Lila’s whole face changes. “Dorian. Oh, my God! Are you sure?”
“Early days,” he says. “But yes.”
“That’s wonderful.” She reaches across and presses his forearm warmly, then frowns at Caleb. “Elena doesn’t know about this, I’m guessing?”
He shakes his head. “Not mine to tell her.”
Lila raises an eyebrow. “She’ll have something to say about that, I’m sure.” Then her expression softens. “A baby!” Her smile is genuine. Her daughter is mated into this family. A child of it is her family too, near enough.
Talon’s hand finds the back of Lila’s chair, grinning at the twins. Iris says, “Congratulations,” and Torbjorn lifts his water glass an inch in a gesture that’s half a toast and half a man not knowing what else to do with his hands. The sound that goesaround the table is low and warm, the kind a room makes before it remembers what it was discussing.
Caleb looks like he’s relieved that it’s finally not a secret he has to keep anymore.
“Okay then,” says Viktor. “So we can assume that’s unrelated.”
“Perhaps,” Lila says. “But it’s definitely something we should be aware of. With the phoenix carrying a child connected to the Heartstone line, we should expect the unexpected.”
“So situation-normal, then.” Iris grins.
Lila rolls her eyes. “Pretty much.”
Ysabelle has watched the entire exchange and kept her face neutral. Whatever the Nocturne Court makes of a restless artifact surfacing in the same season as a trade in blood and magic, she keeps it to herself. The Heartstone isn’t the Court’s business, and she doesn’t spend words on what isn’t hers.
“Well, now that we’ve put that worry to rest, let’s get back to the matter at hand.” He turns back to Ysabelle. “You say there’s a trade. Do you think there’s a pipeline?”
She nods.
“Show me the corridors.”
Ysabelle slides a page down. “Three active. The northern line runs people up through the Idaho panhandle into Canada. The southern runs through Arizona to a coastal handoff we haven’t placed. The third we’ve only seen twice: east, fast, no pattern we can hold yet.”
Caleb turns the page toward himself. “Timing?”
“The northern moves on a ten-day cycle. The southern’s irregular; they wait for volume, then move a lot at once.”
“Then the southern’s the one with the buyer driving it,” Talon says. “Ten days is a supply chain. Waiting for volume is an order being filled.”
“That’s our read too,” Crowe says.
It’s the first he’s spoken. Ysabelle doesn’t look at him; she lets it stand, which tells me he’s here for exactly this—the operational layer, not the politics.
“How do we take a corridor without warning the others?” Iris asks. “Hit the northern and the southern goes dark inside a day?”
“You don’t hit a corridor,” Crowe says. “You hit a handoff. The people moving the cargo don’t know who they’re handing to. That’s how the Court would build it, and whoever built this learned from people who think the way we do. Take a handoff clean, and you walk it forward to the buyer without anyone upstream knowing the line went quiet.”
“That needs eyes on a handoff before we move,” I say. “Live. Long enough to map who comes and goes. Move early, and you get a van full of frightened people and no thread to pull.”
Ysabelle looks at me properly for the first time. “The tracker.”
I dip my head in confirmation.
“Then you’ll want the southern,” she says. “It sits long enough between moves to watch.”
The side door opens partway.
Zoe. She has a slim folder, and her eyes go to Viktor, then catch on the four strangers at the table—a small recalibration, there and gone.
“The Cascade depot revisions,” she says, coming in along the wall to set the folder at his elbow. “You wanted them tonight.” She doesn’t straighten away from the table. Her eyes have gone to the page in front of Caleb—the corridor map, upside down to her—and stayed. “That’s the Idaho line.”
