All Chapters of HE CHOSE HER LIES OVER ME: Chapter 31 - Chapter 40

Chapter Thirty Two: The Road to the Western ReachesThe rider's name was Corrin, and he had been on the road since before dawn. The first thing I noticed when I reached him was that his hands were shaking, the specific tremor of someone who had found something on a road and had not yet finished finding it, even though they were no longer on the road."Coran Vale," I said. "Is he alive?"Corrin looked at me, looked at Freya, who had appeared at my shoulder from somewhere inside the grounds, then looked back at me."When I left him, yes," he said. "But he had been on the ground for some time before I found him. The attack happened before first light. Someone had run the horses off, so he could not ride for help.""How far out?" Freya said."Two hours at a steady pace. Less if you push."Kael was already an hour ahead of me on that road.I turned to Ronan. "I need a horse.""Selene," he said."I need a horse, Ronan. Kael is on that road, and he does not know what he is riding into, and

Chapter Thirty Four: The Man Who Walked BackBrann looked nothing like a traitor.That was the first thing I noticed when Dane brought him into the common room, and I noticed it specifically because I had spent nineteen years watching people decide I looked exactly like what they had already decided I was, and fairness required me to extend to him the same caution I had always wanted extended to me. Even now, even knowing what he had done.He was younger than I had realised. The kind of young that gets obscured when someone is competent, when their face settles into a professional expression and holds it long enough that you stop registering the age underneath. He stood in the doorway with his hands open at his sides and his eyes moving around the room in the way of someone assessing it, not for escape, but for the thing they had decided before walking through the gate."Sit down," Kael said.Brann sat.Kael did not sit. He stood at the end of the table with his arms at his sides an

Chapter Thirty Six: Twelve MilesThe northern track was exactly what the survey notes had promised and considerably worse than I had imagined, a narrow path through densely grown foothills that required the horses to pick their way forward rather than move at any pace that felt adequate given what was waiting at the end of it.Kael rode ahead, I rode second. Behind me, Ronan, Cole, Dane, and Brann moved in a line that spoke to how much the last several days had changed the shape of what we were doing, because a week ago none of us had been in the same room and now we were riding single file through an unmapped track toward a property that did not officially exist, looking for a person whose name had been kept out of every record for forty years."How much further?" Dane said, from the back of the line."Half a mile," Brann said. "The track curves left and then opens onto a cleared area. The main structure is stone, set back from the clearing.""How do you know that?" I said."I have

Chapter Thirty Eight: Come Alone"No," Kael said.He said it before I had finished explaining what the letter contained, before I had finished reading it aloud to the group on the road, and the single word landed with the particular finality of something that had not been considered and then decided but had been decided before the consideration began."You have not heard the full plan yet," I said."The full plan is that you go alone to a man who has spent forty years eliminating people who knew too much, and in exchange he gives you a journal that is the only irreplaceable piece of evidence in a case that already has substantial documentation." He looked at me steadily. "That is not a plan, that is a trap.""I know it is a trap.""And you are still considering it.""I am considering it because the journal is the only evidence that establishes the timeline of the conspiracy from my father's own hand. Everything else we have can be argued as assembled after the fact. The journal cann

Chapter Forty: What He Left on the Last PageI did not open the journal at the Greymill.I carried it out of the common room and back up the ridge to where Cole and Elara were waiting and I held it the entire ride back to the festival grounds, two hands on the reins and the journal wedged beneath my left arm, and I did not open it because opening it in a public place on a moving horse with people around me felt wrong in the specific way that some things are wrong not because they are harmful but because they deserve better than the circumstances available.My father had written in that journal alone, at night, in the days when he understood what he was risking and had chosen to keep going anyway. The least I could do was read it somewhere quiet.Freya met us at the festival grounds gate with the expression she wore when a great deal had happened in a short time and she was in the process of organising it into something actionable. She had Elara escorted inside with a care that was bo