Callum returned to the room carrying a small case that he set on the chair with unhurried precision, and something about the careful, methodical way he opened it frightened me more than any weapon could have — the specific dread of watching a man prepare for something he’d clearly done before and refined at leisure.
“I’m going to explain the process,” he said, “because I find subjects respond better when they understand exactly what’s happening to them instead of simply enduring it. Fear complicates the extraction. Understanding, oddly, tends to smooth it.”
“You said the mark can’t be forced.”
“I said the old record claims it requires trust freely given. I’ve spent forty years discovering that trust is a considerably more manipulable thing than your ancestors believed it to be.” He lift
