Lena's POV
The investigation into the assassin took three days to produce anything solid, and I spent all three of them the way I spent everything difficult now, systematically, with my notebook open and my mind refusing to settle into a conclusion before the evidence had earned it.
Bastian traced the man's movements backward through what remained of him, the coin sewn into his collar, the particular make of the blade, the pattern of scarring on his hands that suggested years of training rather than desperation. None of it pointed toward a random attempt on Stormridge's stability. All of it pointed somewhere specific.
"The blade is Veranox work," Bastian told me, in the war room, laying out what he had gathered with the careful precision I had come to expect from him. "Not common trade.
