She held the full account for three days before she did anything with it.
Not from avoidance — she'd learned, over years, the difference between avoidance and the specific, necessary processing of something too significant to rush. She read Tavri's careful documentation, listened to the audio recording Iris had made with Vass's permission, reread Zane's archive fragments, held the phrase again: *the bloodline was never the danger. What we did to bury the truth became the danger instead.*
On the third day she went to Maren.
The library, the lamp, the walking stick — the room had become, over a decade, its own kind of home, more specific to the two of them than the kitchen or the training ring or the river bank, a space built for exactly this: sitting with something enormous and working o
