CHAPTER EIGHT

Rhys and Selene, as it turned out, made an unexpectedly effective investigative pair, a fact that both of them seemed personally offended by every time Damon asked for an update.

"He's insufferable," Selene reported, dropping into the chair across from Damon's desk with the particular weariness of someone who'd spent the better part of a week in close proximity to a person she refused to admit she respected. "He questions every conclusion I reach, demands to see the evidence himself, and then, infuriatingly, reaches the exact same conclusion I did, ten minutes later, as though it were his idea all along."

"Sounds productive."

"It's unbearable. We've narrowed down the timeline, though." She spread a set of notes across his desk, the same careful, meticulous handwriting she used for house ledgers now applied to something considerably more dangerous. "Whoever set that fire had access to lamp oil stored specifically for the waystation, which means they either work for the Council directly or knew enough about the building's supply chain to divert some without anyone noticing until now."

Damon studied the notes, a cold, familiar feeling settling into his chest, the particular dread of a conspiracy that kept getting closer to home the more they pulled at it. "Council staff. That narrows the suspects considerably."

"It also means whoever did this had access on both sides," Selene said. "The waystation serves both territories. Council staff includes wolves and vampires both, rotating through on a schedule neither house fully controls. Rhys is cross-referencing the roster now against anyone with a personal grievance significant enough to risk treason over."

"And Aurelius?"

"Furious, predictably, that we're treating this as an internal matter rather than blaming your side entirely on outsiders or mine on Voss aggression. He's been vocal about it in council session. I don't think he's involved directly." Selene's expression turned careful, weighing something before she said it. "But I think he knows more than he's saying, Damon. He's too calm about an investigation that should be making him nervous if he's genuinely innocent of everything but bad opinions."

Damon absorbed that, turning the possibility over with the same careful scrutiny he gave any threat to the house, and found, underneath the strategic calculation, something more personal and harder to name: the particular exhaustion of realizing that even the people who'd raised him, who'd sat at his father's table and called themselves loyal to House Ashgrove, might be willing to burn the whole fragile peace down rather than watch him succeed at something his father never would have attempted.

"Keep pulling the thread," he said. "Quietly. If Aurelius is protecting someone, I want to know who, and I want proof before I confront him with it, because he'll deny everything the moment he suspects we're close."

"Understood." Selene gathered her notes, pausing at the door with the particular look she reserved for moments when she intended to say something Damon wouldn't necessarily want to hear. "For what it's worth, the wolves have been more forthcoming than I expected. Rhys didn't have to share half of what he's shared. Garrick Voss could have kept his pack's findings to himself and let us flounder, and instead he's had his own people canvassing the human settlements near the bridge every day this week."

"He wants this solved as badly as we do."

"He wants his daughter safe," Selene said. "I suspect the two have become the same thing to him, whether he's comfortable admitting it or not."

Damon thought about that for a long while after Selene left, turning it over alongside everything else he'd been turning over since the dinner at Voss pack land, since the half-wild garden and the honesty that had passed between them in the dark, honesty he still hadn't fully examined because examining it meant admitting how much ground he'd covered in three short weeks, how thoroughly the Oracle's cold, impersonal prophecy had started to feel like something he wanted rather than something imposed on him.

He was still turning it over three days later when Elena's letter arrived, delivered not by formal Council courier but by an ordinary hawk, her own handwriting instead of official parchment, the first time either of them had written to the other outside the structure the Council had built around them.

Damon,

Rhys thinks he's found something. A name on the Council roster who requested reassignment away from waystation duty two days before the fire, then requested reassignment back the day after. Selene should have the same information by the time this reaches you, but I wanted you to hear it from me and not from a report with both our names attached to it like we're a project instead of people.

Also, Marta wants to know if you'll come to dinner again. She has more questions about garlic. I told her this wasn't a social visit anymore, it's an active investigation into attempted murder, and she said, and I quote, those things aren't mutually exclusive.

She's not wrong. Come Thursday if you can.

Elena

Damon read it twice, the way he'd read every letter that mattered in his long life, and found that this one, brief and plainly written and utterly without diplomatic performance, had settled into his chest with more weight than the entire Oracle's prophecy had managed on its own. He thought of Aurelius's warning, of the shadow his father still cast over every decision he made in that black marble council chamber, of the very real, very present danger that someone within his own house or hers was willing to burn the whole arrangement down before it had the chance to succeed.

And he thought of a half-wild garden, and a woman who'd told him plainly that she didn't hate him, and found that whatever the cost of this courtship turned out to be, he was no longer approaching it as a duty he'd agreed to for the sake of peace between two warring peoples.

He was approaching it, plainly and without the careful diplomatic language he usually reserved for matters of the heart, because he wanted to.

He wrote back that same evening, in his own hand instead of dictating to Selene the way house correspondence usually went, and found himself smiling, alone in his study, at the ridiculous, unguarded honesty of a single line before he sealed it: Thursday. And tell Marta I have several new opinions about garlic I'd be happy to share, provided she returns the favor with whatever she knows about your childhood that you'd rather I not find out. He sent it before he could talk himself into something more careful, and told himself, for the first time in longer than he could remember, that the uncertainty sitting in his chest felt considerably more like hope than like dread.