In the weeks that followed, while Finch worked Silverridge’s old records for any name that might explain who had authority enough to silence a desperate Beta and erase five hired rogues without a trace, life at Frostholm found a strange, steady rhythm around the investigation rather than being consumed by it. Rhea had expected the truth about her childhood to swallow everything else, the way bad news always had at Ironpeak, where one crisis used to bleed into the next until there was no ordinary life left underneath it. Here, somehow, it didn’t. The mornings still came. The training mat was still waiting. The work still needed doing, and doing it, she found, was its own kind of armor against the waiting.
Rhea kept training in the mornings. Kept working through the Lunar Council summit pre
