Pulse of Control
Charlie rose to his feet again. His tone firmed. “Look, this doesn’t have to turn into some kind of siege. I can open the door. I know what’s in there—nothing dangerous, just… books.”
Why the hell is he trying to pull rank on Dru? Is this something to do with Rune?
Then he did it. He snickered.
A nervous tell of his. I’d seen it only when he was covering up something regarding Rune.
Allowing a pulse in his direction, I let my empathic skills surround him, like a bubble with feelers. The best I could tell, he didn’t know anything for certain. If anything, he was confused, as if he wasn’t sure if he needed to be covering for Rune or not. Maybe he and his blushing bride weren’t as in sync as they pretended.
For now, I needed to distract him from his need to be something between hero and martyr.
I reached into the neckline of my shirt with deliberate slowness. From its hiding place, I pulled out his access card I’d tucked there earlier. His eyes widened. A faint pink crept up his neck.
“Still want it?” I mouthed. “Go ahead. Come and get it.”
I barely registered Raven’s chuckle from beside me on the floor. Like he had a front-row seat to a comedy show.
Charlie blinked, then blushed deeper. He started to reach. Then stopped. His hand retreated an inch as if the card had turned radioactive.
Even when he was my boyfriend, he wouldn’t have dared. Not if he didn’t want to draw back nubs for fingers.
I smiled sweetly, then gripped the plastic card by the edges with one hand. The thing was tougher than it looked, engineered to withstand daily use and the occasional dropped wallet. I had to apply real pressure. The edges cut into my fingers as the card bent nearly double before finally giving way with a sharp crack that made everyone—especially Charlie—flinch.
“Oopsie,” I said, handing him the useless halves. “Those things are so flimsy.”
I tucked my hands behind my back, hoping no one would notice the deep red marks the card had left across my fingers.
The lead campus officer spotted opportunity in the wreckage. He advanced toward Charlie, shoulders squared. “Mr. Peterson, you said you could open that door. Do it.”
Charlie stared at the broken pieces of plastic in his palm. He looked up at the officer with genuine confusion. “I… my card is… ”
“Find another way.” The officer’s voice carried no room for negotiation. “You work here. You have access.”
Poor Charlie.
The man who’d spent years trying to please everyone now found himself caught between competing authorities. I could feel his panic spiking—that old need to make somebody, anybody, happy, with nobody left to pick.
He’d lost everything since marrying Rune. Me. Dru’s trust. The majority of his clearances. He was on thinner ice than he knew, but I didn’t sense that he had anything at all to do with the anonymous tip. Only that he was afraid he knew who had called in the report and that he’d gotten them close enough to know something dangerous hid behind the so-called closet door.
Somewhere in the room, I could still sense someone’s satisfaction. More like gleeful anticipation. I couldn’t pick out the emotions from any one person in the room, but they were there, and strong.
But it wasn’t Charlie.
Was that it? Was Charlie putting on a show for someone else to see how helpful he was?
Charlie’s gaze darted between the officer and Dru. He hunted for guidance from someone, anyone.
Then Dru squinted at him.
Not a word. Not a gesture. Just a single, steady look that carried the solidity of decades of institutional authority. The kind of look that reminded you exactly who held your career in their hands, who wrote your performance reviews, who decided whether your contract got renewed. Charlie had spent enough faculty meetings on the receiving end of that look to understand its meaning perfectly, and no amount of playing the good guy or the earnest employee would help.
His shame spiked. I could almost taste it.
He backed away from the vault door, shoulders slumping.
The campus officer sighed heavily. “Mr. Peterson—”
“I don’t have another way in.” Charlie’s voice was barely audible. “That was my only access card.”
Probably his last access card, I wanted to say. At best, he’d never again have access beyond Gate 1.
Somewhere, a keypad clicked, and then the main door burst open. Not quite fast enough, though. The woman shoved it before the opening was wide enough.
“What,” she said in a crisp voice from the doorway, “for the love of God, is going on up here now?”
Deanna Paige O’Neal stood framed in the entrance. She surveyed the scene with a weary expression, like she’d spent her entire adult life cleaning up messes for a living. Deanna and Dru were roughly the same age, but Deanna still dyed her hair to hide the silver. The lanyard around her neck held her photo ID and several access cards, including the plain blank one for Special Collections that, if you were close enough, showed the faint single line of numbers indicating full access to Gate 1. As Head Librarian for the main university system, she outranked everyone in the building except the Chancellor himself, but even she wasn’t aware of the most secure gates in our corner of the university library and had never been granted access higher than Gate 1 because she didn’t have a need-to-know.
She also happened to be Samantha’s mother, which explained why Dru felt forced to hire Samantha as a part-time library assistant last year when Samantha had still been a glowering would-be witch with an unhealthy interest in Dru’s occult collection.
I glanced at Samantha and knew instantly that after she’d notified Dru of our visitors, she’d called her mother. Not out of closeness—or Deanna’s fire power.
Deanna’s gaze swept the room—officials with clipboards, staff members on the floor, Samantha quiet but safe, a second German Shepherd sniffing around Charlie’s secret stash of snacks, Dru standing guard at the vault door—and her mouth puckered.
“Officers,” she declared with the particular authority that came from dealing with entitled undergraduates and overzealous administrators for twenty years, “I’m going to need to see those warrants.” She stalked into the room, headed straight for the man who thought he was in charge, leaning in to violate his personal space. Her sensible shoes squeaked as she approached him. “Doctor Saint Augustine,” she asked without looking in Dru’s direction, “are you well?”
“Perfectly fine.” Dru didn’t move from her position near the vault. “Though I do believe we have a procedural issue.”
“I’d say we have several.” Deanna took the search warrant from the officer. She flipped through it like she’d done this a hundred times—and she probably had. “This is a memo, not a warrant, and it specifies hazardous materials and explosive compounds. Have you found any?”
“We haven’t completed our search,” the EHS officer interjected. “There’s a sealed room we haven’t been able to access.”
“This is a SCIF,” Deanna said. She continued to examine the paperwork. “I’m familiar with the protocols.” She folded what they kept calling a warrant and handed it back. “Gentlemen, nothing else happens until University Counsel reviews this situation. The liability alone…”
She extracted her phone from her pocket even though Dru had expressly forbidden them. “Chancellor Inman? Yes, it’s Deanna. We have a situation in my library that requires your immediate attention.”
The lead officer’s patience visibly expired. He bristled, straightening to his full height. His chin jutted toward the nearest dog. “Ma’am, I have a credible report, and my K-9s are giving a positive indication for accelerants near that door frame. SCIF or not, I cannot ignore a direct alert from a trained animal. For the safety of everyone in this library, you need to open that door.”
Perfect timing.
Deanna’s arrival had thrown a bureaucratic wrench into the officer’s momentum, but I could feel his frustration building to dangerous levels. This wasn’t going to hold him for long.
“Chancellor Inman will be here within the hour,” Deanna announced. She pocketed her phone. “Until then, this facility remains under University jurisdiction.”
The officer snapped his pen into his breast pocket. “Ma’am, we’re not leaving this building until we’ve completed our authorized search.”
“I understand,” Deanna replied smoothly. “But you’re also not accessing that room without proper federal oversight. I’m sure you can appreciate the position that puts the University in.”
Dru glanced at the wall clock. Her lips thinned. She pivoted to the vault’s side panel. Her hand hovered near the circuit controls.
“What are you doing?” I mouthed.
“Buying us a little more time,” she mouthed back.
And then she killed the power.
A slow internal clunk echoed through the room, followed by the faint mechanical whir of the vault sealing under fail-safe protocol. The air pressure shifted as the last magnetic lock engaged—final, deliberate, absolute.
“What did you just do?” The lead officer’s tone dropped. If looks could kill…
“Standard SCIF protocol.” Dru rested her hand on the control panel. “When security is compromised, the facility locks down until proper authority can be restored.”
“We’ll get tools.” The officer snapped his fingers at one of his subordinates. “Crowbars, cutting equipment—”
Veronica snorted softly from her position on the floor.
Dru’s mouth quirked, closer to a smile than not. “It’s a SCIF. You really think a crowbar will get you in?”
The question just sat there. Nobody picked it up, and I had to bite my lip to keep from laughing. She was right. The vault had been designed to withstand everything from electromagnetic pulses to direct assault. A campus safety officer with a crowbar wasn’t going to make a dent, literally or figuratively.
The officer stared at the sealed door, then at Dru, then back at the door. The silence stretched until it became almost comfortable, broken only by the distant sound of students walking past in the main library and a campus-wide alarm.
Finally, Deanna cleared her throat. “Gentlemen, I suggest we all take a breath and wait for proper counsel to arrive. Doctor Saint Augustine, perhaps we could discuss this situation in more detail?”
“Some of the texts in that vault could be weaponized in the wrong hands,” Veronica explained from her seat on the floor. “That’s why the delay matters.”
But even as she spoke, I could feel the tension in the room ratcheting higher. Even with the vault sealed, someone in this room still believed we’d already lost. Because while Dru had bought us time, she’d also escalated the stakes beyond anything we could easily walk back from.
And somewhere in the emotional turbulence of the room, that thread of satisfaction I’d sensed earlier pulsed stronger than ever. It was confident, cloaked, and far too patient to be Charlie.
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