HE WAITED 1,095 DAYS TO CLAIM ME

Chapter 16

I found out about Fen at breakfast.

Not dramatically. Not with a confrontation or a discovery, not with any of the operational clarity the cellar had given me with Marcus. It was a single line, in a compound log, on which Silas had placed his finger next to a name and date without comment. I read and put down my cup and sat very still for a moment.

It was eleven days before the day my father passed away.

The name was Fen's.

A communication routed through her terminal. Not a compound business—the routing signature was external, bouncing through two relays before landing, the kind someone used when they didn't want the origin traced. Silas had found it three weeks ago. He had sat on it because he wasn't certain and because Fen had been my father's for six years, and certainty mattered before you moved on to someone who carried that kind of history with the man.

I understood that. I also understood that three weeks was a long time to sit on something.

"Does she know you found it?" I asked.

"No," Silas said.

"Does Raze?"

"Since yesterday."

I looked up. Silas's face was as placid as ever. He had told Raze first. I filed that, decided it was the right operational call and a personal irritation in equal measure, and moved on.

"What does she have access to currently?" I said.

"Communications. Compound correspondence. Scheduling for the inner structure." He paused. “She would have been aware of the emissary meeting beforehand.”

Which meant the faction had known. Which meant Maren had walked into the west sitting room already knowing the compound's internal state, already knowing Marcus was here, and already knowing the south perimeter had been mapped by their own people. She had come to negotiate with information she wasn't supposed to have, and she had done it smoothly enough that I hadn't identified the tell until now, sitting in the breakfast room with Silas's finger resting on a date and a name and my cup going cold.

I had vouched for Fen. Not formally. I would accept her presence without question when I first was introduced to her by Raze in the operations room. She had been my father's. That had been enough for me.

It should not have been enough. My father had spent years teaching me exactly that, and I had walked back into this compound and made the same mistake inside forty-eight hours.

"Don't change her access yet," I said. "Don't move on her; don't signal anything. I want to see what she gives them between now and when we decide to act."

Silas nodded. He picked up the log and left without adding anything, which was one of the things about Silas I had always appreciated. He understood that some information needed to sit in the room for a while before it became action.

I sat with my cup and thought about Fen.

Six years. The way she had stood in the corner of the operations room, dry and competent and precisely measured in everything she offered. The way she carried herself was like someone who had been in the room long enough that she no longer needed to perform presence. I had heard that as fidelity. I had read the familiarity of her, the shorthand she used with Silas, the way she moved through the compound's rhythms, and I had called it loyalty because it looked like loyalty and I had wanted it to be.

Marcus had taught me this exact lesson twelve days ago. I guess I was still working on learning it.

One hour later, Raze came and found me in the corridor next to the operations room. I knew from the way he fell into step beside me that he had already spoken to Silas. He knew that I knew. We walked the length of the corridor together in the particular silence of two people processing the same information from different positions, and when we stopped at the window at the end of the hall, he stood beside me, and we both looked out at the yard below without speaking first.

"You should have told me last night," I said.

"You needed to read the folder first."

"After the folder."

"You needed one hour that wasn't about the compound."

I wanted to push back on that. I thought about last night, his hand finding mine in the dark after, the ceiling above us, and the pages somewhere beneath us. I found I couldn't argue, and that was its own particular irritation.

"How long have you suspected her?" I said.

"Longer than three weeks. I didn't have the log until Silas found it. Before that it was a pattern—the timing of certain information reaching the faction. Too specific to be coincidence. Too clean to be luck."

"You built a picture."

"Yes." He was silent for a second, his jaw holding that tension still for things that he was still turning over. There may be others. Fen is confirmed. "The picture suggests at least one more, possibly two. Different access levels. Different information streams."

I thought about that. My father's compound, the one he had spent thirty years building, with at least three people inside it feeding information to the faction. I thought about what it had cost him to know that and not move, to manage every conversation, every released detail, every seemingly ordinary exchange inside his own walls for fourteen months without giving away that he knew.

Building everything he knew I would need. Protecting the weapon while the people around him slowly dismantled everything else.

"He didn't tell you about the others either," I said.

"No. He was careful about what I knew." He looked at the yard below us. "In case they got to me."

The thought sat between us, heavy and specific. My father built walls even around Raze, even around the one person he trusted most completely, because the alternative was handing the faction a direct path to everything if Raze was ever compromised. Keeping him safe by keeping him neutral. Protecting him the same way he had protected me — by controlling what each of us knew so that neither of us could be fully used against him.

"He protected you the same way he protected me," I said.

"Yes." Something moved across Raze's face. Not pain in the simple sense. The specific weight of understanding a choice someone made for you long after the moment when understanding could change anything.

I knew that weight. I had been carrying a version of it since I read the last page of his letter.

I put my hand on his arm. He looked at it. Then at me. The gesture was not of comfort and not heat—it was the specific recognition of two people who had been shaped by the same man, protected by the same careful hands, and were only now, standing at this window in this corridor, beginning to understand the full geometry of it.

"Tonight," I said. "Tell me everything you know tonight."

He was staring fixedly into my eyes. "All of it," he said. And the word had two meanings, and we knew it, and we didn't look away.

I took my hand back and walked down the corridor and felt him watching me the whole length of it.

I didn't turn around.

The wanting followed me like a second shadow, patient and warm and entirely certain of where the night was going.