The memory cut before Fin could see what happened next. The vision ended the way a door closes mid-sentence, abrupt, deliberate, leaving the rest of the story locked behind it.
He had known Garrett Darkhowler for years. Fought beside him. Trusted him with his back in situations where trusting the wrong man meant dying face-down in someone else's war. Garrett was a good man. Steady. Honest. The kind of honest that made other men uncomfortable because it left no room for the bullshit they hid behind.
But this was something else.
There was a gap between Garrett surviving the vampires and Garrett standing in Darkhowler today, and the gap was shaped like a story nobody was allowed to tell. Fin had heard the edges of it over the years, fragments that stopped mid-word, sentences that rerouted themselves before they landed, the particular verbal architecture of a man whose throat closed around classified syllables like a blood oath.
