Sleep didn't come easily, not in a guest room two doors down from Ronan's own, surrounded by the unfamiliar sounds of a compound that never seemed to fully quiet down — low voices on patrol, the distant hum of a generator, the occasional creak of old wood settling somewhere in the building's bones.
I gave up around two in the morning and sat instead with my mother's ledger spread open across the borrowed bed, working through her handwriting page by page, searching for anything I might have missed on the first read. Most of it was cryptic — sketches of marks, half-finished theories about the Ferrum bloodline, notes on individuals I didn't recognize, crossed out with the same deliberate finality as everything else in the book.
Near the final pages, tucked between two entries about the Wido
