Aria's POV
I didn't go to sleep that night.
I sat in the war room with the anonymous message on my phone and thought about Serena Vale and her perfectly calibrated hallway speech and the way she had looked at Lucian when she thought I wasn't watching, and I thought about the fact that she had come to us with Viktor's western intelligence three weeks after apparently meeting with one of Viktor's representatives.
The intelligence could still be real. People played both sides all the time, gathering information from one direction and selling it to another.
It didn't automatically make her a plant, but it made her something other than what she'd presented herself as, and in the current environment something other than what she'd presented herself as was enough to be dangerous.
At three in the morning Lucian found me there.
"You didn't come back to bed," he said.
"No." I showed him the message.
