The trial lasted three days. Mercer attended every session, seated beside Isla and Renner, watching Darius Hale answer each charge with the same quiet resignation he'd carried since that night in the warehouse. He confessed to bribery. He confessed to the fires. He confessed to twelve years of holding Elena Vale against her will, though his voice cracked slightly when he reached that particular admission.
The council sentenced him to life imprisonment on the northern islands, a fate that satisfied no one completely but seemed, to Mercer at least, closer to justice than either execution or freedom would have been.
Life in Verath Hollow slowly began returning to something ordinary in the weeks that followed. Mercer's warehouses expanded under honest contracts, no longer threatened by Holli
