Chapter 28 28

Chapter 28 28
Chapter Twenty-Eight

Cassian's POV

The formal council interview request arrived on the twelfth day.

Three sessions scheduled across the following two weeks. June first, then Crest, then Paige. Each interview to be conducted at a neutral council facility two territories north, with legal representation permitted and a council recorder present throughout.

I read the scheduling document at the kitchen table while June stood at the counter making coffee with the focused attention she brought to small domestic tasks, like her hands needed something concrete while her mind worked through larger things.

I told her the dates.

She absorbed them with her back to me for a moment, then turned and brought both mugs to the table and sat down.

"Two weeks," she said.

"Twelve days."

She wrapped her hands around her mug. "I'm ready."

I believed her. Not because she said it with force but because of how she said it. Quiet and matter of fact, the way people spoke when they were describing a condition rather than convincing themselves of one.

"We'll prepare thoroughly," I said. "Go through your account in detail every day until the interview. Not to change anything but to make sure the precision is there when the room requires it."

She nodded. "What's the facility like."

"Neutral ground. Council staff only, no pack affiliations. The recorder is independent." I paused. "Adrian won't be there. He'll have his own session separately."

Something shifted in her expression. The almost imperceptible easing that came when a specific fear was removed from a situation before it could settle.

"Good," she said simply.

We worked through the morning. June at the table with her careful memory and her precise language and the particular quality of attention she brought to getting things right rather than simply getting through them. I asked questions designed to find the edges of each account, the places where memory was firm and the places where it softened into inference, so she would know the difference clearly before she sat across from a council recorder.

She answered everything directly.

By late morning Ryker knocked and entered with a message from the council liaison. Adrian had filed a motion requesting that Paige's account be excluded from the inquiry on the grounds that spousal privilege applied to information exchanged within a bonded pair.

June looked at the motion and almost laughed.

"They completed the bond three weeks ago," she said. "He's claiming privilege over a relationship that didn't legally exist for most of the period in question."

"His legal team is thorough," I said. "It won't succeed but it costs us time to respond."

"He knows it won't succeed," June said. "That's not the point. The point is to make everything slower and more exhausting and to introduce enough procedural friction that accounts start to feel less worth giving." She set the motion down. "It's what he does. He makes the cost of opposing him feel higher than the cost of stopping."

She said it without heat. Just recognition.

"We respond today," I said. "Concise and precise. Ryker has the precedents ready."

The afternoon brought something I had not anticipated.

A message from a BloodMoon pack member I did not recognise. Not through legal channels or formal council process. A handwritten letter delivered to the gate by a civilian courier, addressed to June by name.

I brought it to her unopened.

She looked at the handwriting on the envelope for a moment before she opened it. Whatever she recognised in it moved across her face briefly and then she read.

When she finished she held the letter in both hands for a moment without speaking.

"Who is it from," I asked.

"A woman named Delia. She was a mid-rank member of BloodMoon. She helped in the pack house." June looked up. "She was kind to me during the worst of it. Small things. Extra food left where I'd find it. A blanket outside my door in winter." She paused. "I never knew if it was intentional or coincidental."

"What does she say."

"That she's been following the inquiry notices in the regional pack bulletins. That she has information she believes is relevant." June folded the letter carefully. "That she's been waiting for something like this for a long time and she's not the only one."

The kitchen was very still.

"She's not the only one," I said.

"That's what she says."

I looked at June across the table and thought about what she had told me in those first days. That she was not the only one who had stayed quiet because there was nowhere safe to put the truth. That she had simply been the first to find somewhere safe.

"I want to respond to her," June said. "Directly. Today."

"Carefully," I said. "She's still inside BloodMoon territory. Any communication needs to go through proper channels so there's a record and she has protection."

"I know." She was already thinking through it. "She needs to know what the process looks like. What it costs to come forward and what it doesn't. She needs to know it's survivable."

She said it with the particular authority of someone who could speak to that from direct experience.

I watched her sit with the letter in her hands and thought about the morning she had arrived in my territory, dragged from the forest at the edge of dying, all bone and fear and fractured wolf. I thought about the woman at this table now, preparing for a council interview, thinking about how to make it easier for the next person to find their way out.

The distance between those two points was not twelve days.

It was longer and harder and more deliberate than that.

"Write to her," I said. "I'll make sure it goes through protected channels."

June looked at me with those hazel eyes.

"There are going to be more of them," she said quietly. "If the inquiry does what it should, if Adrian's hold on that pack starts to loosen, people are going to need somewhere to go."

I held her gaze.

I knew what she was moving toward before she said it and I found that I had already arrived at the same place, in the way I had started to arrive at the same places she did, not by following but by converging.

"Then we make sure they have somewhere," I said.

Outside the winter light held steady over the territory and inside the future was taking on a shape that was larger than either of us had anticipated when this began.

That seemed right.