POV: Caroline
The interrogation room Thalia chose was deliberate — not the war room with its maps and authority, but the smaller briefing space off the eastern corridor. The table was plain, the light came from one direction only.
I took the chair at the far left, the angle that gave me Sorcha's full profile. It let me read her without requiring her to track me while she tracked Thalia simultaneously.
Thalia opened without preamble. "Tell me the entry team structure," she said. "Not the numbers Lysander already has. The hierarchy inside it."
Sorcha didn't shift. She'd eliminated the body's impulse to adjust — the specific stillness of someone who'd answered difficult questions under genuine pressure before.
"Field commander is a wolf," she replied. "Not a vampire. Amelia uses wolf leads on the ground because they don't carry the biological signature that would flag at the boundary."
I wrote nothing down. The detail matched a structural note from my father's older expansion files exactly — identical architecture, a generation apart.
"A wolf working for the Coven," Thalia said. "How long has that arrangement been in place?"
"Longer than the current operation," Sorcha told her. "The commander wasn't recruited for this. He's been embedded for years. Amelia keeps him dormant between operations — he has a life, a cover. He only activates when she needs ground presence a vampire can't provide."
"Name," Thalia said, her tone narrowing the question to its precise edges — one word that closed every exit except the direct one.
"Field designation only," Sorcha replied. "They don't use names inside operational circles. I have the designation and a physical description. That's the boundary of what I was given access to." She held Thalia's gaze. "I'm not protecting anyone. That is genuinely the limit."
That was the first useful tell. Fabricated intelligence arrived in uniform packages. Sorcha knew the exact amount a person at her access level would hold — enough to be credible, not enough to implicate anyone above her clearance.
"The communication protocol between Amelia and her operatives," Thalia continued. "How does it move?"
"Dead drops," Sorcha said, without hesitation. "No digital footprint. Physical relay through three intermediaries, each knowing only one step in the chain." She leaned forward fractionally. "The cadence is tied to the lunar cycle. Instructions move on the three nights before the new moon."
My pen stopped. The multi-night lunar relay appeared in my father's pre-truce files on the oldest expansion — documentation that shouldn't have survived in any operational form.
"You've seen the actual relay structure," Thalia said, setting her pen down. "Not a briefing on it — the structure itself. From the inside."
"I ran two relays," Sorcha said. "A long while in. I wasn't told what I was carrying, but I was given the timing, the contact points, and the confirm signal." She paused. "That's how I know the cadence isn't approximated. I lived it."
"What's her contingency if the primary entry point is compromised?" Thalia asked.
"She doesn't redesign mid-operation," Sorcha said. "She aborts and rebuilds. The entire cell goes dark for a minimum stretch, then a new approach is structured from scratch."
Her jaw tightened slightly. "Which is why the northwest window matters. If you cover it cleanly enough, she pulls the team and you gain months."
That was information my father's files didn't have. It was also the kind of thing only someone inside the operational circle would know — not the architecture, but the failure protocol. The part they don't document anywhere.
She hadn't fabricated this. Nobody could have — not without access to documents that had lived in a sealed cabinet in my father's study for decades.
Thalia ran another stretch, working through the operative hierarchy below Amelia and the assault team's field composition.
I tracked the pattern throughout: structural details held loosely, operational specifics held tightly. Lived intelligence. The real kind.
When Thalia finally sat back, the room had settled into the particular quiet of a verdict being formed.
"You'll remain on-compound," Thalia told Sorcha. "Restricted access until the picture clears. You'll work directly with me and with Garrett. No independent compound movement for the first several days." She held Sorcha's gaze. "You understand what I'm offering and what I'm withholding."
"Asylum with conditions," Sorcha replied. "That's the right call." She said it without resentment — the tone of someone who had already decided not to waste energy on terms they couldn't change.
"It is," Thalia confirmed, standing, which closed the formal portion of the session cleanly.
I gathered my notes. When the room had mostly cleared, Thalia stopped beside me. "Your read," she said. "Give me one word."
"Genuine," I told her, which was the whole answer and the only one she needed from me.
She held that for a beat, then walked out without adding anything, which meant her read had matched mine and she didn't need to perform agreement.
Not so long ago I would have been the skeptic in this room. Not loudly — I'd learned the register here too well to waste capital on performance.
But internally, building the counter-case, holding alternatives open because trust wasn't something I extended without documentation.
Something had shifted in that pattern without me deciding to shift it. The difference between building a case against someone and understanding the shape of what they carry — those were not the same instinct, and not so long ago they had been.
Sorcha rose when Garrett moved toward the door. She crossed the room with the careful deliberateness of someone who knew she was still being read. Then she stopped.
She turned — not toward Thalia, not toward Garrett — directly to me, with the precision of someone who had saved this moment specifically.
"You're the Montgomery daughter," she said. Her voice was level, without performance. "I recognized the name when Lysander confirmed you were here."
I held her gaze without moving, my hands flat on the table, and said nothing — the only response that gave her nothing to work with.
"The Coven has a specific file on you," Sorcha continued, her voice careful and deliberate. "Not because of your family name. Because of what you gave this pack."
She paused, choosing her last words with the same care she'd applied to everything else in that room. "I thought you should know it exists."
Garrett's hand closed on her arm with the finality of someone whose job is to move a person through a door. She went without resistance, her eyes holding mine until the angle broke.
The door closed. I looked down at my notes without reading them. The Coven had a file on me — not on my father's work, not on the Montgomery name, not on decades of supernatural mapping across the Pacific Northwest.
On what I had given the pack. I didn't know what that meant. What I did know, with the same precision I applied to every conclusion I committed to paper, was that I needed to find out before someone else acted on it first.