Damien's POV
She argued like she moved through rooms.
I had been watching this since the briefing in Crestfall, the way she thought through something before she spoke, and when she spoke it was precise and unhurried and located exactly where the weight of the exchange needed to be placed. She did not fill space with her words. She used them the way a careful person uses anything of limited supply.
It made disagreeing with her difficult in a way I had not anticipated.
We had been in the war room for two hours, reviewing the intelligence Bastian had compiled on the approaching threat. The mobilization reports from the eastern borders. The communication logs that the traitor's arrest had left exposed. Bastian and Rourke were both present, along with two junior analysts whose names I had l
