Chloe's POV
The war room was empty when I went back the next morning.
I told myself I only wanted my shawl, the one I'd left over the back of a chair. That was true. It was also not the whole truth.
The maps were still scattered where Theron and I had left them, some torn, one soaked through where a cup had tipped. I gathered them without really looking, stacking them back into some kind of order, and that was when I saw it.
A folded scrap of parchment, half-crushed under the corner of the eastern border map.
Adrian's hand.
I recognized the slant of it from the strategy notes he'd shown me the day before. My first instinct was to leave it. My second instinct won.
I unfolded it.
It wasn't a love letter. It wasn't a confession, either, not the kind I'd been braced for since the messe
