Alle Kapitel von You Will Regret Rejecting Me: Kapitel 81 – Kapitel 90

The exemplars were locked.Kaela found this out standing in the records annex at six in the morning, Voss beside her, the reconstructed stub in a sleeve between them. The archivist — not Mira, a junior tech Kaela didn't recognize — kept her hand flat on the drawer like she could will it shut through touch alone."The three clean samples of his hand are all in the restricted set," the tech said. "Which is under Fen's hold. Which means I can't pull them without her signing off, and she's not going to sign off on unlocking evidence against the man she just locked out.""So we compare against what?” Voss said."Older logs. Nothing recent enough to be reliable. His hand's changed in six years."Kaela looked at the drawer. "Get Fen.""I already tried.""Try again. Tell her I'm asking."*****Fen didn't come. She sent word instead, four words relayed through the tech: ‘Containment stands as ordered.’Voss read it twice like the second pass might soften it. "She's protecting the hold, not the

Voss didn't sit down. He put the two exemplar sheets on Fen's desk side by side and let her look."Neither one's Davan," he said. "And neither one's Adrian. Close on the second, close enough that if I hadn't run the loop stroke three times I'd have called it a match and closed the file."Fen picked up the second sheet. Turned it under the lamp. "Close enough to convict him if nobody looked twice.""That's what I thought.""So either the restricted set has a hand in it that was never logged," Fen said, "or somebody built this on purpose, knowing exactly whose name it would land on first." She set the sheet down. "Which do you want it to be?""Doesn't matter what I want.""It matters what you brought me first." Fen was already moving, pulling the drawer with the access log. "Reopen the full restricted set. Not the two exemplars, all of it, everything that's supposed to be locked to two hands. And get Odile back in. If there's a fourth hand in a two-hand set, somebody signed her name to

The calibration alcove off the archive was unmonitored after midnight, which was the only reason Kaela was standing in it.She set the shard against the reader a second time. The screen didn't hesitate — same amber pulse, same resonance signature, cross-referenced against the same seven-generation Varkas lineage marker it had thrown up hours ago. Not a glitch. Not her own signature bleeding through from proximity, which was the possibility she'd let herself hope for on the walk over.She picked up the blank chain-of-custody tag from the unclaimed-evidence tray, the one meant for objects too degraded to log properly, and wrote nothing on it. Then she peeled the real tag off the shard's containment sleeve — the one that traced it to tonight, to her, to the archive — and put the blank one in its place.Her hand was steady doing it. That was the part that unsettled her.She pocketed the real tag rather than destroying it. If this was ever going to cost her, she wanted to be the one holdin

The boy gave up the location before he gave up anything else."I don't have a name," he said, twisting against Adrian's grip on his arm, not fighting it, just registering it. "I get told where. Never who.""Where, then?” Lucien said."Corner post. East boundary marker, past the old grain gate." His eyes went to the torn page still in Lucien's hand. "I was supposed to leave that under the stone. That's all I do. I don't read them.""You read enough to know it was torn," Adrian said.The boy didn't answer that.Lucien folded the page once and put it inside his coat. "Take him to holding. Not Renner's people, mine." He looked at Adrian. "The marker's twenty minutes out.""Then we're already late."They ran.*****The stone was exactly where the boy said it would be, and nothing was under it.Adrian crouched anyway, ran his hand along the underside, found the shallow notch worn into the rock by years of the same motion. "Used a lot. Not just tonight.""So we missed the pickup." Lucien tur

Davan moved the moment the second watcher shifted weight.It wasn't much — a half-step back into the tree line, testing space that hadn't been tested in an hour — but it was enough. Davan came off the ridge at an angle that put him between the watcher and the marker itself, not chasing, cutting.The watcher ran.Davan closed the gap fast enough to get a hand on a shoulder before the figure twisted free, dropped low, and put a knee into his ribs hard enough to buy three seconds. Three seconds was enough. By the time Davan had his footing back, there was only broken brush and a strip of dark fabric caught on a branch where a jacket had torn."Lucien." He was already moving, relay open, breath still uneven. "Lost them. They knew the terrain, better than a first pass would explain. Left fabric. No face, no scent I recognize, and they were gone before I could pin either.""Bring the fabric in," Lucien said. "Don't chase further tonight. If they've mapped that ground once, they'll expect pu