Chapter 966: House Rules
"Hello, dear," my mother said.
Alyssara didn’t turn. The crimson thread at my throat held, a single millimeter too tight. Every instinct I own wanted to swing, to burn, to break—everything in me that has ever kept me alive answered with the same truth: ’not here.’ Stella’s breath was steady against my shoulder. I kept it that way.
Alice didn’t touch Alyssara. She didn’t need to. The ward along her palm brightened, then settled, as if the sigils in the paint had just remembered who taught them their letters.
"House rule," my mother said, calm as a kitchen fire she had already decided would not take the cabinets. "No blood in my dining room."
Alyssara’s smile tilted. "The Nightingale matriarch," she said. "At last. I wondered when the editor would leave the back room."
"I prefer the sink," Alice said. "Less pretense. More work done."
The crimson thread at my throat didn’t loosen. If anything, the room felt cleaner, like we had stepped into the line between sentences. Alyssara’s power is like that—malicious order. It makes your tools polite before it takes them away.
Alice raised her hand, not high, and wrote in the air with one finger.
Ink that wasn’t ink caught on nothing and stayed. A neat line appeared along the crown molding in tiny block script, clean as a ledger: "This is a home scene. Hospitality law applies."
My Mythweaver, when I use it, drags a space around us and asks it to be a story. Hers didn’t need to drag. She didn’t make a domain. She penciled in the margin and reality moved over to make room for the note.
Alyssara’s eyes narrowed. The thread around my forearm wavered. Across the table, I felt my fiancées test the slack at their wrists and find none. Luna’s light hummed in my bones and waited, steady.
"You’re strong," Alyssara said, and the compliment was not flattery. "Older edition. Fewer tricks. More authority."
"I have one gift," Alice said. "It’s enough."
She wrote again, faster now, the letters forming in the air like sewing: "No binding by guests. No naming without consent. No harm to sleepers." Each clause set the ward humming in a new key.
The crimson threads considered. They did not break. They did what good villains do when faced with law—they tried to read their way through.
Alyssara’s hand twitched. The red lines rippled and re-labeled themselves "ribbons" in some sly grammar that was and was not a word. Rachel’s Redeemer comb washed over them and found nothing to clean. Cecilia’s interlocks clicked and refused, because her rules don’t argue with the margin when it’s written in a mother’s hand. Seraphina’s cold crystallized and fell away like sugar in tea. Reika’s cuts closed as soon as they opened. Rose’s blue geometry filled with red again, like a vein taking a dye.
The loop at Stella’s ankle—that I hadn’t even seen settle there—stalled. Alice’s eyes cut to it and her mouth tightened by a millimeter. She added a footnote under the air: "By the old Guest Rite, sleeping children are outside the scene." The loop slid off and hit the floor with no weight at all.
It was hard for her. My mother didn’t sweat. She doesn’t show strain the way other people do. But there was a shine at her temple that hadn’t been there, and the ward under her hand was beginning to glow through her skin.
Alyssara finally turned. She didn’t look away from Alice’s hand when she spoke. "You rewrote the room," she said softly. "Neat. But I didn’t come to fight in your kitchen."
"You came to threaten my family in my kitchen," Alice said. She did not raise her voice. It filled the room anyway. "Those are different verbs."
Luna stepped between the table and the entry without making it look like a move. Golden eyes, amethyst braid, Purelight steady as breath. "Release him," she told Alyssara, meaning me, meaning all of us.
"Or what?" Alyssara asked, genuinely curious.
"Or I forget manners," Luna said.
"Don’t," I said, because if this turned loud the house would pay the bill and I live here.
Alice wrote a third line in the margin. The letters looked like they had teeth: "Scene boundary drawn. No antagonist escalation permitted beyond preface."
The threads around my throat and wrist resisted like clever wire. Then, very slowly and very unwillingly, they unstitched themselves into loose strands and drifted back toward Alyssara’s hand like hair in water.
Alyssara watched them return with an expression I hated for how interested it was. "You’re better than he is," she said to my mother, meaning my Mythweaver, meaning the part of me that is still a student. "For now."
"It’s my job to be," Alice said. "He’s my son."
Jealousy flickered across Alyssara’s face, bright and stupid. She looked past Alice to me and then to the six women who had not moved an inch from where they would die for me. "It hurts," she said, voice almost conversational. "I want to kill them." Her gaze moved across them one by one, gentle as fingertips, lethal as a wire. "All six."
Rachel’s fingers flexed. Cecilia’s spine stayed straight. Seraphina’s mouth flattened. Reika’s stance lowered a hair. Rose didn’t blink. Luna’s light deepened until my skin remembered sunlight on river rock.
Alice didn’t write that time. She spoke it, and her gift put ink on the air anyway. "Not in this house. Not in this city."
The words hung there like law set in stone. The ward took them and ran them down the walls, into the floor, up through the vents, into the glass. The city answered in a way I had not heard since I was very young—buildings are stories too, if you are patient enough to listen to bricks.
Alyssara pushed. It was small—half a thought. The crimson lines moved to answer her and hit the sentence Alice had just spoken like a pane of invisible glass. The room rang, high and thin, just once.
Alice’s hand shook. She hid it by smoothing the air as if it were a napkin.
I realized: ’Even for her, this is work.’
Alyssara’s smile returned, sharper now that it had failed to cut. "This is why I like you," she told my mother. "You make the game fair for people who would otherwise die. It’s very sweet."
"And this is why I have never liked you," Alice said, letting a breath out through her nose, "you call murder a game when you are bored."
Alyssara looked back at me like we were alone. She can find that angle in any room. "Do your best," she said softly. "Get stronger. I am waiting in the parts of the sky your mother’s sentences don’t reach."
She flicked her fingers toward my fiancées and Luna without taking her eyes off me. "I was telling the truth," she added, and the jealousy in her voice came out raw. "My heart hurts. I want to kill all six."
Luna took a step she didn’t mean to. I tightened my free hand, a warning.
Alice moved first.
She didn’t write this time. She turned her wrist and tore the line she had written in the margin, the way a seamstress rips a basting stitch to move a hem.
The room caught on that rip and began to slide.