REBORN: THE BEAST LORDS' CONTRACT

CHAPTER 7 — The Raven's Report

Corvin Blackmoor did not believe in coincidence, omens, or unexplainable knowledge. He believed in information — where it came from, who held it, and what it was worth to the people willing to pay for it. A bride who spoke of ten years she hadn't lived was not a mystery to him. She was a problem with an answer he hadn't found yet, and Corvin had never once failed to find an answer he was properly motivated to look for.

He reached his private study within the Blackmoor townhouse before the wedding feast had even ended, ink already drying on the first page of a file that would, within the week, grow considerably thicker than he expected.

Subject: Luna Ellery, contract-bride. Claim: prior knowledge of future events across a ten-year span. Specificity: high. Verifiable claim regarding a "harvest fire" — cross-reference House Thorne agricultural records, unconfirmed future event. Assessment: either fraud of exceptional skill, or something outside current understanding of the Pact's magic. Recommendation: monitor. Do not alert the others to full extent of investigation.

He set the pen down and stared at the last line for longer than he meant to. Do not alert the others. It was instinct, the same instinct that had made him valuable to the Crown for a decade — control the information, control the outcome, tell people only as much as they needed to act the way you needed them to act.

It was also, he realized with a discomfort he didn't have a name for yet, precisely the kind of instinct a woman who already knew how this story ended might have specifically warned him about.

Corvin. He hadn't spoken to her directly yet, hadn't approached her the way the others clearly already had — Kade cornering her in the garden, Ronan trailing her through the colonnade, Sylas trading barbs with her at the harbor's edge while pretending it was flirtation instead of interrogation. Corvin preferred to watch first. He always had. It was how he'd survived a decade as the Crown's most valuable spymaster without once being caught at it.

Except she had already caught him at it once today, hadn't she — that pause in the garden, the deliberate slowness of her turn toward the hedge where he'd been standing, as if she'd known exactly where to look before she looked.

He didn't like that feeling. He liked it even less than he liked admitting he didn't like it.

A knock interrupted him — his second, Wren, a quiet woman who'd served House Blackmoor's network for six years and asked no questions she wasn't authorized to ask.

"My lord. You wanted the House Marrow correspondence flagged the moment it arrived."

She set a sealed letter on his desk, and Corvin's expression didn't change, though something in his chest went cold and familiar — the particular stillness of a man about to read something he already suspected would be bad.

He broke the seal. Read it once. Read it again, slower, to be certain he hadn't misunderstood.

House Marrow extends congratulations on the Ellery wedding and looks forward to discussing terms regarding the Sundering Pilgrimage route — specifically, the section of the Ashwood Reach bordering Marrow holdings, which we understand the Crown intends to route the party through on Day Four. We trust House Blackmoor will find it advantageous to share logistical details in advance, as has been our custom.

As has been our custom.

Corvin sat very still for a long moment, and thought — with a clarity that unsettled him more than anything Luna had said in the garden — about a version of himself, ten years from now, who had apparently made a habit of exactly this kind of arrangement. A version of himself who had, at some point, sold information about his own wife to House Marrow, the same House now politely reminding him of "custom" before the Pilgrimage had even been announced.

He hadn't done it yet. He hadn't done anything yet.

But for the first time in his career, Corvin Blackmoor looked at a letter he would once have answered without a second thought, and felt something that might, in a less careful man, have been called guilt.

He folded the letter, set it aside unanswered, and reached instead for a fresh page.

New entry, he wrote. Cross-reference required: does Lady Ellery know about House Marrow specifically? If so — how much, and how did she learn it in a life I have no memory of her living?

Outside his window, the temple bells rang the hour, and somewhere across the city, in a room she didn't yet know he'd have cause to search, Luna Ellery sat awake long after the wedding feast had ended, waiting for the one husband who hadn't come to find her yet.