The Heiress he never met
"I'm going to tell the board. Not everything, not yet — I need Isabella found first, I need to understand the full shape of what happened to Elias Calloway before I hand anyone a story with holes still in it. But I'm not going to let this stay buried until Aldric's faction forces it into the open on their own terms, and I'm not going to let you or my father's ghost decide, one more time, what I'm capable of carrying."
"They'll use it against you, six weeks before the vote — "
"Then it costs me the vote." Sebastian said it simply, and felt, saying it, a kind of relief he hadn't expected, the particular lightness of finally setting down a version of himself he'd been performing for two years w