Chapter 30 031

Chapter 30 031
Chapter Thirty-One
Carmen

Fabrizio found Sorel in three days.

He called on a Wednesday morning while I was in the garden and Xavier came to find me himself rather than sending anyone, which was how I knew it mattered. He stood at the garden gate with his phone and said Fabrizio has her location and I set down my shears and came inside.

Sorel of the Blood Moon pack was thirty-one years old and lived four territories northeast in a small independent settlement that operated outside pack jurisdiction. She worked as a healer, which Fabrizio delivered as a fact and which landed for me as something more than that. She had built a life in the space between structures, neither pack nor fully human, just someone who had taken what she knew and made it useful somewhere that let her use it.

I recognized that.

Fabrizio had made contact through an intermediary, carefully, without revealing the full nature of what we wanted, and she had agreed to a conversation. Cautiously. With conditions. She wanted to know who was asking and why before she committed to anything, which Fabrizio said with approval in his voice.

"She's smart," he said through the phone, projected across the table where Bruno and Xavier and I were sitting. "She didn't ask for money. She asked for context."

"What did you tell her," Xavier said.

"That someone who had also left Blood Moon wanted to speak with her. That it concerned her father's activities and the people those activities had harmed." A pause. "She was quiet for a long time after that. Then she said when."

"How soon can she travel," I said.

"She asked the same question about you," Fabrizio said.

The room was briefly quiet.

"She knows about me," I said.

"She knows someone was taken through the border routes and ended up somewhere safe. My intermediary wasn't specific but she filled in enough." Fabrizio's voice was careful. "She said, and I want to quote this exactly, tell her I'm sorry it took this long for someone to do something."

I looked at the table for a moment.

"Tell her I understand," I said. "And tell her whenever she's ready."

She arrived four days later on a grey Saturday morning, in a car driven by someone who waited outside without being asked to, which told me she had people she trusted and had thought about what she might need. I was in the main room when Rosaria brought her in and I stood up and we looked at each other.

She looked like Hannibal around the eyes and nothing like him anywhere else. Tall, dark-haired, with the self-contained quality of someone who had rebuilt themselves from scratch and made a good job of it. She looked at me with the directness of someone who had also learned to read rooms quickly and had already read this one.

"Carmen," she said.

"Sorel." I held out my hand and she shook it. "Thank you for coming."

"Thank you for asking." She looked around the room, at Xavier near the window, Bruno by the door, Fabrizio already seated at the table with his folder. "I wasn't sure anyone was going to."

Rosaria brought tea and left with the discretion of someone who understood which rooms needed fewer people. I sat across from Sorel and Xavier took the chair to my left and Fabrizio opened his folder and Bruno stayed near the door and we began.

She talked for two hours.

She talked about leaving at nineteen after a human girl named Dara who had been her closest friend disappeared from Blood Moon territory. How she had gone to her father and he had looked at her with the particular blankness of a man choosing not to know something and told her to let it go. How she had understood in that moment that letting it go was the only future available to her inside that pack. How she had left the next week and never gone back.

She talked about what she had pieced together over the years. The border routes. The names she had heard as a child that had meant nothing then and meant everything later. The specific patrol captains who had been quietly loyal to her father through three restructurings of the border security. How the routes had been operational since before Pablo died, since before the war, since when she was still inside the pack and the ground was already rotten underneath.

Fabrizio asked precise questions and she answered them precisely and I watched him filling in the gaps of his documentation with the satisfaction of a man whose six months of confirmation work was completing itself.

At some point she turned to me and said, "You were Carmen. The Beta's daughter."

"Yes."

"I heard about you when I was still there. I was twelve when you were born. My father said something about it at dinner, about a Beta pair disgracing themselves with a heartbeat child." She looked at her tea. "I didn't understand then. I understand now that it was a preview."

"Of his methods," I said.

"Of what he decides people are worth." She looked up. "Hannibal. Is he—"

"He's trying," I said honestly. "He's doing the work."

Something moved through her face. "He was never like our father. Not at the core. He learned the behavior." She paused. "That's not an excuse."

"No," I agreed. "But it's a different problem than if it were the core."

She looked at me for a moment with an expression I recognized because I had worn it myself, the look of someone deciding whether to trust the ground before they step on it.

"What do you want from me," she said.

"Your account," I said. "Formal, documented, submitted to the king's counsel. Dara's name on record." I held her gaze. "And whatever you want for yourself after that. That part is yours."

She looked at the table. Outside the grey morning had shifted into something with pale light moving through it, the specific silver of a winter afternoon finding its way through.

"Alright," she said quietly.

"Alright," I said.

And Fabrizio turned to a new page.