I did not go to the front of the old elder hall at dusk, alone, to sign a confession.
Vale was certain I would. He'd built his whole gambit on it the Luna who trades anything for a person, walking into his trap by the door he was watching. And he was right that I'd come for Elara. He was wrong about everything else, because Vale had never once in his life been the invisible servant who cleaned this building, and I had.
I went in at dusk, yes. But not through the front. I went through the old drainage run beneath the elder hall's eastern wall the same kind of forgotten passage I'd crawled through to take all of Crescent Hollow, the kind the powerful never learn because they've never had to. Cain came with me, and a handful of Ironfang's quietest, and we came up inside the hall's walls in
