Cassian did not let the pruning list sit on the table long enough to cool.
The name at the bottom of the page had changed the work in the hall from patient dismantling into something harder and far more direct. Ronan Vale was no longer a shadow at the edge of reserve books and clipped road marks. He was a man with a list in his own hand, a man already reducing Rowan's world around her while trying to preserve only what still reached close enough to Sable and the house to matter. The long quarry house was the next place that line touched earth. If Grimridge waited until morning, the books would be gone, the rooms emptied, and the men keeping his structure clean would have time to fold themselves into the road the same way every other layer had tried to do once the house came too near.
Sable saw that in Cassian before he spoke.
