Pack law required a trial within seven days of a prisoner's capture, and the council spent most of that week preparing for it with the same grim thoroughness they'd brought to preparing for battle, because in every way that mattered, this was simply the next front of the same war.
I didn't sleep well during those seven days. Part of it was Cassian, still out there, still unaccounted for, his silence somehow more unsettling than the two-front assault had been, because at least an assault gave us something concrete to prepare against.
Part of it was Marisol herself, the story she'd told us in that cell settling into my chest in a way I hadn't fully processed, complicated and uncomfortable, refusing to resolve into the simple, satisfying hatred I'd carried toward her since the moment I fir
