ANNA'S POV
The morning session ran long.
Trade route amendments, port access language that took three rounds before Shadow Moon's lead negotiator would put his initials to it, a boundary dispute that should have died in pre-summit correspondence and hadn't — I chaired two hours of it with the exact focus of someone who hadn't slept and was using the work to keep from thinking about what waited on the desk in her suite.
By the time the afternoon session broke for gala setup, I had signed four documents, settled two disputes between delegates who knew better, and gone about forty-five minutes total without thinking about the note.
That was the best I could do.
The gala was Crimson Moon's night — the summit's centerpiece, the thing the whole festival had been building toward. Three packs
