He laid it out at the round table — the property, the connections, the sequence of events since the convening that Edric's movements suggested.
Reine listened to all of it with her arms crossed and her chin level, the position she took when she was hearing something she'd already suspected.
When Mitch finished, she uncrossed her arms and put both hands flat on the table.
"He's regrouping," she said. "Not retreating. There's a difference and I need everyone to understand what it means." She looked at the table. "My father doesn't stop. The convening failing means he's lost one angle of approach. He will find another. He has relationships with four of the fourteen council families that predate any of this — personal relationships, the kind that survive legal defeats because they're built
