Chapter 61 NADIA

Chapter 61 NADIA
The Crestfall Supernatural Council met in a building that looked, from the outside, exactly like an insurance firm.

It had three floors of glass and steel, a plaque by the door, and a very ordinary lobby. This was the kind of building you walked past a hundred times without looking twice. Inside, though, past the lobby and through two security points that would stop a human cold but scan for something entirely different in wolves, was a room that had no business being inside that building.

It was all dark wood, a long table, and nine seats. The ceiling was higher than it should have been for the floor plan. Everywhere seemed to smell like old decisions.

At the far end of the table was the woman named Maria. She had been running this room for sixteen years. She looked like someone who had heard everything at least twice and had stopped being surprised by most of it a long time ago.

She hadn’t heard this though.

I spoke for forty-seven minutes.

I went through everything in order. The mission. The cover. The reports I'd filed and when. What I'd passed to Marcus and why. My father. My mother. The suppressants I'd been taking since I was a child without knowing what they were. The attack. The USB drive and what was on it. I spoke about all of it clearly, in the right order, without skipping anything.

I kept my voice steady. That was not the same as emotionless because there were moments when some emotion got through and I heard it in my own voice before I could stop it. I just breathed through those parts and kept going.

Dane Ferguson was present. He sat three seats down from Maria, and for the first twenty minutes, his face was absolutely blank. That was the tell, actually. The blankness was too controlled. He'd expected something and prepared for it, and the preparation was holding, though barely.

Then I got to the communications section.

I watched his face start to slip. It wasn't dramatic. It wasn't a collapse. It was more like watching someone hold a position for too long, but even then, there were small slips that happened when the effort got too much. 

By the time Petra stepped forward and formally presented the USB drive to the council, Ferguson's expression had changed from one of composure to something between panic and composure, like he was trying really hard to decide.

The council asked questions for another hour after that. Some of them were the same questions Zane had been running me through in those evening sessions, almost word for word. I answered all of them. I didn't rush. I didn't stall either.

Zane sat against the back wall the whole time. He wasn't speaking because he was there as a witness, not a speaker. But I was aware of him like I was aware of the weather. I didn’t have to look at him to know he was there. It helped.

At the end, Maria called for a break. Petra and I sat in a small side room that had two chairs, a water pitcher, and nothing else. Petra said very little. I drank some water. Fifteen minutes passed.
When the council reconvened, Maria read the findings.

Preliminary credibility.

Petra leaned over and said quietly, "It means the evidence is strong enough to move to a formal hearing. That's what we needed."

Ferguson was suspended from his council seat immediately, pending investigation. The council's enforcement arm was authorized to put restrictions on Marcus Cole's activities inside the jurisdiction. Now there were legal limits on what he could do and where.

It wasn't everything, but it was enough to matter.

I sat there for a moment while Maria wrapped things up. I looked at the long table, the nine seats, and the dark wood walls, and I thought about what it had taken to get here. Not just the last few weeks, but all of it. 

Maria dismissed the session. People started moving. Petra went to shake someone's hand. Zane was suddenly next to me, his shoulder against mine, the way he did when he was checking on me without asking.

"That's the first time I've ever testified against my own father,” I said quietly.

"How does it feel?" he asked.

I thought about it honestly, then said, "Like something I should have done sooner." I paused. "And also like I just swallowed something large."

He nodded, like both of those things made complete sense to him. Probably because they did.

We walked out through the security points, back through the ordinary lobby, and out into the grey morning. The street looked the same as it had when we'd come in. 

Marcus was still out there. The formal hearing was three weeks away. The restrictions were in place but they weren't walls, they were speed bumps, and I knew how my father felt about speed bumps.

But Ferguson was suspended. The legal cover was shrinking. And I was still standing.

I counted that.

Zane held the door open and I walked out into the cold, and somewhere across the city—I knew I couldn't see it, and I couldn't locate it exactly, but I just felt it in the new part of me that was still learning how to psychoanalyze things—I could feel something shift.

Like a countdown that had just changed its number.