Third Person's POV:Because I want you to find it before they use it. For reasons that are not yours to understand yet, the leader had told Nathan in that hotel room, and now Nathan's voice was carrying the same words down the phone line to Adrian.Adrian went very still.~.~"Say that again," he said quietly."He told me the sixth stone is not where you believe it is," Nathan said. "He said the person who moved it is someone you trust completely. Adrian. Is that true."Adrian did not answer right away. He was standing near the window of the small office, the same room where he had first told Nathan about the estate, the small worn notebook still sitting closed on the desk behind him. Something in his silence stretched long enough that Nathan spoke again before he could gather himself."Do not go quiet on me now," Nathan said. "Not tonight. Not after everything else.""I am not going quiet," Adrian said. "I am thinking about how to say this correctly.""There is no correct way to say

Nathan's POV:We do not have time to be careful about this the slow way, Claire had told Marcus, and by the time she and Daniel got me on a call together an hour later, I understood exactly why."Marcus is not a traitor," I said, once they had both laid out the full picture. "He is a custodian who made a protective decision that turned into a new problem. I need everyone to understand that before we move any further tonight."~.~"I agree," Daniel said. "But agreeing with his intention does not solve the transfer problem. The Hollow Court knows he has it. They have given him forty eight hours, and they will be watching every route between him and us.""How significant is their intercept capability," I said.Daniel was quiet for a second, clearly running through it in his head before answering."Significant," he said finally. "They have people positioned on every route we know about between Marcus's location and any place we would normally bring something like this. Roads. Rail. Even c

Nathan's POV:It is time for that to stop, the stranger had told Vivienne, though I would not learn about any of it until much later. Right now I was sitting at a familiar counter, watching the same man who had once told me about a little girl pressing her face against glass.He nodded when he saw me and brought a coffee over without asking.~.~"You are back," he said."I am back," I said.He set the cup down and glanced toward the display case, then back at me, something careful in his expression, like he was deciding whether to say more."Coffee is on the house today," he said simply, and went back to the register.~.~I drank it slowly and looked at the case.The cake was there. Pink icing, flowers along the top edge, exactly the way it had been described to me the day I bought one just like it and left it beside my daughter with nothing to say except that I had gone back for it.I did not plan to order anything. My mind was elsewhere, running through everything that still had to

Nathan's POV:I already made my mistakes. This is not one of them, Vivienne had told the operative in her kitchen, though I would not hear about any of that until later. Right now I was walking into Adrian's building with a small case in my hand and six stones between us for the first time in twenty years.~.~Adrian was already at the desk when I came in. He saw the case and stood up slowly, something careful moving across his face."You have all of them," he said. It was not quite a question."All six," I said. "Marcus gave up the sixth willingly, once we found a way to move it without the Hollow Court intercepting the transfer.""How," Adrian said."Claire chose the meeting place," I said. "The bakery on Clement Street. Nobody was watching for that."~.~I set the case down on the table and opened it. One by one I laid each stone out beside the others, Adrian's two dark ones, the amber stone from the music teacher, the smoke black fourth stone from the house on the hill, the fifth

Nathan's POV:She was smiling, Daniel had said, and I did not answer him right away. I sat with it, the way I had learned to sit with almost everything now, quietly, from the inside out, before letting myself decide what it meant.~.~Adrian was watching me. Daniel too. Neither of them pushed me to speak. The stones on the table had gone quiet again, five of them softly glowing, the sixth still dark, and I stared at that darkness for a long moment before I finally spoke."Say it again," I said to Daniel. "Exactly what you saw. Do not soften it for me.""A meeting," Daniel said. "Six weeks ago. The location I catalogued was a private garden behind an old estate on the northern edge of the city. I recorded the date, the time, the fact that it happened, because that is what I do with everything. I never wrote down who was there because at the time my mind slid past it, the way you slide past something ordinary.""And now," Adrian said quietly."Now it is not ordinary at all," Daniel said