Ravenna
I read everything he sent me in three hours and twenty minutes.
Not because it was a small file. It wasn't. It was the accumulated intelligence of two months of careful, methodical work — contact histories, financial cross-references, movement logs, and a dossier on the Hollow Court that Valkor had assembled from sources I could identify maybe half of, which meant the other half were channels I did not yet have access to and would need to understand. I read it the way I had learned to read everything that mattered — not for the surface of it, not for the facts presented cleanly at the top, but for the shape beneath the facts. The gaps. The things that were conspicuously absent. The questions that the file raised and did not answer.
By the time the compound had gone fully quiet a
