Chapter 31 Chapter 32

Chapter 31 Chapter 32
Chapter Thirty-Two
Xavier

The documentation took four days.

Fabrizio worked with the particular intensity he reserved for things he had been building toward for a long time, and Sorel sat with him for hours each day and gave him everything she had, dates and names and specific incidents, the accumulated evidence of a woman who had been paying attention for twelve years from the outside of something she had been close enough to the inside of to understand. She was methodical and she was thorough and she didn't editorialize, just delivered facts in the clean sequence of someone who had been waiting to deliver them to the right person.

Carmen was with her for most of it.

Not participating in the documentation exactly, more like present in the way she was present with people, available without being intrusive, and I watched from a distance the particular thing that happened around Carmen when someone was working through something hard. The room stayed quieter. People found their footing faster. Sorel, who had arrived guarded and careful, had opened incrementally over four days in a way that would have taken most people weeks.

On the third evening I found them both in the library after dinner. Carmen was reading and Sorel was looking at the fire and neither of them was talking and both of them looked entirely comfortable with that, which told me something about how far they had come in three days.

I left them to it.

Bruno found me afterward in the study. He closed the door behind him, which he only did when the conversation was specific.

"Fabrizio thinks the documentation is strong enough," he said.

"Strong enough for what specifically."

"Formal submission to the king's counsel. Not a petition, not a complaint. A case." He sat down. "Sorel's account combined with the network evidence combined with the border route documentation. He says any counsel with functional judgment would have to act on it."

"Any counsel with functional judgment," I said.

"He said it with more optimism than I'm conveying."

I looked at the desk. The king's counsel was three people, appointed by the king, theoretically impartial. In practice their impartiality was a variable that depended on who was asking and what it cost. Ares had supported the wrong faction during the succession crisis, which meant he had no standing with the king, but that didn't mean the counsel would move against him cleanly. Institutions had their own gravity and it didn't always pull toward justice.

"Who presents it," I said.

"Fabrizio thinks you."

"Fabrizio would."

"He also thinks Carmen." Bruno paused. "He was less circumspect about that one. He said her account of the extraction combined with her history in that pack gives the submission a human face that the counsel can't dismiss as a political maneuver between Alphas."

I was quiet for a moment.

"She'll want to," Bruno said. "You know she will."

"I know she will," I agreed. That wasn't the part I was sitting with. The part I was sitting with was the counsel's room, the formal setting, the specific exposure of having your history laid out in front of people who had the power to decide what it meant. Carmen was not fragile. I knew that better than anyone. But knowing someone wasn't fragile was different from wanting to watch them be put through something.

"Talk to her," Bruno said simply.

I found her when the library had emptied, Sorel having gone to her room and the house settling into its late evening quiet. Carmen was still in the chair by the fire with her book closed on her lap, her fingers resting on the cover, looking at the middle distance.

She looked up when I came in and moved her feet to make room and I sat on the edge of the footstool and leaned forward with my elbows on my knees.

"Fabrizio wants you to present with me," I said. "To the king's counsel."

She was quiet for a moment, taking it in fully before she responded.

"My account," she said.

"Your account and your history in Blood Moon. The trafficking, the extraction, what you saw from inside the network." I held her gaze. "It's not a small thing to ask."

"No," she agreed. "It isn't." She looked at the fire. "He's right though. An Alpha submitting documentation against another Alpha looks like politics. They'll find a way to read it as politics." She turned back to me. "A woman from inside that pack saying what she saw, what happened to her, what was done with the routes that ran through that territory, that's harder to file away."

"It means your history in that pack becomes formal record," I said. "What you were considered to be. Your parents. All of it in a room."

She looked at me steadily. "Xavier. My history is my history. Putting it in a room doesn't change it and it doesn't shame me." She paused. "The only person who should be ashamed by my history in that pack is Ares. And my parents. And everyone who looked at a child with a heart condition and decided she was worth less than nothing." Her voice was level, no performance in it, just the flat steady truth of something she had been knowing for a long time. "I'd like to say that in a formal room. Actually I think I've been wanting to say it in a formal room for most of my life."

I looked at her in the firelight.

"Sorel should present too," she said. "Fabrizio's documentation is strong but Sorel is an Alpha's daughter. They can't dismiss her as easily."

"I'll ask her."

"I'll ask her," she said. "In the morning. She'll want to hear it from me."

She was already thinking about how to have the conversation, which was Carmen in everything, always three steps into the practical reality of a thing while other people were still deciding whether to do it.

I reached out and put my hand over hers on the book cover and she turned her hand over and held mine and we sat in the quiet room with the fire going down and the house breathing around us and outside the pines were dark against a sky doing something extraordinary with stars and I thought about a girl in a cold cabin who had survived everything and arrived here and was now going to stand in a formal room and say her name clearly.

I held her hand and the fire went low and neither of us moved for a long time.