[Evelyn’s POV]

The knock comes at the council chamber door during Draven’s evening briefing, and when the guard announces the visitor, the air in the room changes.

“Venna requests a private audience, my lord.”

Draven’s pen stills. He glances at me — a quick look that asks whether I want to leave. I don’t move.

“Send her in.”

Venna enters in unmarked leathers, with no sigil or braid.

She’s thinner than the last time I saw her — hollows beneath her cheekbones deeper, cords in her neck more pronounced. Demotion is eating her from the inside.

Her gaze finds me standing beside Draven’s chair. Her jaw tightens — a flex she controls so fast it’s almost invisible.

“Speak,” Draven says.

Venna plants herself three paces from the desk, feet apart, hands clasped behind her back. The stance of a soldier delivering a report, even without the rank to justify it.

“The coded correspondence channel I created with Cassandra during the summit. Someone is using it.”

Draven’s expression doesn’t change.

“How do you know this?”

“I checked the dead drop myself three days ago.” She holds his stare without flinching.

“Not out of treachery but paranoia. When you stripped my rank, I assumed Sera’s team would dismantle the infrastructure — the drop points, the cipher, the relay chain. I wanted to confirm it was done.”

“It wasn’t.”

“The primary drop in the kitchen corridor was active. Fresh messages, recent ink, intelligence I never shared during my contact with Cassandra. Patrol schedules updated since my demotion. An analysis of the eastern approach — tidal patterns, reef coverage, the three-day window when shallow-draft vessels can navigate the channel.”

My pulse spikes. The eastern approach — the weakness I showed Draven on the map. Someone with current access is feeding that information outward.

“I never had that intelligence,” Venna continues. “I lost access to operational briefings the day you demoted me.”

“Whoever is using my channel has clearance I no longer possess.” She adds. “They’re seeing duty rosters, defensive assessments, briefing summaries — material that flows through the senior command structure or the administrative corridors adjacent to it.”

Draven leans forward. “You’re telling me someone with active intelligence clearance has co-opted the channel you built for Cassandra and is running it independently.”

“That’s what the evidence shows. The cipher is mine — I designed it, and whoever is using it has the full rotation key. Either they obtained it from Cassandra during the summit, or they were part of the original network I didn’t know about.”

“A second operative, already embedded before you made contact.”

“Possible… Or someone Cassandra recruited separately using the access my channel provided. Either way, the flow is current and detailed, and this isn’t leftover intelligence — it’s active espionage.”

Silence fills the chamber. I watch Draven’s hands on the desk — still, flat, the controlled stillness of a man calculating distances and trajectories.

“Why are you bringing this to me?” he asks.

The question hangs between them. It’s not an accusation but a genuine inquiry. Venna’s jaw works, and I see the effort it costs her to answer without defensiveness.

“The channel I created is being used to transmit intelligence that will get people in this compound killed. Patrol schedules tell an enemy where your guards aren’t. Eastern approach analysis tells them where to land an assault force. Defensive assessments tell them where to hit and where to avoid.”

“Fewer, once we cross-reference with the other intelligence Venna identified. The patrol schedules were updated on specific dates. Whoever transmitted them had access on those dates and the opportunity to reach the dead drop.”

Sera arrives within minutes. Draven briefs her with clipped efficiency, and I watch her face shift as the new data restructures her investigation. She pulls a folded list from her vest and begins striking names, adding annotations.

“This changes the geometry,” she says. “Give me forty-eight hours, and I’ll have a name.”

She leaves at a pace that’s nearly a run. Draven sits back in his chair and exhales — a long, slow release that carries the weight of everything this evening has delivered.

I look at him. He’s staring at the closed door where Venna exited, and his expression holds something he didn’t let her see.

He won’t say it aloud, but I caught what his eyes admitted in the moment before Sera arrived — the recognition of what Venna just did.

She walked into a room with the woman she blames for her downfall, laid intelligence on the table that could have been her leverage or her bargaining chip, and asked for nothing.

She chose the house over her pride and stripped of everything that defined her, choosing to protect the people who watched her fall.

It doesn’t erase anything. The treason stands, and the trust she broke is still broken.

But it matters — the way four sparring partners out of thirty mattered, the way Margit’s words mattered. Small acts of integrity in a house full of fractures.

Draven catches my eye across the desk. Neither of us speaks.

The hunt for the second spy just narrowed to days, and the war it serves is already on the water.