Chapter 347: Good Beta, Bad Bitch

"You mindlinked me ’DUNGEON. NOW. BLAIR HAS A BODY.’ That’s waking me up, Griffin," Ryker said, flatly.

"I said Blair has a SITUATION. You heard body."

"Because with Blair it’s always a body."

Blair turned to all of them with the look of a woman who was surrounded by the most competent men on two continents and every single one of them was annoying.

"Fine. Damon goes in. Brennan monitors. Sterling stands at the door. Ryker drinks. Griffin loses his threesome privileges permanently. Are we done negotiating, or would anyone else like to contribute to this clown caucus before I lose what remains of my patience?"

Nobody spoke.

Blair grabbed Damon’s arm before he reached the door.

"Keep the bag on his head. He doesn’t see your face, he doesn’t see Brennan’s face, he doesn’t know who he’s talking to. Watch his hands. Warded cuffs suppress but they don’t kill motor function. If his fingers start moving in any pattern that looks like a sequence, Brennan shuts it down."

Damon gave a single nod. The instruction was clean and tactically sound and delivered by a woman who had never once in her life interrogated a prisoner and was somehow better at the pre-brief than half the officers he’d trained.

"His tells are in his breathing," Brennan added quietly. "When he’s about to lie, he holds the inhale a half-second longer. I’ve seen it."

"From the circles," Damon said.

"From the circles."

The door opened. The door closed. Blair stood on the other side of it with Sterling, Ryker, and Griffin, and listened.

Damon’s voice came through the door muffled but audible because Blair had her ear pressed against the soundproofing with the commitment of a woman who was going to get every syllable whether the architecture cooperated or not.

"I’m going to ask you some questions. If you cooperate, this goes quickly. If you don’t, it goes differently."

"Who are you?" Marek’s voice was hoarse. Disoriented. The voice of a man who had woken up cuffed and bagged and was running diagnostics on how fucked he was. The answer was very.

"That’s not relevant to you right now."

"I am a Master Mage of House Solandris. I have diplomatic immunity under the sixth accord of the—"

"You attacked a member of the Drakencrest royal family with dark magic. Your immunity expired when your spell hit the corridor wall. Let’s start with something easy. How many times have you been inside this Keep in the last week?"

Silence. Then the half-second inhale Brennan had mentioned, visible even through a door if you knew what to listen for.

"This is my first visit."

Blair lasted one minute.

Sixty seconds. That was the full extent of Blair Drakencrest’s patience for a formal interrogation conducted at a pace that respected the prisoner’s rights, comfort, and dignity. Sixty seconds of Damon’s measured, professional, psychologically calibrated approach before Blair’s internal monarchy overruled every agreement she had made in the corridor.

She pushed off the door and walked past Ryker and Sterling without a word, heading deeper into the dungeon corridor with the stride of a woman who knew exactly where she was going because she had been down here before and the dungeon was as familiar to her as her own closet.

Ryker looked at Sterling. Sterling looked at Ryker.

The look was universal. Cross-species. Cross-kingdom. The look that every man who has ever known a dangerous woman exchanges with another man when that woman walks away with purpose and the purpose is clearly violent.

She’s in a mood.

Blair disappeared around a corner. A door opened somewhere in the dark. Metal scraped stone. Something sloshed.

She reappeared carrying a bucket.

The bucket was full. The contents were not warm. Blair held it with one hand like it weighed nothing and walked toward the interrogation door with the calm, purposeful stride of a woman who had already decided what was about to happen and the only variable was how wet the floor was going to be afterward.

Sterling’s hand went up. "Blair, we agreed that you would—"

She opened the door before he finished the sentence.

Ryker lunged. Too late. Sterling grabbed air. Griffin said "oh no" with the enthusiasm of a man who had been saying "oh no" about Blair his entire life and meant it less every time.

Inside the interrogation chamber, Damon had just settled into his chair across from Marek. He had placed both hands flat on the table. His posture was relaxed. His voice had been steady. He was building rapport the way a professional interrogator builds rapport, one careful question at a time, establishing the power dynamic, earning trust.

He was laying the foundation for a calculated, patient extraction of intel that would have produced results within twenty minutes and preserved every piece of legal standing they needed to—

Cold water hit Marek’s hooded head with the force and grace of a waterfall that had a vendetta.

The sack went from dry to plastered. Marek gasped, choked, and inhaled burlap and ice water simultaneously, which produced a sound that was half drowning and half outrage. His entire body seized against the cuffs. Water ran down his chest, pooled in the chair, and spread across the stone floor in a puddle that reached Damon’s boots in under three seconds.

Damon’s hands were still flat on the table. His face was still composed. His eyes moved from Marek to Blair to the empty bucket and back to Blair with the controlled expression of a man whose twenty-minute interrogation plan had just been waterboarded by a princess.

Blair dropped the bucket. The metal hit the stone with a clang that echoed off every wall in the chamber.

Then she kicked Marek in the chest.

Her boot connected with his sternum with the full force of a woman who had been running on fury, espionage, and zero sleep, and the kick was designed to send his chair backwards into the floor where the impact would disorient him further and establish that the rules of this interrogation had just been rewritten by management.

The chair didn’t move.

It was bolted to the floor. Blair’s boot connected. Marek’s body rocked back. The chair stayed exactly where it was. The physics she had planned for, which involved a dramatic backward crash and a mage falling wondering what hit him, were replaced by the physics of a boot bouncing off a chest that was attached to a chair that was attached to a floor that did not give a fuck about Blair’s dramatic vision.