The study had gone quiet in the way rooms go quiet before something significant. Late evening. The fire built up and burning steady. The lamps low.
Crane sat across from me.
He had been brought in without escort this time, a decision Caden had made deliberately, the small calculated risk of treating a man as cooperative in order to give him room to actually be cooperative. Crane sat with thirty years of built patience arranged into something that looked almost like stillness, and underneath it I could feel the specific wariness of a man who understood he was at a disadvantage and had decided cooperation was less costly than the alternative.
Maren sat to my left. Close enough to guide. Far enough to let the work be mine.
Caden stood at the edge of the room.
He had said he would be ther
