Iandre did not move to stop Gavin.
Not yet.
She watched him the way she had watched men arm charges in narrow corridors, the way she had watched medics clamp tourniquets while their hands shook, the way she had watched officers make choices they would pretend later had been inevitable. His hand hovered near the incinerator's mouth, skin reddened, and the heat was doing exactly what he wanted it to do. It was not bravado for an audience. It was a ritual. A reminder to himself that pain was preferable to doubt.
The flame light threw sharp angles across the room and made the terminals look harsher than they were, all white glare and reflected heat, but it did not soften her focus. She took in the stacked binders, the thick paper trails, the logistics of it, and then she let her gaze travel to Dante's workstation, where images looped and rewove themselves with the smooth confidence of someone who had done this before and enjoyed doing it.
Only after she had seen enough did she speak, and even then it was quiet, pitched so it was meant for the people in the room rather than the corridor outside.
"Gavin," she said, her tone polite in the way a blade can be polished before it cuts. "Step away from the incinerator."
Not an order given in anger. An instruction given in control.
She did not wait for obedience to prove a point; she simply continued, because the point was not dominance, it was clarity.
"This is not what you think it is," she added, eyes flicking once to the documents and then back to him. "You are not in danger. You are burning leverage, and you are doing it in a room that is already too warm with intent."
Her posture remained immaculate beside Rellik, but there was a subtle shift in her stance, weight redistributed, shoulders settling into readiness the way soldiers did right before a door blew inward. The Force around her was not flaring or dramatic, but it tightened, like a net being drawn closed, and the air in the room seemed to notice.
She turned her head slightly toward Dante, not with hostility, but with the calm certainty of someone who had sat through enough tribunals to know what a manufactured narrative looked like.
"And you," she said evenly, "are clever enough to understand the difference between shaping a public statement and falsifying a record, so do not insult everyone in this room by pretending you do not know which one you are doing."
The hum of the terminals grew louder after that, as if the building itself had leaned in.
Iandre's gaze returned to Gavin, and her voice lowered by a fraction, gaining that quiet edge that officers used when they were done with discussion.
"If the Assembly wants to claw at Rellik, let them," she said. "Let them scream about expenditure and optics and pretend they were not applauding while victories were clean, because that hypocrisy is not lethal."
She nodded toward the incinerator with a small tilt of her chin, as if the flame were simply another piece of equipment in the room.
"This is lethal," she continued. "Because when you destroy primary material, you do not erase accusation, you create a vacuum, and vacuums get filled by whoever shouts the loudest and lies the best."
A pause, brief but deliberate, and then she looked at Rellik—not to ask permission, but to make sure he heard her the way she intended: as a shield that would not step aside.
"They did not pull you out of that chamber to protect you," she said softly. "They pulled you out because someone needed time, and because they assumed you would not bring anyone who could
feel the shape of what they are doing."
Her eyes lifted again, sweeping the doorway, the corridor beyond, the guards posted outside, cataloging how their attention had been guided, how their stillness was too measured to be natural.
"And while they are doing this," she said, "something else is moving on Bastion."
She did not claim to know the details, because she did not need to, but the certainty was there all the same, anchored in that pervasive pressure she had felt the moment the corridor doors closed behind them.
"Whether it is infiltration, sabotage, or a manufactured crisis meant to justify the very story you are trying to write," she continued, "I cannot yet say, but I can tell you this: the timing is coordinated, and coordination means intent."
Her hand drifted, casually, to rest near her belt, not reaching for a weapon, but making it clear that if a weapon became necessary, she would not hesitate long enough for someone else to regret it.
She looked at Gavin one last time, expression still calm, still controlled, but with steel threaded beneath it.
"If you want to serve Rellik," she said, "then stop feeding the fire and start preserving the truth."
Then she shifted half a step closer to Rellik's side, the motion small, almost intimate, but the effect unmistakable: a second lieutenant of the Lilaste Order placing herself between her Diarch and whatever walked through the door next.
"And if anyone comes through that door who is not supposed to," she finished, voice quiet and absolutely certain, "I will put them down before they get a second breath to decide otherwise."
Diarch Rellik
Gavin Vel
Dante Phantomhive
