Ash sits back in his chair. He gives the other patrons a quick glance, and I can tell by his face that he doesn’t find anything out of the ordinary. “The way those codes work is that you only see the latest correspondence but could have missed a long conversation that came before it. It can be hard to interpret out of context.”

I frown at him. “Okay, now you’re really making me nervous. You never try to qualify things.”

He hesitates, not trying to deny it. A waiter brings our food and drinks, setting them down in front of us.

When we’re alone again, Ash sips his coffee and studies me. Whatever he sees in my expression must tell him that I’m not going to let this go.

He leans forward with a sigh. “The message said Harry’s dead and there will be retaliation.”

Instead of me grappling to process some big reveal, my nervousness shifts to confusion. That’s the message he was resisting sharing with me? “Who’s Harry?”

Ash pushes his hair back even though it’s perfectly in place and gives the other patrons a scan. “Brendan’s cousin. Your cousin. Not a first cousin, but a second or possibly a third. He was one of Jag’s favorites. Students at the Academy always joked that Harry was the reason Brendan tried so hard to prove he was good at everything. That he was always worried his grandfather would eventually appoint Harry as head of the Family instead of him,” he says, keeping his voice down and his body language casual.

I frown, knowing there is a dot I should have connected somewhere but haven’t; it’s clawing at the edge of my awareness.

Ash rubs the back of his neck. “I didn’t recognize him in the woods. It was too dark and the one time I met him was long ago and he didn’t have that beard then,” he says, and the realization hits me like a slap.

I stare at him, unmoving.

“At first I thought the message must be wrong,” Ash continues, “that it couldn’t be Harry, because Jag wouldn’t send him to America to just sit and wait…but then there was that expensive jet that pointed to an important Family member. And it’s always possible that if Jag knows about you, he might assume you would go back to Pembrook and therefore prioritized that mission.”

“Oh god, Ash,” I say, my voice losing its volume and catching in my throat. “You’re saying…I killed my cousin?” I try to swallow the nauseated feeling in my stomach as the image of his limp body and the pool of blood flashes through my mind.

“You survived an attack, November, nothing more,” Ash says, and his voice is insistent, like there is no other way to see it.