She folds her arms at his sentimentalism. “Jayce, you don’t know what that thing is, or what it wants. You didn’t know last time until it was too late. Let’s not repeat our mistakes.”
“It’s not like last time. He’s himself, Mel. He wants to do good. Just talk to him—”
“This is not a situation that can be resolved as a philosophical contention, Jayce. This is about what happened in the real world. To real people.”
“I told you, the Hexcore was—” Jayce starts, urgently. “Viktor wasn’t in control. It was just using him as a puppet for its own agenda.”
“Even if I take you at your word—”
“What do you mean, ‘even if’?” Jayce asks, a frown condensing.
“—whatever survivor’s guilt you’re coping with, whatever grief you feel for your partner, it does not justify making a thing like that, Jayce. You needed to let him go. You said it yourself: your partner died in that room.”
“I was wrong,” Jayce states, suddenly blunt. She senses the juvenile joy at this reunion has faded for the man opposite her. “It’s not a thing. He’s a person. It’s Viktor.”
“What constitutes a person, Jayce? Does he have Viktor’s …brain?”
“No. …it’s more complicated than that,” Jayce says. A little condescending.
“So there’s no flesh under there? He doesn’t eat, drink. Does he sleep?” she questions.
A twitching wince instead of just coming out and saying ‘no’.
“...does he actually feel anything?”
“Do you?” Jayce retorts.
“Excuse me?”
Jayce stands all of a sudden. Paces—limps around the conference room. “I didn’t even want to come here, Mel. What the hell are you doing here, exactly? Picking sides in a civil war? Claiming House Medarda as your own? This is not what I meant by 'never being a passenger', Mel.”
Fleetingly allowed into my bed, and now you presume to know my every aspiration. But Mel is ruthless with herself. “I am on the right side of this conflict. I do not expect you have been well-placed to learn the complexities. On the road, evading your own homeland’s authorities.”
“Why are you in Noxus at all?”
“I am Noxian. I am the head of House Medarda.”
“What does that even mean to you? You told me Medardas only take from the world. That you were exiled because you weren’t like them. And I met Ambessa, and I understood what you meant—you were better than them.”
“I am House Medarda. My mother is dead; she no longer decides what Medarda means.”
“So what House Medarda means is—” a wave of that massive hand towards the carving behind, “—more soldiers wearing your house's crest piled into a blood-soaked war?”
“No good has ever been accomplished stewing in superiority on the sidelines, Jayce.”
Still incredulous: “So, you’re doing good?”
“Well. I’m not handing out coins to urchins in the slums. There is more than one type of good that can be done in this world.”
“I’m not—” he grimaces, stops mid-stride. He grips a table instead. One of his knuckles is busted up into yellowy patches and scabs; he must have been in a fight fairly recently. “I’m not being flippant, Mel. I’m trying to understand you. I’m asking: are you doing good? Can you explain that to me, please? Because all I’m hearing about is—is razed towns and massacres and rich politicians in their high castles pointing elegant fingers around their maps. Without a single thought to what those battles they’re choreographing actually cost in flesh and blood.”
Mel feels herself straighten like a pike has been driven up through her spine. “I am accomplishing what progress and peace I can for my nation of birth. I will not be lectured about my own country's intricate political situation by a man who couldn’t handle a seat on the Piltover Council for less than a week.”
Jayce doesn’t take the dig as personally as she was expecting him to. He shrugs belligerently. “Yeah, I couldn’t handle the Council, Mel. I couldn’t do good like I wanted to,” he blows out. “Can you handle Noxus?”
“Yes.”
“And that’s what you want? To rule? …was I wrong about you this whole time?” he asks her, with forlorn intensity.
“I can’t help but wonder the same thing,” she says, standing sharply. “The Jayce Talis I knew always valued human safety over his scientific progress.”
“Saving Viktor was never about scientific progress,” Jayce admits. He sits again, massages at the bruised skin over a knuckle, struggles for words. “This new Hextech—the body I made Viktor—this isn’t big picture. It isn’t about humanity; it isn’t about the future. It’s only about him.”
Not so changed, then. She feels a deep pity for this horrifying public grief he’s displaying to the world. A slow, deflating sigh and she rejoins him. “I am trying to good, Jayce. It is a knife’s edge.” She hesitates, then squeezes his shoulder. Less muscle than she remembers. He’d been twice her size. That enormous weight pressed into her form, and yet so gentle. So easy to move to her liking. “You should rest. Take some time to really think about what you’re doing, Jayce.”
“Mel, I told you: I didn’t even want to come here. I didn’t want to make this your problem. I certainly don’t want to have to form an opinion on Noxian wars.” Both hands drag back the hair falling into his eyes. “You need to talk to Viktor.”
“Do I?”
“He’ll explain the importance of this purification project. He’s the one with the burning moral imperative here.”
“Or a more sinister agenda that you’re too relieved by the return of your lab partner to register.”
“It’s not like that, Mel. I’ve seen proof of this phenomenon; I understand the danger it poses more than anyone else in this whole world. More than Viktor, even. I lived through—and I was actually cognizant during—” he sags back into a seat, seems unable to finish. “I could go settle down some long dead end where nobody looked to me for anything ever again. I could be through with trying to do good.” His eyes trail off in the direction Viktor was taken once more. “We’re equally responsible for what happened in Piltover. I made him what he was, Mel; you saw yourself what I did to him trying to save his life. Like I told you: I’d promised to destroy the Hexcore. I'd promised him.”
“You were in a state of shock.”
Jayce shrugs into himself without meeting her eye. “The difference between us is that Viktor is seeking redemption. Maybe he’s seeking it on my behalf too.”
Mel watches him minutely—each half-formed word he swallows, each twitch of his sharpened jaw, the upturned, pleading shape to his brows even when he’s not looking her way. She can tell Jayce is lying to himself; his conscience is as overactive as ever. “I’ll have you put in the guest wing. I will speak with …Viktor tomorrow. I cannot adjourn my day’s schedule any longer.” She stands. “Eat something. Sleep. You look terrible, Jayce.”
“What?” Jayce asks, now trying to catch sight of himself in the glossy ebony carving behind her. He scrapes his hair back from his forehead, smooths at his beard, then the scar through his eyebrow. Still clinging to his vanity. She smiles to herself as she exits.
It does not last long.
On her way towards her chambers, she pulls aside one of the senior butlers. “Have Mr. Talis outfitted in his House colours and crest. Tasteful, but …fitted. No expense spared.”
This must be put into terms Noxus will comprehend: a powerful political exile of noble birth. No talk of apocalypses, no illusions of old friendships. Noxus will look at Talis and see the one thing they will respect: a victor-to-be.
Talis can be reconfigured for their consumption. His machine cannot. Not on her side of the conflict, anyway.
She tries to partition off that terrifying, inhuman Viktor in the skies above Piltover from her memories of the dead man she'd once known. He’d been under the influence of an unthinkably corrosive power, Jayce had insisted.
Even reaching back so far, she finds no great nostalgia.
Viktor. The dying man. Oh, she’d known it long before Jayce had. Not in definitive terms. Not such a steep precipice rushing up to meet him. But she could be objective, in a way Jayce seemed unable to about his scientific partner. She couldn’t fail to miss his physical decline: how he had gone from standoffishly leaning away from her at opening ceremonies and fundraisers to a sickly slump in some dark corner. He would be still except for those scathing, searing golden eyes, always tracking Jayce Talis around rooms, waiting impatiently, resentfully to steer him back to their high-minded pursuits. She’d pitied the man, faintly. She could have, perhaps, summoned up more compassion had Viktor not so clearly disdained her from their very first introduction.
She never found out for what she’d earned his scorn. She was a politician, which is enough for some of those idealistic scientist types. On Piltover’s Council, which could have rankled his barely-concealed Undercity sympathies. A Noxian, a Medarda—and wasn’t he always the most obnoxiously unrealistic sort of pacifist? That’s where Jayce’s rhetoric is coming from. From grief. Carrying what he can of his friend with him still.
She stops herself short from that easy out. Viktor did not put those words in Jayce’s mouth; Jayce Talis had that exact same moralizing streak. Amid his more practical moments—too practical sometimes, too action-oriented when it came to active threats. But not a man who could ever endorse a war once he comprehended the cost.
He didn’t come here for her; he didn’t even want to see her. She allows herself just a few seconds to nurse this girlish, foolish wound of Jayce Talis’s disapproval. She wanted her friend—old friend, she wants to think of him, though it’s hardly accurate—to arrive boyish and beaming and sympathetic to her hardship. Reassure Mel that her severe measures and thorny rulings were all made in pursuit of a noble goal. And instead, Jayce arrives with censure, with suspicion.
Mel believes his story, she thinks. Still, she cannot square a version of her that has such an intimate friendship with Viktor—on Viktor’s end. Without Jayce, yes, she may have found more use for his partner. An equally brilliant scientist—even without any of that accessible charisma to be trotted out for public consumption. Viktor’s neurotic ideological rigidity wouldn’t have often clashed against her goals in Piltover. But what change could have befallen that man who so disliked her, to bring them so close?
She doesn’t have the answer—but, she doesn’t think Jayce would lie to her. Wouldn’t lie this outlandishly, anyway.
…wasn’t she softer, too? Only months ago. Didn’t she forever dream of a peaceful utopia through diplomacy alone, like some forlorn little girl clutching at an old toy? Perhaps she really did have such copious common ground with a one-note dove like Viktor.
Can’t think about it. At this moment, any slip back towards softness would be fatal. A soldier might as well shed a chestplate before a charge.
Her meetings are long and filled with awful compromises; she does not see her advisor until she’s readying for sleep. Unclasping first the stiff armored coat, then the dozens of buttons of the near-black starched silk beneath.
Clemence of Ionia enters the chamber quietly, only the faint metallic rustle of her chain headdress. The woman is tall—around her own height—with stiff, prison-pallid features, a surprising amount of muscle underneath her dull gray garb. The hair covering is barely ornamented; her tufty, almost-black-brown hair shows through in places. She might have been a beauty, once. Men might have found the mass of freckles and the dragging heaviness of those long lashes a fascinating diversion from more traditional standards.
“I suppose you’ve been spying on our new guests,” Mel murmurs, catching Clemence’s eyes briefly in the mirror.
“Of course, my liege.”
Mel’s conscience lasts through another three buttons. Her fingers are trembling with cold—she refuses to heat her chambers. She is playing catch-up on a Noxian constitution; she will not be caught shivering in a meeting, inviting speculation that southern blood runs through her veins. “Alright. What did they talk about.”
“They argued. The golem does not serve Talis as a master.”
She could correct that misapprehension. Whatever the hell that thing is, ‘golem’ is not an adequate descriptor. Later, when it serves her. “Argued over what?”
“Over what the disgraced scion of House Talis has chosen not to inform you.”
Oh, Clemence is enjoying this. Mel doesn’t dash her fun. She gets off the stiff-necked shirt, then the slinky alloy chainmail beneath, and beckons her advisor onto the bed with two crooked fingers.
Foolish, says that Ambessa that now lives only in her head. Pleasure need not be discreet, but it must be discrete from your work, child. Have your fun publicly, make it simple to parse for your enemies. Let no-one think they can blackmail you, shame you. This secrecy is below your station.
The metal jewelry over Clem’s fingertips is sharp. Like that beautiful curved black blade the ex-hostage almost killed her with, that first night they met. Before she had come to understand Mel not as Ambessa’s inheritor, but Ambessa’s murderer.
The wound at her ribs has not yet healed to a white, unfeeling scar.
“We’ll need to get them somewhere secluded, isolated, once Swain’s delegates arrive,” Mel thinks out loud. “I do not want our guests becoming a problem in our negotiations. We meet with Piltover’s ambassador in under a week, too. …Talis did always have bad timing with his grand gestures.”
“Bad timing can turn fortuitous,” Clem muses against her inner thigh. “You’ve set this scientist to produce weaponry before.”
“Jayce Talis is not to be underestimated. He is not so malleable as he seems. Now, my dear little spy,” Mel says, running the gold of the back of her fingers over that sharp cheek, “You’d better tell me what Talis is keeping from me.”
Clemence is the bastard half-sister of some notorious Ionian freedom fighter. Ambessa kept her longer than any interrogation would last—almost seven years, by the records Mel could find—and must have intended some blackmail, some gambit. How else to explain one of the few exceptions to Ambessa’s ‘no prisoners’ creed? Clem has grown subtle and harmful over those years, like one of those distilled, tasteless poisons dripped gradually out of an alembic. And still, she finds her fun: “The golem wants Talis to admit that their partnership is not as it was.” Grinning sharp canines score skin. Mel wants her to get to the point, in more than one way. “Talis insists he’s not ashamed—of what some may consider his degenerate obsession.” Not even a feeble attempt to disguise her own opinion; she is among those condemners.
Mel enjoys the sensation of breath on sensitive skin. The words do not quite untangle into meaning.
“Talis insisted he was not ashamed. That he kept secrets from you because you might, ah,” a little soft kiss, “...misinterpret. You might view him as crazed, unreliable.”
Mel allows her to drag it out.
“Talis has a fixation on it. On the golem. A sexual fixation.”
Mel suddenly stops enjoying this foreplay. She pushes upright to stare. “What?”
“I saw him fondling its waist with my own eyes when it was escorted up from the dungeon. …he barely seemed to know what his own hands were doing.”
“Jayce and Viktor weren’t—” Mel begins, brow wrinkling. Were they? Oh, she could certainly see it from Viktor. She’d taken it that he didn’t want any distraction from their great scientific accomplishments to come, but perhaps the possessiveness had a different bent. But on Jayce’s behalf? Well, he liked women—that had been rather obvious, with how overeager he’d been that night together. …and hadn’t Jayce compared his scientific partner to a brother ? “You’re certain?”
“I am confident in what I observed, my liege." A long-lashed blink. "It is the guest wing; we have methods of observation.”
Oh. Mel hadn’t even intended to have them spied on. …she doesn’t think she did.
She tries to square it. That hideous attempt at restarting life in Viktor's lax corpse. How Jayce had scooped up that irreparable broken little body and fled—fled the still-living who needed help.
And then the next time they were in that same room together. That terrifying metal vessel, tossing Jayce around like a doll, clambering all over him.
Not to mention Jayce’s current insistence that Viktor is still alive, despite all evidence to the contrary.
“I am pleased for House Medarda,” Clem says, taking Mel’s knee, fingers crooking beneath it. “The scientist’s ideological malleability is irrelevant. You protect his little toy from those that would see it taken apart, and he will serve you. I will ensure it.”
Mel leans back. She is saturated with self-indulgent, perverse pleasure. How personally she had taken Jayce’s judgment—and now, this open invitation to see it as the hypocrisy of a debased, selfish lunatic. She allows herself to imagine him, hunched over his creation, crooning the name of his dead partner. Her hips rock slightly to press into the bone of Clem’s closed jaw. She won’t let herself think of Jayce with such cruelty for long. Just a few minutes, that’s all Clem needs.
Her spy’s scarred lips press higher, tongue lathing wet through clinging silk. “I will impress this upon him. I will have him loyal to you as a hound.”
Mel should definitely say something about that. She should strangle this plot, like an unviable, deformed infant. She permits herself inaction. Temporarily.
The metal over Clem’s fingers slips beneath her skirt and up onto her hips. Eases off the silk underlayer. For just one blink in the flickering candlelight, Mel sees that talismanic facial decoration of an untaken Ionian prisoner. A trick of the gloom; it resolves to Clem’s purposeful smile.
Afterwards, Clemence prays. Prone save for her knees tucked to her chest, forehead on the slate flagstones, hands twisted to clasp hands behind her back. Some bizarre evangelizing Solari cult that had spread as far as Ionia—or perhaps she picked it up from a fellow prisoner who Ambessa interrogated and disposed of. It is not usual that a prisoner turn to religion—especially one with a fanatical, messianic doctrine of imminent salvation.
Mel does not pray; she never has. She has wrung out the last drops of that delicious superiority, and now her conscience eats at her in retaliation. Her affection for that man—that idiotic man—is not an affectation, not one of Clemence’s schemes. It is real and solid as metal that you could hold in your palm. The last trace of an old Mel.
But he must feel the same. Whatever guilt-driven psychosis Jayce has descended into, he wouldn’t let that thing hurt her.
...she'll have her guards concealed behind the conference room's doors, just in case.