Who Arrived

Lena’s POV She came on a Wednesday morning without calling first. I heard the car on the private road and looked at the time which was eight forty three and looked at Damien who was across the kitchen table with his coffee and Eli who was beside him working through breakfast with the focused attention of someone fuelling up for important work and neither of them had called anyone and I had not called anyone and Mara appeared in the kitchen doorway and looked at me and said “Do you know who that is?” I went to the window. The car was unfamiliar. Dark. Council plates. Not Maren’s usual driver. I looked at Damien. He was already standing. “Stay with Eli,” I said to Mara. She gave me the look that said she had been staying with people in this house long before I arrived and would continue to do so without being told but acknowledged the instruction with a nod. I went to the front door. Damien was a step behind me. The woman who got out of the car was someone I had not seen befo

The Call

Lena’s POVI went to the library.Closed the door.Stood at the window for exactly ten seconds doing the breathing that I had learned in the months after the hospital when everything had been new and overwhelming and the breathing was the thing that kept the floor under my feet.Then I called.It rang four times.“Selene,” Orla said.Her voice was careful in the way it got careful when she knew from the ring or the time or some instinct built from twenty four years of waiting that something significant was coming.“I need to ask you something,” I said. “And I need you to tell me the truth even if the truth is difficult.”A pause.“Yes,” she said.“Did you know anyone connected to Brennan Voss before I came back?” I said. “Not through me. Not through this pack. Through the northern pack or through Calder Vane or through anyone in that network.”The silence on the line was not the silence of someone thinking about an answer.It was the silence of someone deciding how much of an answer t

Orla Arrives

Lena’s POVShe pulled up at eleven forty three.Two hours and twelve minutes after the call.She had driven fast which I had not asked her to do and which told me something about the specific weight she had been carrying and how ready she had been to put it down somewhere.I was at the front door when she got out of the car.She looked at me across the distance between the car and the steps.She looked like someone who had cried on the drive and had stopped crying and had made the decision that whatever came next she was going to walk into it with both feet.I went down the steps.She met me at the bottom.We stood there for a moment.“I should have told you,” she said. “When the investigation started. When Vane’s name came up and I knew there was a network being examined. I should have told you then.”“Yes,” I said.She held my gaze.She had been expecting me to soften it and I had not and the not-softening was its own kind of respect.“I was afraid,” she said.“I know,” I said.“I h

What The Network Was Called

Cole’s POVAldene Marsh sat across from me in the war room at two in the afternoon and I put everything I had built on the table between us and she put everything she had built on the table and we spent three hours going through both sets of documentation with the specific focused attention of two people who had been working the same problem from different ends and were now meeting in the middle.She was good.Better than I had expected which was already high given her introduction to the estate that morning.Her financial reconstruction was thorough in the places mine had been thin and mine was thorough in the places hers had been thin and together the picture that emerged was considerably more complete than either of us had managed separately.At four thirty she sat back.Looked at the combined documentation.“The network has a name,” she said. “In the internal communications. It is referred to consistently as the Vorn arrangement.”“Elias Vorn,” I said. “Who founded it.”“Who found

The Eastern Edge

Lena’s POVWe left at five.Me and Damien in one car. Cole behind us. Aldene Marsh in contact by phone from the estate because she had made her position on the inadvisability of this clear and had then accepted it was happening and had extracted a commitment that nothing would be done to alert Vorn before the Council could act.I had given her the commitment.I intended to keep it.I was not going to approach Vorn.I was going to look at what he had built in the territory I was responsible for and I was going to talk to Rowan and I was going to understand the complete picture before the Council moved and then I was going to let the Council move.That was the plan.Damien had looked at the plan with the expression of someone who understood the plan and trusted me to keep it and was not going to say any of the things he was thinking because he had learned the difference between thoughts that needed to be said and thoughts that needed to be held.We drove.The subsidiary territory was an

All Chapters of His Rejected Luna Remembers Nothing: Chapter 101 - Chapter 105

Who Arrived

The Call

Orla Arrives

What The Network Was Called

The Eastern Edge