The Guardian's Mate
She made me wait two days, which felt like an eternity given everything hanging on the answer, but when she finally called, what she gave me changed the shape of everything we'd been chasing.
"There's a coven," she said, her voice low even over the phone, like she was worried about being overheard even now. "Small. Not affiliated with Adrian, not affiliated with the King either. Independent. They specialize in exactly this kind of work — memory extraction, illusion casting, the sort of magic most covens abandoned because the cost is too steep for anyone sane to keep using it regularly."
"Who leads them?"
"That I don't have," she admitted. "But I have a locatio