Gregor arrives at six fourteen.
He comes in without his usual posture, the deliberate weight he carries into every room he enters, and I understand from the way he holds himself in the doorway that he already knows why he has been called. Men who have done what Gregor has done can read a summons the way I can read a missing data point.
He sits across from me without being asked.
I don’t offer him a drink. I don’t ease into it. I put the financial transaction record on the desk between us, turn it so he can read it, and watch him look at the numbered account he has used twice before.
“Sorrel,” I say.
Gregor doesn’t deny it. He looks at the page for a long moment, and then he looks at me, and something in his face settles.
“You told the council yourself,” he says. “Before the documentation was finished. Before the protection was in place. I didn’t create the window, Zane. You did.”
“I told the council to protect her.”
“You told the council and left a gap. I walked through it.”
“You handed a pregnant woman’s location and medical history to a rival faction.”
“I handed information to people who already suspected something was happening inside this organization.” His voice rises slightly, the first crack in the composure he walked in with. “Thirty years I have sat on this council. Thirty years I have watched you build something extraordinary out of nothing, and you brought in a woman with no bloodline, no history, no protection of her own, and expected the rest of us to simply accept it.”
“I didn’t ask you to accept it. I told you it was decided.”
“Decisions made alone are decisions that can be unmade.”
I look at him. The office is quiet. Outside the window, the city has moved into evening, lights coming on floor by floor across the skyline, indifferent to the conversation happening in this room.
“You are removed from the council, effective immediately,” I say. “Your accounts are frozen pending review. Your access to any organizational property ends tonight.”
Gregor stands. “You’re making a mistake.”
“The mistake was giving you thirty years of trust you decided to spend on a transaction with the Marchetti faction.”
He looks at me for a long moment. Whatever he’s deciding to say, he decides against it. He turns. Walks to the door. Stops with his hand on the frame, the same gesture Celine makes when she has more to say and is choosing not to say it, and for one disorienting second, I see the parallel and dismiss it immediately.
“You’ll regret moving against me,” Gregor says.
“I already regret not moving sooner.”
He leaves.
Roman comes back in at eight.
“It’s done,” he says. “His access is cut. Security has confirmed he’s left the building.”
“Good.”
“That doesn’t solve the problem.”
I look at him. He’s right, and I already know he’s right, which is why I have not moved from this desk in two hours.
“The Marchetti faction has everything,” I say. “Her background. Lena’s location. The pregnancy. Gregor is removed, but the information already exists outside this organization. Removing the source doesn’t remove what the source already gave away.”
Roman sits across from me, which he doesn’t usually do, suggesting he intends to be here for a while.
“What do we know about their intentions?” I ask.
“Nothing concrete. The faction’s leadership hasn’t moved publicly. But Sorrel being pulled in for review means they’re taking the information seriously enough to verify it before acting on it.”
