Chapter 355

KAEL

–

“I’m going to talk to her,” I said. “Not now she’ll have a full clinic day after yesterday and she needs the space soon.” I paused. to do the work. Bur

“I’m going to tell her that I read it and I understand it and I’m not going to pretend I’ve processed everything because I haven’t. But I want her to know that I know. And that the thing she was afraid I’d feel the thing that made her write it rather than say it she was partially right. I would have refused. I would have been wrong. And I want to say that to her directly.”

–

Jordan nodded slowly. “And Sera?”

—

The Sera question. The practical, immediate problem that existed alongside the personal one and needed handling regardless of how I was feeling about Ivory’s letter.

“Sera is in our territory with a medical condition that requires treatment,” I said. “The authorization process that Ivory that is currently in the protocol

–

means Aria controls whether treatment proceeds. Aria told Nina she’d approve it with conditions.” I turned back to the window. “Sera came here with a weapon. The weapon has been emptied – Ivory emptied it by telling me first. And now Sera is sitting in accommodation on our grounds, smelling of old fish water, needing treatment she can only get from a healer she just assaulted a clinic over, waiting for authorization from the Luna she came here specifically to undermine.”

“That’s a terrible position to be in,” Jordan said, in the tone of someone who found this fact entirely satisfying.

“Yes,” I said. “It is.”

“Do you want me to manage the com.ation with her?” Jordan asked.

“Nina’s already managing it,” I said. “She’s been managing it since the gate yesterday. But yes, stay in the loop.” I thought about the coalition documentation, about the file Nina had been building, about the maintenance incident record and the clinic incident record and the correspondence that was now formally part of Shadowmere’s coalition-accessible records.

“She came here thinking she could exploit our openness. The open door policy as access. Aria’s insecurity as a lever. Ivory’s capacity to feel obligations as a pressure point.” I turned.

“Instead she got the maintenance

corridor and the fish water and a rule that requires her to go through Aria, and now she’s sitting in our territory with a medical condition she can’t get

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18f the Luna she insulted to decide whether she deserves care.”

“Shadowmere’s reputation for hospitality,” Jordan said, “remains intact.”

“We’re being very hospitable,” I said. “She has clean accommodation and access to meals and Margo checked on her this morning.” I paused.

“Margo also documented the check-in. With timestamps.”

Jordan’s mouth moved. He controlled it.

“I need to think about the letter,” I said. “The original — what Ivory produced, what it reveals about how the bond was arranged. Regardless of how I feel about Ivory’s decision, the information exists and Sera knows about it and Damon will know about it when Sera reports back.”

—

I sat down. “If Damon can reframe himself as someone whose pack was manipulated into sending Aria away if he can use that to approach Aria or approach the coalition with some argument about the bond being improperly arranged-”

“He’d need more than Sera’s account,” Jordan said. “He’d need the original letter. Which we don’t know who possessed it.”

“Right.”

“So the immediate security concern is whether Sera obtained a copy of the original or whether what she showed Ivory was the only version.”

“Ivory said she produced a letter,” I said. “I need to ask her whether it was the original or a copy. That determines the exposure level.” I made a note.

“Add that to the conversation with Ivory.”

“Added,” Jordan said, in the mental way he had of cataloguing things.

I sat behind my desk and looked at the packed morning that was waiting for me. The meetings that had been rescheduled, the coalition follow-up from the celebration, the ongoing security considerations around investigation into Damon’s movements that Nina

s presence, the had been running since before the Hunt,

All of it still there. All of it still requiring attention regardless of the letter on my desk and everything it had rearranged in my understanding of the past eight months.

“Jordan,” I said.

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“Still here,” he said.

“When Aria first arrived,” I said. “Before the ceremony, in the days when she was here and we were figuring out the situation did you know? About the bloodline. About what Ivory had

done.”

Jordan was quiet for a moment. The specific quiet of someone consulting their own memory carefully. “I knew Ivory had been involved in identifying Aria,” he said. “I knew she’d had a role in the arrangement because Nina had been the one in charge as the one overseeing things in your seclusion, and Nina often spoke to ivory about this sort of things. I assumed it was through formal channels, Nina sending Luna Margaret an official letter stamped with your seal on it – I didn’t know about the letter Ivory wrote secretly specifically.” He met my eyes. “I should have asked more questions.”

“We should both have asked more questions,” I said.

“Yes,” he said. “We should have.” He paused. “But Kael he stopped himself, chose different words.

–

we were in the third year. You were-”

“Things were not good. We were managing one day at a time. I don’t know that either of us had the capacity to scan for faults in the solution brought to us when the solution was what we needed.”