Cole found us a room in the pack house that wasn't Marcus's old study and wasn't Kael's office either, a smaller space off the east corridor that Kael said had belonged to his mother once, before I understood there'd ever been a mother in this story at all.
"She died when I was young," Kael said, catching the question before I asked it, setting a stack of papers Priya had smuggled out of the records room before Thorne's people could seal it entirely. "Marcus doesn't talk about her much. This was her reading room. Nobody's used it in years."
It felt strange, sitting in a dead woman's quiet room, building a case to defend a bond her son carried in his blood whether either of us had chosen it or not. I pushed the thought aside, because there wasn't room for it tonight, not with hours instea
