ZIKO POV
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Ziko Bane had a working theory about social warfare, developed over years of watching wealthy families perform civility at each other while doing genuine damage underneath it: the people who won were rarely the ones who played the game correctly. They were the ones who refused to play it at all and did something so direct it broke the frame entirely.
He'd been thinking about this since Mitch's announcement at the round table — two families already replying to Edric, six having received the rumor, the whole careful architecture Neva and the rest of them had built threatening to crack under something that wasn't even a real attack, just a story with no fingerprints on it.
He had a plan. It involved being loud, in public, in a way that nobody in this family's careful, control
