Chapter Twenty-Four
Caden is awake before I finish the sentence.
Not the slow surface of someone dragged from sleep. Immediately present, immediately focused, the way he wakes when something is wrong. He sits up and looks at me and reads my face and his jaw sets.
"Tell me," he says.
I tell him.
All of it. The logic walking backward from the document to the room to the exit to the intention. The thing Aldric gains from us knowing the bond can complete. The thing a permanent Luna of Blackmoon represents on a board Aldric is still playing.
When I finish Caden is very still.
Then: "Who would pay for that."
"Someone who wants Blackmoon territory and cannot take it by force," I say. "Someone who knows that a permanent Luna with a founding bloodline dispute creates a legal opening. A cont
