Three days passed without a word from Aiden, and Morgana threw herself into garage work with a fierceness that didn't go unnoticed by anyone who'd spent more than a few hours around her. She reorganized the weapons cache twice, recalibrated equipment that had needed no recalibrating, and volunteered for two minor supply runs that Finn or Wren would normally have handled without her involvement at all.

"You've been in a mood." Wren observed on the second evening, watching her strip down a sniper rifle that had been cleaned and reassembled only the day before. "Something happen with the Bank Chief?"

"Nothing happened." Morgana snapped, harder than she intended, the words coming out sharper than the question warranted. She caught herself immediately, softening her tone with visible effort. "We're focusing on essential updates only. That's all. It's a sensible precaution given the circumstances."

Wren raised an eyebrow but said nothing further, recognizing the particular tightness in her friend's jaw that meant further questions would only make things worse, though she filed the reaction away all the same, the way she filed away every small crack in Morgana's usually impenetrable composure. In four years of working alongside her, Wren had learned that Morgana's silences carried more information than her words ever did, and this particular silence carried quite a lot.

She tried once more, gentler this time, setting down the tools she'd been using to help with the rifle. "You know you can talk to me. Whatever it is."

"I know." Morgana said, and for a moment, something in her posture softened, the fierce, deliberate busyness of the past two days threatening to crack. "It's not — it's complicated. He pulled back after the mission. Some internal Bank thing flagged him, and instead of just telling me what was actually going on, he just... shut the door. Called it 'essential updates only' and left."

"That sounds like a man protecting something, not abandoning someone." Wren offered carefully.

"Maybe." Morgana said, unwilling to concede the point fully even as some part of her recognized the fairness in it. "Or maybe it's easier to hide behind protocol than to actually explain himself. I've seen enough of that particular skill from people at court to recognize it when it happens again somewhere else."

Wren didn't push further, letting the observation sit, and after a moment, Morgana returned to her work, the conversation closed for now, though not entirely resolved in either of their minds.

Alone that night, lying awake long after the rest of the garage had gone quiet, Morgana told herself firmly that this was for the best. She'd spent four years building a life that didn't depend on anyone from the Bank, four years of proving — to herself, if to no one else — that she could carry the weight of hundreds of desperate families entirely on her own shoulders without needing anyone else's help or approval. One week of partnership didn't change that fundamental truth, however much it had felt, in the moment, like something worth building on.

She stared at the ceiling of her small room, listening to the distant sounds of the garage settling for the night — Grath's heavy footsteps making one last patrol of the perimeter, the soft hum of Finn's equipment still running somewhere down the hall, the ordinary rhythms of the life she'd built for herself, piece by piece, over four hard years. This life didn't need Aiden in it. This life had existed perfectly well before him, and would continue perfectly well without him, whatever brief warmth she'd allowed herself to feel over these past strange weeks. She'd built this garage, this crew, this entire fragile ecosystem of trust and survival, out of nothing but stubbornness and a refusal to accept the world as it was handed to her. Surely she could survive one Bank Chief deciding distance was safer than honesty.

Trusting Aiden had always been a calculated risk, not a certainty — she reminded herself of this repeatedly, as though repetition alone could make the reminder stick. If he'd decided the risk to his career outweighed whatever they'd built together, that was, she told herself firmly, entirely reasonable. Perfectly rational. Exactly the kind of decision she herself might have made, in his position, weighing institutional survival against an uncertain alliance with an outlaw gang leader whose own motives, however aligned they currently seemed, could theoretically shift at any moment.

And yet she found herself checking her communicator far more often than she cared to admit, an almost involuntary habit that had crept in over the past days without her fully noticing until it had already become routine, annoyed each time at her own disappointment when nothing new appeared on the screen beyond the mundane traffic of ordinary crew business. She caught herself doing it during a supply run, during a weapons check, once even in the middle of a conversation with Finn about scheduling the next distribution route, and each time the small habit irritated her more than the last, a physical tell of exactly the vulnerability she'd spent years training herself out of.

"This is exactly why I don't rely on anyone." she muttered to herself on the third night, tossing the device aside onto her cot with more force than necessary, the small clatter of it hitting the thin mattress feeling somehow unsatisfying compared to the frustration building beneath her ribs. She lay back, staring at the ceiling, and allowed herself, just this once, in the privacy of her own dark room, to admit that the frustration wasn't really about Aiden's silence at all — it was about how much that silence had revealed about how far she'd already let him in, without ever quite deciding to.

She thought, unwillingly, of the way he'd talked about the rooftop, about his mother, about beauty built on suffering he'd only later understood — small, unguarded pieces of himself he'd offered without her even having to ask. It had felt, in the moment, like the beginning of something rare, something she hadn't let herself want in longer than she could clearly remember. And then, with a single phone call, he'd folded it all away again, retreating behind the same careful walls he'd first worn at Copperline, as though the warmth between them had been an aberration rather than anything real.

She thought too of her own walls, the ones she'd built even higher than his over the years — the crown she'd never mentioned, the mother she called only rarely and only in secret, the entire life she'd walked away from that she'd shared with almost no one outside Wren. If she was honest with herself, and honesty at two in the morning was easier to manage than honesty in daylight, she'd been no more forthcoming with him than he'd been with her. Perhaps that was exactly why his sudden retreat had stung as sharply as it had — not because it was unfair, but because it mirrored something she recognized far too well in herself.

She told herself it didn't matter. She told herself this several more times before finally accepting that telling herself things repeatedly did not, in fact, make them true.

Refusing to simply wait for him to decide when, or if, he was ready to reach out again, she decided to continue investigating Baron Dresthorne independently, pulling old contacts and favors from her years navigating Ledgerhold's underworld — informants in the shipping district who owed her favors from jobs long past, a disgraced former Bank clerk who'd been quietly feeding her scraps of information for over a year in exchange for enough Mana to keep his family fed. None of them had access to anything as clean as Aiden's internal Bank credentials, but together, pieced carefully, their information painted a picture that even official channels sometimes missed.

She spent the better part of two days moving between contacts, calling in favors she'd been saving for years, piecing together fragments of shipping records, tax filings, and half-remembered rumors from people who'd crossed paths with Dresthorne's operation at one point or another. It was slow, exhausting work, nothing like the efficiency Aiden's Bank access had provided, but it kept her hands busy and her mind occupied with something other than the silence sitting heavy on her communicator.

One contact, an aging clerk named Osric who'd once processed shipping manifests for half the noble houses in Ledgerhold before a gambling debt forced him into quiet, resentful retirement, proved particularly useful. He remembered names, patterns, the small inconsistencies that official records were designed to hide, and he owed Morgana enough favors from past jobs that he was willing to spend an entire evening walking her through everything he could recall about unusual account structures tied to major noble houses. It wasn't Bank-grade access, but it was enough to point her in the right direction, enough to know which threads were worth pulling harder.

"You're looking for something buried deep." Osric had told her, squinting at the fragments she'd shown him, adjusting a pair of cracked spectacles that had clearly seen better decades. "This kind of formatting, this level of obscuring — that's not standard corporate hiding. That's someone with real institutional power making sure a very specific trail never surfaces. I saw formatting like this exactly once before, years ago, in a file I wasn't supposed to see at all. Cost me my job when someone realized I'd seen it."

"What was in it?" Morgana had asked, leaning forward.

"Couldn't tell you." Osric said, shaking his head. "I only glimpsed it for a moment before they caught me and had me escorted out. But I remember the feeling of it — like I'd stumbled onto something the whole institution was built to protect, not just one corrupt official skimming off the top."

The observation had stuck with her through the following night's work, sharpening her focus as she cross-referenced everything Osric had given her against the cold-storage data.

Late into the night, cross-referencing shipping manifests with the financial records they'd already extracted from the cold-storage vault, hunched over a makeshift desk in the corner of the garage with only a single lamp for light, she found it — an irregular transaction number appearing repeatedly across seemingly unrelated Bank accounts, a pattern too specific, too deliberately obscured, to be coincidence. It wasn't tied to Dresthorne's known holdings at all, which was precisely what made it interesting; whoever had structured this particular thread of the financial web had gone to considerably more effort to hide it than anything else she'd seen so far.

Her breath caught as she recognized the formatting, a specific encryption pattern she'd seen once before, weeks ago, in a fragment of data Aiden had shown her without fully explaining its significance. This wasn't just evidence connected to Dresthorne. This was something deeper, something that reached directly into the Bank's most classified internal systems — the kind of classification level that, in her limited understanding of Bank hierarchy, was typically reserved for matters the institution considered existential to its own survival.

Whatever pride had kept her from reaching out these past three days evaporated instantly in the face of what she'd just found. She grabbed her communicator, fingers already typing before she'd fully decided to send it, the urgency of the discovery overriding every careful resolution she'd made about waiting him out, about proving she didn't need him to reach out first.

She paused only once, thumb hovering over the send button, some small, stubborn part of her still wanting to draft something cooler, more professional, something that wouldn't betray how much the silence of the past three days had actually cost her. But the discovery in front of her mattered more than her pride, and after a moment, she sent the message exactly as she'd first typed it — direct, urgent, and entirely without the careful distance she'd told herself she wanted to maintain: "Found something. Irregular transaction number, buried deep, doesn't match Dresthorne's known accounts. This goes higher than him. Need to talk."

Within minutes, a reply came back, faster than she'd expected, faster than the careful, measured pace of their supposed "essential updates only" arrangement would have suggested. Whatever else had shifted between them over the past three days, she thought, reading his response, Aiden clearly hadn't managed to convince himself of his own careful distance any more successfully than she had.

"Tonight. Same place." the message read, and beneath the brevity of it, she thought she could detect something like relief, as though the excuse to reach out again had been exactly what he'd needed too, however unwilling either of them had been to admit it first. She read the two words three times over, searching for some hidden warmth in them that probably wasn't there, and finding, despite her better judgment, that she wanted to believe it was.

She set the communicator down, allowing herself, for the first time in three days, a small, genuine smile before catching herself and forcing her expression back into something more neutral, more appropriately professional for a woman about to walk back into a meeting she'd spent three days convincing herself she didn't need.

She dressed quickly, checking her weapon out of habit rather than any real expectation of danger tonight. Whatever waited for her at the safehouse — an apology, more careful distance, or something else entirely — she would face it the way she faced everything else: directly, and without pretending the discovery in her bag was the only reason she'd been eager to go.

By the time she reached the door, she'd already decided that whatever awkwardness waited for her at the safehouse, the discovery was worth it. Some things mattered more than pride, even hers.

Wren caught her at the door, arms crossed, one eyebrow raised at the change in Morgana's demeanor from the fierce, closed-off busyness of the past three days. "You look like someone who just found a reason to stop sulking."

"I found a lead." Morgana said simply, refusing to elaborate further, though the small, betraying lift at the corner of her mouth told Wren everything else she needed to know.

"Uh-huh." Wren said, unconvinced but wise enough not to press, stepping aside to let her pass. "Be careful out there."

"Always am." Morgana replied, already halfway out the door, the cool night air a welcome relief after three days spent stewing in her own stubborn silence, though she couldn't quite shake the feeling that Wren's knowing look would follow her the whole way there.

The ride to the safehouse felt shorter than usual, the cool night air clearing her head of the tangled frustration of the past three days, replaced instead by the sharp, familiar focus of a lead worth chasing — and, if she was being fully honest with herself, a small measure of anticipation she wasn't quite ready to name.

Whatever came of tonight, she thought, gripping the handlebars a little tighter as the garage lights faded behind her, at least it would be honest.