Morgana returned to the garage the following morning, the weight of the previous night's conversation still settling strangely in her chest — lighter in some ways, having finally spoken the truth aloud to someone outside her own crew, but heavier in others, aware now that the truth existed in one more mind than it had before, one more variable in an already complicated equation. She found Wren in the back workshop, elbow-deep in the internals of a malfunctioning enchanted rifle, and settled onto a nearby stool without quite deciding to say anything yet.
"You look like you didn't sleep." Wren observed, not looking up from her work.
"I told Aiden." Morgana said, the words coming out simpler than she expected, though the weight behind them was anything but simple. "About the crown. About everything."
Wren's hands stilled on the rifle, and she looked up slowly, her expression carrying none of the immediate reassurance Morgana had half-hoped for. "You told him everything? The throne, the Ceremony, all of it?"
"Not all of it. But enough. He already knew something was wrong — the envoy left the sealed notice on the table, and there wasn't really a way to explain that away as a supplier issue anymore." Morgana rubbed a hand over her face, exhaustion from the sleepless night finally catching up with her. "It felt right, telling him. It felt like a weight coming off."
"I understand that." Wren said carefully, setting down her tools entirely now, giving Morgana her full attention. "But have you thought about what it means for him, now that he knows? If the Council ever finds out that a Bank Chief knows the crown princess's location, knows she's been working with an outlaw crew, knows details about the succession crisis that aren't public — that makes him a target. Not just professionally. Actually dangerous kind of target."
Morgana felt something cold settle in her stomach at the observation, an angle she hadn't fully considered in the relief of finally unburdening herself. "I hadn't thought that far ahead." she admitted. "I was so focused on how much it cost me to keep carrying it alone that I didn't think about what it might cost him to carry it with me."
"That's not a criticism." Wren said gently. "I understand why you told him. I probably would have done the same thing, eventually, in your position. I just want you to go into this with your eyes open. Aiden's already risking his career for this investigation. Now he's risking more than that, whether he fully realizes it yet or not." She set the rifle aside entirely now, wiping her hands on a rag as she turned to face Morgana more directly. "I saw what the Bank did to people who crossed powerful families, back when I still worked there. It wasn't always dramatic. Sometimes it was just a quiet transfer to a worse position, a sudden audit that turned up irregularities that had never existed before, a career that simply stopped advancing for reasons no one would ever explain. If House Veyland ever learns Aiden knows what he knows, they won't need to do anything as obvious as coming after him directly."
"You think they'd be that patient about it." Morgana said, though it wasn't really a question.
"I think powerful people usually are, when patience serves them better than haste." Wren replied. "That's something you'd know better than most, given where you come from."
Morgana absorbed that, the truth of it settling uncomfortably alongside everything else she was already carrying. "I'll talk to him. Make sure he understands the full shape of what he's agreed to, not just the parts that seemed obvious in the moment."
Morgana sat with that for a long moment, turning the new weight of it over in her mind. "He didn't hesitate." she said finally. "When I told him. He didn't ask me to reconsider trusting him, didn't treat it like a burden. He just... accepted it, and asked what I needed."
"That says something good about him." Wren agreed. "But it doesn't make the risk any smaller. Just make sure he understands exactly what he's taken on, if he doesn't already. Some people don't fully register a danger until it's already arrived."
Morgana nodded slowly, already turning over how she might explain the fuller shape of the risk without frightening him away from something neither of them seemed inclined to walk back from at this point.
Meanwhile, across the city, Aiden sat in his office with the door locked, cross-referencing the coding symbol Morgana had identified in Dresthorne's ledger against the classified Continuity Initiative files he'd extracted from the underground vault. The symbol had taken most of the morning to properly decode, requiring him to work through three layers of encryption using techniques he'd only ever seen referenced in the Bank's most restricted training materials, materials he'd only had access to since his promotion to Special Debt Recovery Chief years earlier. He'd sent Corin away on a fabricated errand to buy himself the uninterrupted hours the decryption required, aware that even his most loyal subordinate couldn't be allowed to glimpse what he was working on.
When the final layer finally resolved into readable text, Aiden felt his breath catch in his throat. The symbol wasn't a department code, or a project designation, as he'd assumed. It was a personal signature — the private authorization mark of a specific individual, someone with clearance high enough to bypass standard oversight entirely, a level of access Aiden himself, even as Chief, had never been granted.
The name attached to that signature stopped him cold: Marcus Aldric Voss. Former Deputy Director of the Ancient Bank, quietly retired a decade earlier under circumstances that had never been fully explained to junior staff, circumstances Aiden himself had once accepted without question, back when he was young enough in his career to simply trust that senior leadership departures happened for reasons above his pay grade to understand.
He sat back in his chair, staring at the name on the screen, memories surfacing unbidden — Voss's office on the fortieth floor, all dark wood and old books, the careful, patient way he'd mentored a handful of promising junior officers, Aiden included, during his first two years at the Bank. Voss had been the one who'd first explained the deeper mechanics of credit structuring to him, the one who'd praised his meticulous attention to detail, the one whose approval Aiden had, for a brief and formative period of his early career, actively sought before he'd learned enough to recognize how much of what Voss taught him existed to serve the system rather than the people trapped within it. He remembered, with sudden and uncomfortable clarity, a specific afternoon when Voss had taken him aside after a difficult case, telling him that the kindest thing a good officer could do was follow procedure precisely, that mercy dispensed unevenly was crueler than none at all. He'd believed that once. It had taken years of watching the human cost of that "procedure" to understand how convenient a philosophy it had been for the people who benefited most from it.
He needed more before bringing this to Morgana — not because he doubted the discovery, but because a name alone wasn't enough. He spent the next several hours quietly pulling whatever fragmentary records still existed on Voss's decade-old departure, cross-referencing dates, searching for any trace of where the man might have gone, what he might be doing now, why his signature would still be appearing on documents years after his supposed retirement.
By the time evening approached, Aiden had assembled enough to feel confident bringing the discovery forward, though the shape of what he'd found left him with more unease than satisfaction. He drafted a brief message to Morgana, his fingers hesitating over the words before finally settling on something simple: "Found the name. Meet tonight."
Across the city, in the garage's back workshop, Morgana's communicator buzzed with the message, and she felt a strange mixture of relief and dread settle over her in equal measure — relief that they finally had a concrete thread to pull, dread at what that thread might unravel once they finally reached its end. Two fronts pressing in at once, she thought — the crown from one direction, the conspiracy from another, both converging toward deadlines and discoveries she wasn't sure she was fully prepared to face.
She typed back a brief confirmation, then sat for a moment longer, staring at the screen, wondering which of the two closing gates would ultimately demand her attention first, and whether she'd have any real choice in the matter when the moment finally came.
You've reached the end of this chapter
Morgana returned to the garage the following morning, the weight of the previous night's conversation still settling strangely in her chest — lighter in some ways, having finally spoken the truth aloud to someone outside her own crew, but heavier in others, aware now that the truth existed in one more mind than it had before, one more variable in an already complicated equation. She found Wren in the back workshop, elbow-deep in the internals of a malfunctioning enchanted rifle, and settled onto a nearby stool without quite deciding to say anything yet.
"You look like you didn't sleep." Wren observed, not looking up from her work.
"I told Aiden." Morgana said, the words coming out simpler than she expected, though the weight behind them was anything but simple. "About the crown. About everything."
Wren's hands stilled on the rifle, and she looked up slowly, her expression carrying none of the immediate reassurance Morgana had half-hoped for. "You told him everything? The throne, the Ceremony, all of it?"
"Not all of it. But enough. He already knew something was wrong — the envoy left the sealed notice on the table, and there wasn't really a way to explain that away as a supplier issue anymore." Morgana rubbed a hand over her face, exhaustion from the sleepless night finally catching up with her. "It felt right, telling him. It felt like a weight coming off."
"I understand that." Wren said carefully, setting down her tools entirely now, giving Morgana her full attention. "But have you thought about what it means for him, now that he knows? If the Council ever finds out that a Bank Chief knows the crown princess's location, knows she's been working with an outlaw crew, knows details about the succession crisis that aren't public — that makes him a target. Not just professionally. Actually dangerous kind of target."
Morgana felt something cold settle in her stomach at the observation, an angle she hadn't fully considered in the relief of finally unburdening herself. "I hadn't thought that far ahead." she admitted. "I was so focused on how much it cost me to keep carrying it alone that I didn't think about what it might cost him to carry it with me."
"That's not a criticism." Wren said gently. "I understand why you told him. I probably would have done the same thing, eventually, in your position. I just want you to go into this with your eyes open. Aiden's already risking his career for this investigation. Now he's risking more than that, whether he fully realizes it yet or not." She set the rifle aside entirely now, wiping her hands on a rag as she turned to face Morgana more directly. "I saw what the Bank did to people who crossed powerful families, back when I still worked there. It wasn't always dramatic. Sometimes it was just a quiet transfer to a worse position, a sudden audit that turned up irregularities that had never existed before, a career that simply stopped advancing for reasons no one would ever explain. If House Veyland ever learns Aiden knows what he knows, they won't need to do anything as obvious as coming after him directly."
"You think they'd be that patient about it." Morgana said, though it wasn't really a question.
"I think powerful people usually are, when patience serves them better than haste." Wren replied. "That's something you'd know better than most, given where you come from."
Morgana absorbed that, the truth of it settling uncomfortably alongside everything else she was already carrying. "I'll talk to him. Make sure he understands the full shape of what he's agreed to, not just the parts that seemed obvious in the moment."
Morgana sat with that for a long moment, turning the new weight of it over in her mind. "He didn't hesitate." she said finally. "When I told him. He didn't ask me to reconsider trusting him, didn't treat it like a burden. He just... accepted it, and asked what I needed."
"That says something good about him." Wren agreed. "But it doesn't make the risk any smaller. Just make sure he understands exactly what he's taken on, if he doesn't already. Some people don't fully register a danger until it's already arrived."
Morgana nodded slowly, already turning over how she might explain the fuller shape of the risk without frightening him away from something neither of them seemed inclined to walk back from at this point.
Meanwhile, across the city, Aiden sat in his office with the door locked, cross-referencing the coding symbol Morgana had identified in Dresthorne's ledger against the classified Continuity Initiative files he'd extracted from the underground vault. The symbol had taken most of the morning to properly decode, requiring him to work through three layers of encryption using techniques he'd only ever seen referenced in the Bank's most restricted training materials, materials he'd only had access to since his promotion to Special Debt Recovery Chief years earlier. He'd sent Corin away on a fabricated errand to buy himself the uninterrupted hours the decryption required, aware that even his most loyal subordinate couldn't be allowed to glimpse what he was working on.
When the final layer finally resolved into readable text, Aiden felt his breath catch in his throat. The symbol wasn't a department code, or a project designation, as he'd assumed. It was a personal signature — the private authorization mark of a specific individual, someone with clearance high enough to bypass standard oversight entirely, a level of access Aiden himself, even as Chief, had never been granted.
The name attached to that signature stopped him cold: Marcus Aldric Voss. Former Deputy Director of the Ancient Bank, quietly retired a decade earlier under circumstances that had never been fully explained to junior staff, circumstances Aiden himself had once accepted without question, back when he was young enough in his career to simply trust that senior leadership departures happened for reasons above his pay grade to understand.
He sat back in his chair, staring at the name on the screen, memories surfacing unbidden — Voss's office on the fortieth floor, all dark wood and old books, the careful, patient way he'd mentored a handful of promising junior officers, Aiden included, during his first two years at the Bank. Voss had been the one who'd first explained the deeper mechanics of credit structuring to him, the one who'd praised his meticulous attention to detail, the one whose approval Aiden had, for a brief and formative period of his early career, actively sought before he'd learned enough to recognize how much of what Voss taught him existed to serve the system rather than the people trapped within it. He remembered, with sudden and uncomfortable clarity, a specific afternoon when Voss had taken him aside after a difficult case, telling him that the kindest thing a good officer could do was follow procedure precisely, that mercy dispensed unevenly was crueler than none at all. He'd believed that once. It had taken years of watching the human cost of that "procedure" to understand how convenient a philosophy it had been for the people who benefited most from it.
He needed more before bringing this to Morgana — not because he doubted the discovery, but because a name alone wasn't enough. He spent the next several hours quietly pulling whatever fragmentary records still existed on Voss's decade-old departure, cross-referencing dates, searching for any trace of where the man might have gone, what he might be doing now, why his signature would still be appearing on documents years after his supposed retirement.
By the time evening approached, Aiden had assembled enough to feel confident bringing the discovery forward, though the shape of what he'd found left him with more unease than satisfaction. He drafted a brief message to Morgana, his fingers hesitating over the words before finally settling on something simple: "Found the name. Meet tonight."
Across the city, in the garage's back workshop, Morgana's communicator buzzed with the message, and she felt a strange mixture of relief and dread settle over her in equal measure — relief that they finally had a concrete thread to pull, dread at what that thread might unravel once they finally reached its end. Two fronts pressing in at once, she thought — the crown from one direction, the conspiracy from another, both converging toward deadlines and discoveries she wasn't sure she was fully prepared to face.
She typed back a brief confirmation, then sat for a moment longer, staring at the screen, wondering which of the two closing gates would ultimately demand her attention first, and whether she'd have any real choice in the matter when the moment finally came.
You've reached the end of this chapter