All Chapters of HE WAITED 1,095 DAYS TO CLAIM ME: Chapter 101 - Chapter 105

Renard asked me to come to him this time, which hadn't happened since the first meeting three months ago, and the reversal told me something about the weight of what he was carrying before I'd driven the first mile toward him. He hadn't said why on the phone, only that it needed to happen in person, in his house, and that I should come alone. I'd left Raze at the compound without argument from either of us, the first genuinely easy agreement we'd managed in four days.He met me himself at the door of the same house I'd earned my way into once already, older wood, older quiet, the kind of place that had never once needed to prove it belonged to someone serious. He didn't offer coffee this time. He led me straight to a study smaller than my father's, shelved floor to ceiling with the kind of ledgers that hadn't been digitized because some things, in Renard's world, were only ever meant to exist in one physical copy that could be burned."Your father came to me four years ago," he said,

Fen had both screens running when I found her, and neither of them was showing me anything I wanted to see."Second node's confirmed," she said, before I'd finished crossing the room. "Not close. Not warming. Active. Has been for six hours, and I only just caught it because it's routing through a completely different relay pattern than the first one did.""Show me."She turned the left screen toward me. A signal, structured, repeating, the same clean architecture as the one that had been pinging my coordinates for three months before we found it. Different frequency. Different destination."Where's it going.""That's the part you're not going to like." Fen's hands went still on the keys, which was the thing she did right before she told me something she'd already decided was going to cost me. "I traced the reception point. Not a relay. A terminal, registered to a shell that Renard's old ledgers cross-reference against a name we already have.""Delacroix.""No." She looked at me direct

I found him in the armoury, the way I'd found him a dozen times since I came back, doing quiet work that didn't need doing so his hands would have something to do while his head worked a different problem."You knew about Delacroix's outside help before I came back," I said, no preamble. "Before the letter, before the node. My father told you and told you to sit on it until it mattered."Raze set down what he was holding. Didn't deny it. He had never once lied to me outright. He'd simply decided, over and over, what I got to know and when, and called the deciding something else."Yes," he said."How long.""Since before you came home." His voice was even, careful in the way he got careful when a conversation was going to cost him something and he'd made peace with paying it. "Your father told me the week before he died. He said it was information that would matter eventually, and that I'd know when eventually arrived, and that until then it stayed with me.""And you decided that was s