Thursday evening arrived with the particular tension of a confrontation carefully planned but genuinely uncertain in its outcome, and Wren sat in the third row of Ashford Hollow's modest council chambers, Cruz beside her, feeling the weight of every eye that turned their way as word of their presence rippled quietly through the assembled crowd.
The council chamber itself occupied the county building's largest meeting room, worn wooden benches arranged before a raised dais where five council members sat, Robert Hensley among them — a genial-looking man in his fifties, silver-templed, wearing the comfortable, unremarkable authority of someone who'd spent decades as a respected local fixture. Watching him greet constituents before the meeting's formal start, warm and unhurried, Wren found it
