Chapter 17 017

Chapter 17 017
DARIUS

I called Rhen into the study just after breakfast.

He came in and closed the door and sat down and looked at me the way he did when he knew something was about to move.

"Croft," I said.

Rhen nodded slowly. "When."

"Tonight."

He was quiet for a second. "You're sure."

"Nicholas is already talking to Castellan. Every day I wait he gets further. Croft is the thread that unravels everything Nicholas has built since Ironwood. I pull it now while Nicholas is still feeling confident. He won't see it coming."

"What do you want done," Rhen said.

"I want him brought here. Quietly. No noise, no scene. I want to talk to him before anything else happens."

Rhen looked at me. "Talk."

"Yes."

"Darius—"

"I want to hear it from him," I said. "What he did, why he did it, what Nicholas has on him or promised him. All of it. Before anything else."

Rhen held my gaze for a moment then nodded. "Cole and I can have him here by midnight."

"Make sure nobody sees. Not his people, not Nicholas's."

"Understood." He stood up. Stopped. "And after you talk to him."

I looked at him. "We'll see what he says."

Rhen left and I sat back in my chair and looked at the ceiling.

Croft.

I had known his name since I was nineteen. Two years after my father died, when I was still putting things together, still trying to understand the full picture of what had happened to Ironwood. A man called Dael had found me. Old, retired, had been a minor council member during the Ironwood hearings. He'd tracked me down because he had a conscience that had been eating at him for two years and he needed someone to give the truth to before he died.

He'd given it to me over three hours in a small room in a territory nobody important paid attention to.

Croft's name had been the last thing he said.

I had sat on that name for fifteen years. Used it in my head like a compass, something to come back to when I needed to remember that the full picture wasn't complete yet. I hadn't moved on Croft before because moving too early would have warned Nicholas that I knew more than I should. The value of it was in the surprise.

Tonight the surprise was happening.

I got up and went to find Meira.

She was in the library. I'd started to figure out that was where she went when she needed to think. She wasn't reading, just sitting in the chair by the window with her legs tucked under her and her hands in her lap, looking out at the grounds.

She looked up when I came in.

"Tonight I'm moving on Croft," I said. "Rhen and Cole are bringing him here."

She nodded. Took it in. "Do you want me to stay out of it."

"Yes. Stay in your room after ten. Whatever you hear, stay in your room."

"What are you expecting to hear."

"Nothing dramatic," I said. "Croft is sixty years old and he's been comfortable for fifteen years. He's not going to fight. He's going to talk."

She looked at me for a moment. "You said you wanted to hear it from him."

"Yes."

"Why does it matter," she said. "You already know what he did."

I looked at her. It was a fair question. A practical one. She was thinking like someone who had come into this late and was trying to understand the logic of every move.

"Because knowing something and hearing it are different things," I said. "My father deserves to have someone say it out loud. What was done to him, the betrayal, all of it. Someone saying it in a room where it can't be taken back."

She was quiet for a moment.

"For you or for him," she said softly.

I looked at her.

"Your father's gone," she said. Not harsh, just straight. "Hearing Croft say it doesn't change what happened to him. So it's for you. Which is fine. You're allowed to need that." She paused. "I just think you should know which one it is."

I stood there in the doorway of the library and looked at this woman sitting in the chair by the window who had been in my house for less than two weeks and was already saying things that nobody else in my life had ever said to me.

I didn't answer her. Not because she was wrong. Because she was right and I didn't have anything to add to it.

"Stay in your room after ten," I said.

"I will."

I left her there and went back down the hall.

.....

Rhen and Cole left at nine.

The house settled into quiet after that. Cora had gone to bed. Meira's light went off just after ten like she'd said it would. I sat in the study with the door open and waited.

They came back at ten past midnight.

I heard the car on the drive, then voices low in the hallway, then Rhen's knock.

"He's here," he said.

Croft walked in ahead of Cole looking exactly like what he was. An old man who had been comfortable for too long and was now very uncomfortable. He was heavyset, grey haired, dressed like he'd been pulled out of somewhere warm. His eyes moved around the study quick and sharp and landed on me.

He knew who I was. I could see it the moment his eyes found my face. He knew.

"Sit down," I said.

He sat.

I came around the desk and leaned against the front of it and looked at him. Up close he looked older than I expected. Smaller. Fifteen years I had been carrying this man's name around like something heavy and here he was, just an old man in a chair looking scared.

"You know who I am," I said.

He swallowed. "Vael's boy."

"Edmund Vael's son," I said. "Yes."

He looked at his hands in his lap.

"You were his second," I said. "Thirty years he led that pack and you were beside him for most of it. He trusted you."

Croft said nothing.

"I want to hear it," I said. "What you did. Why you did it. All of it."

He looked up at me. His eyes were wet at the edges, whether from fear or something else I couldn't tell. "It was a long time ago."

"I know how long ago it was," I said. "Tell me anyway."

He was quiet for a moment. Then he started talking.

It took a long time. He talked about Nicholas approaching him three years before the Ironwood hearings. The promises he'd made — land, money, a position in his pack once it was done. Croft had been passed over twice for a promotion my father had given to younger men and the bitterness of it had been sitting in him for years by the time Nicholas found it.

He talked about the information he fed Nicholas. Council members he knew were sympathetic. Weaknesses in my father's alliances. The exact accusations that would land hardest and be hardest to disprove.

He talked about watching my father at the hearing. Watching him try to defend himself against things he didn't know were coming because the man he trusted most had handed the ammunition to the other side.

He stopped talking.

The room was very quiet.

I stood there and looked at him and felt nothing dramatic. No rage, no satisfaction, nothing that matched the size of what he'd just described. Just a flat, heavy quiet inside me, the particular weight of something finally confirmed.

"My father knew it was you," I said. "At the end. He figured it out."

Croft's face crumpled slightly. "I know," he said quietly. "He wrote me a letter. I never opened it."

I looked at him for a long moment.

"You still have it," I said.

It wasn't a question. The way he'd said it, the way his eyes dropped — he still had it.

"Yes," he said.

"I want it."

He looked up at me. Something in his face shifted, something old and tired giving way. "I'll get it to you," he said. "Whatever you want. I'll give you everything I have on Nicholas. Everything. Just—" He stopped.

"Just what," I said.

"Just let me go home," he said. "I'm an old man. I'm tired. Let me go home."

I looked at him sitting there. This man who had spent fifteen years eating well and sleeping well and living comfortably in the shadow of what he'd done.

I thought about my father's face that day. I thought about the letter sitting somewhere in Croft's house, unopened for fifteen years.

"Get me the letter," I said. "And everything you have on Nicholas. Every conversation, every agreement, every promise he made you. All of it." I straightened up. "Do that and we're done."

He nodded. Fast, relieved, like a man who had been holding his breath for a very long time.

Rhen took him back out.

I stood in the study alone and looked at the window.

My father had known. He'd written a letter to the man who betrayed him and that man had never opened it and had carried it around for fifteen years like a stone in his pocket.

I was going to read that letter.

Whatever my father had written, whatever he'd said to the man who destroyed him, I was going to read it and I was going to know.

I sat down in my chair and the house was quiet all around me and somewhere upstairs Meira was in her room like she'd said she would be, staying out of it, trusting me to handle it.