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Fitzwalter arrived without ceremony this time, alone, which told me the visit mattered to him.

He crossed my office with pleasantries already flowing about the regrettable events on the forest road. Then his gaze passed over my desk, over the spread transcripts and the black ribbon and the confiscation orders lying face up in the lamplight, and it happened.

His expression hardened but only lasted only a heartbeat, a single crack in a lifetime of polish. I had built a career on heartbeats, and I watched something cold and calculating look out through his eyes at the papers before the courtier's warmth slid back over it like a lid.

"Old papers should stay buried," he said lightly, as though remarking on the weather.

"History has a way of digging itself up," I replied.

We looked at one another across my desk, and the room held two conversations at once, the one made of words about archives and diligence, and the true one underneath it, in which he understood exactly what I had found and I understood exactly what he was, and both of us declined to say so. He recovered beautifully, I’ll grant him that. He complimented my thoroughness, expressed his confidence in my hunt, and hoped aloud that I would not let dusty tragedies distract me from living criminals.

Then he left smiling, and his eyes were anything but warm.

I listened to his footsteps fade while I gathered every document on my desk and locked them in the iron chest beneath my window, because papers that frightened a man like Fitzwalter were papers worth guarding.

What I could not lock away was the new shape of my situation, so I stood at the window and made myself look at it squarely. I had been given unlimited authority to hunt a woman whose father had been murdered by process, whose lands had been stolen by petition, and whose only true crime, as far as I could establish, was refusing to starve quietly. The law I had served my entire life had been the weapon, and the outlaw I was sworn to catch was the evidence, and somewhere between those two facts stood a lord powerful enough to buy a treason verdict, who had looked at my desk this morning and understood that I knew.

In the yard below, his carriage pulled away through the gates.

I could not hear what Lord Edmund Fitzwalter said inside it, leaning back against the cushions with his smile finally allowed to die, speaking softly to the rider who paced his window.

"Closer eyes on the sheriff. I want to know what he reads, who he meets, and where he rides."

A pause, thin as a blade.

"He has developed an interest in history."

7

ROBIN

Iwoke before dawn with a headache pounding behind my eyes and a warmth beneath my skin that had no business being there on a cold autumn morning.

For a long moment I lay still in my tent and refused to understand it. The fire outside had burned to embers hours ago, and my breath fogged faintly in the gray air.

Yet heat moved under my skin in slow lazy currents, pooling low in my belly, humming in places that had been mercifully silent for years. My body felt like a hearth someone had begun to light without my permission, and my own scent hung in the closeness of the tent, richer than it should have been, lavender gone heavy and sweet.

I knew this feeling.

Fuck, I thought.

Every Omega knew this feeling, the way sailors knew how to keep a boat steady in a storm coming their way.

I sat up too fast, and the headache spiked. Carefully, I dug through my pack with hands that were steadier than I deserved.

Eventually, I found the flat leather case where my suppressants lived. I carried my supply separate from the camp stores. I’d always done that. It was one of the small ruthless disciplines of being the Ghost.

The Ghost could be hungry and cold and hunted.

But the Ghost could never, ever be in heat.

Ever.

Slowly, I opened the case and found that one vial remained.

I stared at it in the dim light, my head still hurting. that single measure of pale liquid that stood between me and my own biology, and I made myself do the arithmetic I had been avoiding for a fortnight. I had shorted my own doses twice during the shortage, stretching my supply thin so it never touched what we distributed, and my body was now presenting me with the bill. One vial, taken today, would hold the tide for perhaps a week. Taken at the first true sign instead, it might buy me three or four days at the storm's edge, which was a gambler's timing with a gambler's consequences.

And there would be no more.