Aísē: My Five Supernatural Wives-Chapter 136: Come Back Safely

He set it aside. There were more complicated things in his life than Mephistopheles and he had learned to address them in order of arrival.

Thirty years since the Corps had crossed into the human world proper.

He had been counting. Not obsessively — it was simply a fact that sat in the background of the decision, the way the weight of a thing sat in the background of lifting it. Thirty years of the ceasefire framework holding. Thirty years of the Church acting as gatekeeper for supernatural access to human lands, the whole delicate architecture of mutual restraint balanced on the agreement that nobody would test its edges unless the provocation was severe enough to justify the cost.

He had crossed the edge. He had done it this morning, and he had done it without hesitation, which was not the same as without thought. He had thought. Extensively and carefully, every mile of the ride here, turning the political geometry from every angle he could find.

The conversations that would follow. The justifications that would need to be built and maintained in rooms full of people who had not been on this road and would not have made this call. The pressure from the Association, from the other faction heads, from every interested party who would see the Bloodhound Corps in English territory and draw their own conclusions about what it meant for the ceasefire going forward.

He had calculated all of it.

And then he had thought about Aisha, and crossed anyway.

That was the part he did not say aloud, and would not say aloud, because saying it aloud transformed a Commander executing a politically justified retrieval into an uncle crossing international lines for family — and those were two very different things to be standing in front of an inquest explaining.

The political justification was real. It was not manufactured. A Saintess of the Church in a volatile situation in human territory was a genuine reason for the Bloodhound Corps to move, and it would hold up in any room he was likely to find himself in afterward. He was not lying about it.

But it was not the reason he had given the order without hesitation.

He had grown up under the same roof as the man Aisha called grandfather. Had eaten at the same table, had argued in the same hallways, had been shaped in ways he still could not always identify by the particular patience and the particular steel of Pope Adrian de Transilvania — who was not his biological father, who had never pretended to be his biological father, and who had nonetheless been more of a father to him than Vlad Dracul had managed in several centuries of refusing to acknowledge his existence.

Aisha was Adrian's granddaughter.

Which made her, through the only family structure that had ever actually meant anything to Vanir, his niece.

He would not say that in any official capacity. He would not put it in any report or use it as any part of his justification. He would stand in whatever rooms came after this and give the political argument clearly and calmly and let it carry the weight it needed to carry.

But on this road, on this morning, in the privacy of a silence that his Corps had learned not to interrupt —

He was riding for his niece.

Rein appeared at his shoulder. "Signatures inside are stable. Three clusters — the old one, a saint-class, and a mixed group. At least two demon-adjacent, two human baseline."

"The Saintess."

"Clearer than an hour ago." A pause. "She's tired, Commander. But holding."

Vanir said nothing for a moment.

He had been tracking her signature since the boundary. That particular quality of holy mana — Aisha's specifically, which he could have identified blindfolded at twice this distance — cut through suppression the way light cut through water. You could not suppress a Saintess's signature the same way you suppressed ordinary power. It had its own frequency. It simply *was,* regardless of what anyone wanted.

She was tired. She was holding.

That was enough. Everything else came after. 𝒇𝓻𝓮𝓮𝙬𝙚𝒃𝒏𝓸𝙫𝒆𝙡.𝓬𝓸𝒎

"Formation holds until I give the word," he said, loudly enough for the front ranks to carry it back through the Corps. "We do not advance past the perimeter without my signal. We do not engage. We do not give anyone inside those walls a reason to read our arrival as a threat." He paused. "We are here because a Saintess of the Church is inside that building. That is the justification. That is what we state."

Acknowledgement moved back through the formation in a quiet wave.

He thought, briefly, about Sistene.

He stopped thinking about Sistene with the practiced efficiency of a man who had done it many times and had absolutely no intention of examining how much practice it had taken.

He pressed his heels in.

The horse moved forward. The Corps moved with it, sixty signatures rolling through the thinning fog in disciplined formation, and the abandoned town grew rooftop by rooftop into something real and close and no longer deniable.

He would be there in twenty minutes.

Twenty minutes was nothing at all.

.....

....

Before writing, let me re-read the end of chapter 133 one more time to make sure the continuation connects perfectly from where the Vanir POV closes.

The Vanir section ends with him twenty minutes out, riding toward the town. The natural continuation would be either:

- Jumping back to **Valerian** in the hideout, final preparations before he leaves for Austin

- Or a **brief bridge** showing the last moments before everything converges

Given the chapter structure and the 700 word limit, a Valerian closing section makes the most sense — the catalyst settling in his blood, the group's final quiet before he walks out the door, and that last beat of tension before the operation begins. Writing now:

---

*....*

The plan had been explained twice.

Victor had asked the same three questions in different orders both times, which meant he understood it and was looking for the flaw rather than the shape of it, which was exactly what I needed him to do.

He hadn't found a flaw. Neither had Mariabell, who had asked fewer questions and sharper ones. Neither had Aisha, who had listened to the whole thing with her hands still in her lap and then said, quietly, that she would be ready, which from Aisha was worth more than an extended confirmation from anyone else in the room.

The catalyst had been in my bloodstream for twenty minutes.

I could feel it — not painfully, not yet. A low, steady resistance sitting somewhere behind my sternum, like pressure on the inside of a closed door. Mephistopheles had said I'd feel it at twenty minutes and she had been precise about everything else this morning so I trusted the timeline. Forty minutes to full integration. Thirty to Austin's location, give or take.

The margins were tight. They had always been tight. That was the plan.

I stood at the window while the others moved around the room behind me — Victor checking his equipment with the focused energy of someone who had accepted an impossible situation and was managing it by being useful, Mariabell talking quietly with Aisha in the corner in that low, even way she talked when she was making sure someone else was grounded before she needed to be, Liliana sitting on the edge of the table with her arms folded and her tail very still, which was how I knew she was more worried than she was showing.

The morning outside was grey and unchanged.

Somewhere out there, Austin was waiting in a prepared room with a ritual circle on the floor and a chair across from it that had my name on it in all but lettering. Somewhere further out, something was moving through the fog toward this town — something strong and disciplined and carrying, through a thread in my chest I still hadn't looked at directly, a presence that felt like warmth pressed up against cold glass.

I didn't look at the thread. Not now. Looking at it now would cost me something I couldn't afford to spend before walking into Austin's circle.

After. Everything after.

Liliana appeared beside me. She didn't say anything immediately — just stood close enough that her shoulder was almost touching mine, her gaze on the same grey morning I was looking at.

'You're thinking too loudly,' she said eventually, in the tone she used when she meant it as an observation and not a complaint.

"I'm always thinking too loudly."

'Not like this.'

I didn't argue with that.

She turned to look at me — not the sideways look she used when she was being calculating, but the direct one she saved for moments when she had decided that being direct was more important than being composed. Her purple eyes were steady.

"Come back," she said. Not as a question. Not quite as a demand. Somewhere between the two, in the register she used when she meant something too plainly to dress it up.

I looked at her.

"I always do," I said.

She held my gaze for another moment. Then she reached up, adjusted the collar of my jacket with two precise fingers, and stepped back.

"Good," she said, and the composed version of her face slid back into place. "Because if you don't I will find whatever afterlife you end up in and make it considerably less peaceful."

Behind us Victor made a sound that was not quite a laugh.

I turned from the window.

The room was as ready as it was going to be. The plan was as solid as plans got when they had moving parts and a ticking clock and a man on the other end who was considerably more dangerous than he looked sitting in a chair with a cane.

I picked up my coat.

"Alright," I said. "Let's go."

....

Hope you enjoyed the chapter — leave a comment if you have any thoughts!