“She lived long enough to have you in 1951.”
“Yes.” He looked at the photograph then. Briefly. “I’ve asked Bjorn three times in my life what they did to her after the official date,” he said. “The third time, he told me to stop asking.”
“Bjorn knows.”
“Bjorn knows.”
The certainty of it sat between us, old and ugly.
I thought of the books Yuki had set out for me. The permissions that had let me read around the truth without touching it directly.
“There was a third hand in the books Yuki gave me,” I said.
Rhain went still.
“The margin notes. After Yuki’s. After Morag’s. A third name had been blacked out.”
Rhain looked at me.
“Likely Mara Voss,” he said. “She was a junior elder in ’47. She was in the council chamber the day they decided what the public record would say about my mother.”
The public record.
Not the truth. The version built to survive being questioned.
Someone had taken a living woman and turned her into a controlled file. They had chosen the language first, then forced reality to fit it. Bond strain. Medical decline. Official death. All of it clean enough to survive inspection.
Langley wouldn’t call it bond strain. Langley would call itasset compromise.
They would say I was unstable. They would say removal from the field was necessary for my safety and theirs. They would say my access to Dominic and Rhain had created unacceptable exposure and political instability.
If the bond held, it could stabilize relations between Ashenmere and Norway, which would make it harder for the United States to get the mineral rights it had sent me here to get.
If the old patterns repeated themselves, it could become the spark between rival dragon houses. Jealousy dressed as succession. Possession dressed as law. Another war with my name somewhere in the file.
Either way, I was no longer just an operative.
I was leverage.
They would put me on a plane to Washington, sit me in a debriefing room, and let two governments argue over me while pretending I still had choices.
Different institution. Same patriarchal bullshit.
Margot hadn’t disappeared because one cruel man wanted her gone. She had disappeared because a system knew how to make that cruelty official.
I put the photograph flat between us.
“Why are you showing me this today?”
Rhain looked up. “I had planned to give it to you on Sunday,” he said. “Your returned claim moved my timeline.”
There was no charm in him now. No practiced ease. His hands rested flat on the table. “There’s something I should say.”
I waited.
“I pointed you toward the older sections of the library when I firstscent-locked because I knew what you would need to find. I shouldn’t have made you find it alone.”
He hadn’t made me find anything alone. He had set the page in my hand the day I asked the right question.
