The word "really" hung in the morning air like smoke.
Who are you really.
Twenty-two years. This man had spent twenty-two years constructing something so elaborate it had survived the death of one prince's ambition and transferred seamlessly to the next. He had mapped family names across generations, bent the Imperial Historian's office to his purpose, and built a network so carefully invisible that even Lord Baek — who had been watching for years — couldn't name him until we handed him the proof ourselves.
And now he was standing at the end of a lane in the eastern district with four guards and an unfinished question, and the decree was somewhere between here and the Ministry gates, and Kaien was a very controlled warmth at my left side, and I was deciding how much of the truth to give a man who had spent twenty-two years trying to erase me.
So I gave him something true.
"Someone difficult to get rid of," I said.
