Chapter 27 27

Chapter 27 27
Chapter Twenty-Seven

June's POV

Paige arrived on a Tuesday.

I knew she was coming. Cassian had told me the meeting was scheduled and had asked, more than once, whether I wanted to be elsewhere in the house or elsewhere in the territory entirely while it happened. I had said no both times. Not because I intended to sit in on the meeting but because removing myself felt like the old habit of making myself smaller to accommodate something difficult.

I stayed in the library.

I heard her arrive from the window. A single vehicle, no pack escort. She came alone which told me something about how thoroughly her calculation had shifted. Paige with leverage arrived with presence and performance. Paige without it arrived quietly and alone.

She looked smaller from the upstairs window.

I did not let myself decide what that meant.

Cassian met her in the formal receiving room off the main hall, which he used for inter-pack business rather than the kitchen table where the rest of our lives seemed to happen. Ryker was with him. I heard the door close.

I picked up my book and read the same page four times.

Elara was restless, not aggressive, just alert in the way she was when something significant was in close proximity. I let her pace without trying to settle her.

An hour passed.

Then an hour and a half.

Sera appeared in the library doorway with tea that I had not asked for and set it on the low shelf beside me without comment. I was grateful for the company even in its quiet form.

When the receiving room door finally opened I heard voices in the hall below. Low and controlled. Then the front door. Then a car.

I was still in the window seat when Cassian came upstairs.

He came in and sat in the chair across from me and looked at me for a moment before he spoke, the way he did when he was choosing his words with care.

"She gave a full account," he said. "Everything she witnessed from her position. It goes further than what you documented in some areas."

I kept my breathing steady. "How much further."

"There are two additional incidents involving BloodMoon pack finances that she can speak to directly. And she was present at a meeting between Adrian and Harrow's Alpha that you weren't aware of, where the terms of a second undisclosed agreement were set." He paused. "She has documentation. She kept records."

That surprised me. "She kept records."

"She said she started doing it approximately a year ago. When she began to understand the nature of what she was inside." His voice was careful and even. "She said she told herself it was for protection. Insurance."

I looked at the window. Outside the birch trees stood in their pale patient rows.

"She stayed," I said. "Even knowing. She stayed and she kept records and she stayed."

"Yes."

"That's not simple," I said. "It's not simply self-interest and it's not simply complicity. It's both things at the same time and they don't cancel each other out."

Cassian said nothing. He was giving me the space to think it through rather than handing me a conclusion.

"Did she ask about me," I said.

"Yes."

"What did she ask."

"Whether you were well. Whether you were safe." A pause. "Whether you hated her."

The library was very quiet around us.

"What did you tell her."

"That you were well and safe," Cassian said. "That the third question wasn't mine to answer."

I pressed my thumbnail into the spine of my book and thought about my sister. About the girl she had been before the woman she had become. About the specific afternoon when we were perhaps twelve and ten and our father had taken us to the edge of pack territory to watch the deer come out at dusk, and Paige had held my hand the whole time because she knew I startled easily and she didn't want me to frighten them away.

That girl and this woman were connected by an unbroken line and I could not pretend they were different people just because it would be simpler.

"She'll submit her account to the council," I said. It was not a question.

"She's agreed to. Her legal representative will be in contact with the council liaison by end of week."

I nodded.

I sat with everything for a long moment in the winter light with my tea going cold and Elara finally settling in my chest, warm and quiet.

"I don't hate her," I said. "I want to be accurate about that because it matters to be accurate." I looked at Cassian. "I'm angry. I'll probably be angry for a long time. There are things she did that I don't know how to forgive yet and maybe some I never will." I paused. "But hate would require me to stop seeing her as a full person and I can't do that. She's too familiar."

Cassian held my gaze steadily. "That's not weakness."

"I know," I said. "It's just true."

He crossed the room and sat beside me in the window seat, close enough that his shoulder was against mine, and I let myself lean into the warmth of him without making anything of it.

Outside the winter afternoon was moving toward its early dark, the light going gold and then amber in the bare branches.

"The inquiry has three corroborating accounts now," Cassian said quietly. "Yours, Crest's, and Paige's. With documentation from two of the three." He paused. "This is done, June. Not immediately, the process will take months. But the outcome is done."

I absorbed that.

The outcome is done.

Three years of silence ending in a library in the last of the winter light with my shoulder against his and the future sitting open and specific in front of me for the first time.

"Okay," I said.

Just that.

He reached over and took my hand in his and we sat together while the light in the birch trees went from amber to grey to the soft particular blue of early evening.