Cao vanished three days before Jian could move against him.
Not fled — vanished, the way a man vanishes when he's had help doing it, his chambers found stripped bare overnight, guards who should have noticed his departure claiming, with genuine confusion, that they'd seen nothing at all. Jian's fury at the news was quiet and controlled and, somehow, more unsettling than shouting would have been.
He'd spent the previous evening drafting the exact plan for Cao's capture with Lei — timing, positioning, which guards could be trusted with something this sensitive — and Yuan had watched the two of them work through it with a kind of grim efficiency that reminded him, uncomfortably, of exactly how much responsibility both brothers had been raised to carry since childhood. It had felt, that evening, like they were finally getting ahead of something that had been running loose for weeks. The morning's news undid all of it in a single sentence.
