All Chapters of Midnight Crown: Chapter 71 - Chapter 76

66 — SilkHe kept the promise at ten that night.Not the silk — that took until morning, Ash sourcing it from somewhere Dom didn't ask about with the particular efficiency of a man who had learned that certain requests from Dom were simply logistics to be executed rather than questions to be answered. But he kept the spirit of it before the sheets arrived, which was: a real room. Four walls that didn't belong to a war. A bed that hadn't come out of a wolf pack's emergency supply.The new space was in the northern quarter of Crown District — not the Tower, which was rubble, but a building Dom had owned quietly for six years without ever using as his primary. A floor he'd kept dark. Unfurnished in the way of spaces held in reserve, waiting for a reason to become something. He'd had Ash's people through it by noon, and by ten o'clock it was habitable in the specific way of spaces that had been prepared by people who understood what habitable meant to Domenik Laev.Eirwen stood in the mid

68 — AshThe room the Widow had chosen was at the back of the building — old Cayde territory, grey stone walls, a table and three chairs positioned with the deliberate geometry of a woman who had thought about this meeting for a long time and had arranged it accordingly.A file sat on the table.Not digital. Paper. Real paper, which in New Eidolon meant something old or something important or both.The Widow stood when they entered. Not deference — positioning. She looked at Dom first, which Eirwen noted, and then at Eirwen with the expression she'd had in the vault, in the Tower corridor, in every moment since the war began where she'd made a decision that protected her daughter over her position. The look Eirwen still couldn't name.Dom stood at the door.Not blocking it. Just present. His eyes moved through the room — the exits, the windows, the Widow's hands — with the automatic thoroughness of a man who hadn't yet decided whether the threat in this room was physical or of another

70 — The DropFour in the afternoon.Dom had the distribution architecture mapped across three screens — the northern quarter's communications infrastructure converted, temporarily, into something that would have made Ash's original setup look modest. Caelan had pulled the municipal archive records. Marsel's tunnel network was staged and waiting. Seventeen couriers positioned at relay points across the city, each carrying a sealed package addressed to a recipient who didn't yet know they were about to become the most important journalist or prosecutor in New Eidolon.On the table beside him, the Covenant texts. The Widow's thirty years. Her father's unfinished case.Dom was on his fourth call of the hour when Ash walked in from the corridor and set a printed intercept log on the table without speaking. Dom read it without ending the call, finished the conversation in two sentences, and hung up.He looked at Eirwen."Voss has filed an emergency petition with the Commission," she said.