They moved in gradually, over the first two weeks of December, nothing rushed, the way Fae had insisted everything in this family now happened, slowly, with room left for it to settle properly.Derek took the study at the end of the east wing as his own working space, not Jacob's, a separate room Pruitt had quietly prepared weeks earlier, as though he'd anticipated this arrangement before anyone had spoken it aloud. Fae claimed the sitting room with the piano no one had played in thirty-one years, and on their third evening in the house, she sat down at it, tentative, and picked out a simple melody she admitted, laughing, she'd only half-remembered from childhood lessons.Jacob, passing the doorway, stopped and listened for a long moment before continuing on, and Derek, watching his father's face in that brief pause, thought he understood exactly what Jacob was hearing: not Fae's halting, imperfect scales, but the simple fact of music existing in that room again at all.The foundation

The message came through an intermediary, careful and indirect the way everything connected to Elisabeth Hartenstein had always been, and it reached Victor's office on a grey February morning with an urgency that cut through the office's usual procedural calm."She's requesting protection," Victor told Derek and Fae, relaying the message word for word. "Not from prosecution. From her own structure. She says that since handing over the folder, she's noticed surveillance she believes originates from within the older network, people connected to whatever remains above even her former authority.""She said she'd stop interfering," Derek said, "not that she'd be safe once she did.""No," Victor agreed. "I think she understood the risk when she handed Jacob that folder. I think she's only now confirming the risk was real rather than theoretical."Sera, consulted immediately, authorized limited federal protection, a careful arrangement given Elisabeth's unusual status, neither witness nor fu

Fae told him on a Tuesday morning, quietly, the way she told him everything that mattered most, without ceremony, simply true the moment it needed to be said."I'm pregnant," she said, setting down her coffee cup with careful precision, as though the cup required more attention than usual to keep her hands from shaking. "Six weeks, the doctor thinks. I wanted to be certain before I said anything, even to you."Derek set down the report he'd been reading and looked at her for a long moment, feeling something settle and expand in his chest at once, too large for any single, careful sentence to hold."Fae," he said, and found he had nothing more composed prepared, the plain fact of it simply too large to dress up with anything else."I know," she said, and her eyes were wet, though she was smiling, the particular unguarded smile she'd learned to allow herself fully since the wedding. "I've been sitting with it for three days, trying to find the right way to tell you, and I think there is