Chapter: Chapter 151: Cowardice With Better PaperworkXena."Say it again.""Dante, I need you to actually hear me before you—""Say it again." He hadn't moved from the doorway of his own kitchen. "The word. Just the word.""Guardianship."Something went out of his face. Not colour — colour had gone already, in the car, the second I'd started talking. This was something under the colour."When." His voice had dropped almost to nothing."Herald didn't give me a date. He said Victor told him you were helping build the paperwork. Somebody inside the family. Somebody who'd sign off on it and never lose a night's sleep." I made myself keep going, because if I stopped now I don't think I'd have started again. "That's what he said.""I didn't—" Dante stopped himself. Started again. "I need to think.""Take your time.""No. Actual time. Not the kind where I say something clever in four seconds because I can't stand the silence." He put both hands flat on the counter and stood there like a man bracing for weather. "Give me a minute, Xena. A real
Last Updated: 2026-08-28
Chapter: Chapter 150: Who I'd ProtectXena."You brought her."Herald stopped three feet from the table, and for the first time since I'd known him, something that wasn't calm got all the way to his face before he could stop it."Sit down," Cassandra said, in the voice she must have used on grown men for sixty years. "I'm too old to have a conversation looking up at somebody."He sat."You've been writing to me about the weather," he said to her. "And now you're here.""Paper wasn't doing either of us any good." She folded her hands on the table, steady as stone. "Victor Hale. March. Twice. I'd like to know what he said.""She already knows some of it," I offered, wanting to spare him the worst of the telling. "I told her about the question."Herald looked at me."You told her.""I told her he asked who you'd prot
Last Updated: 2026-08-27
Chapter: Chapter 149: Deciding Out LoudXena.Cassandra Byrne answered her own door in a cardigan the colour of weak tea, and she looked at me for a long moment before she said anything at all."You've got your father's mouth," she observed, not unkindly, as though noting the weather. "I keep meaning to tell you that and then deciding it isn't mine to give you.""You can give it to me now.""I can." She stood back to let me in. "Come through. I've made too much coffee for one person, which is a lie old women tell so nobody feels they're intruding."Her flat in Streeterville has almost nothing in it. A chair. A second chair that looked unused. A window with a view of the river that she wasn't looking out of.I sat in the used chair."You know why I've come." I didn't bother with an opening."I know you've come about Sunday." Cassandra poured without asking w
Last Updated: 2026-08-26
Chapter: Chapter 148: Fear Wearing A Better CoatXena."You're back.""You're still up."Dante was at the kitchen table in the house on Wells — my flat, not his, because I'd driven there without deciding to and only noticed when I was already parking. He had his coat still on. There was a mug in front of him he hadn't touched."How did it go with Osei," I got out, before I'd even taken my coat off."Sit down first.""Dante.""I'm not being dramatic. You've been driving for an hour and you look like you haven't eaten." He got up and put the kettle on without asking, a thing he does now, and which I have stopped minding. "Sit down, and then I'll tell you, and then you can be angry at whichever part of it you like."I sat down."She took it," Dante said, relief and dread tangled up in the same breath. "Nine fifteen this morning. I sat in the corridor from nine, like I said I would. Her clerk let me in at quarter past. I put the notebook on her desk and told her what it was before she'd opened it.""And?""She read the Eleanor pages fir
Last Updated: 2026-08-25
Chapter: Chapter 147: Everyone Who's Ever Known A Whole ThingXena."Time," the officer called, from the wall."Herald—""You've got ninety seconds." He leaned in over the table, and for once he wasn't calm about it, and that frightened me more than anything he'd said all afternoon. "Listen to me. Don't go to Osei with this. Not yet.""Why not?""Because I don't know what he told her already, and if you walk in asking about March visits before she's raised it, you'll look like you knew something and sat on it." His hands had come off the table. "You're named in a federal matter, Xena. Everything you do from today gets read by somebody looking for a reason.""Then tell me what he said.""Wrap it up, Cross." The officer was already moving."He asked me who I'd protect," Herald said, fast, low, the words falling over each other for the first time since I'd sat down. "First visit, he asked me who I'd protect if it came to it. Second visit, he told me why he was asking.""Herald—""Sunday. Same time. Bring nothing." A guard had a hand near his shoulde
Last Updated: 2026-08-24
Chapter: Chapter 146: Nothing Said In This RoomXena."He's coming out. I want you to know he nearly didn't."The officer on the desk said it while she was checking my ID against a screen, without looking up, in the tone of a woman doing me a kindness she'd deny later."He declined the mail item." I heard how thin it came out."He declined the mail item Friday. He put you on the visit sheet Monday." She slid my licence back. "Locker four. No paper, no pens, nothing in your hands."The room at Joliet has eleven tables bolted to the floor and a vending machine that only takes coins from a machine that only takes cash. I got there first. I sat with my hands flat on the table because there was nowhere else to put them.Herald came in with a man's walk and a boy's shoulders.They'd cut his hair since Thursday. He's twenty-four and he looked about nineteen. He sat down across from me. For a second neither of us managed a word."You look tired." Concern got into his voice before he could stop it."You declined my photograph.""Yes.""Hera
Last Updated: 2026-08-23
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