Page 75 of The Robin on the Oak Throne

“I’ll keep looking.” He removed his gloves and tossed them onto the desk. “If I’ve learned anything in my pursuit of knowledge, it’s that everything will out if given enough time.”

“Ah, the thing we are short on.”

The corner of his mouth lifted in the hint of a smile. “We’ll get as much as we can and make contingencies for everything else.” His eyes moved to her body, running over where her hip leaned against his desk. She tilted toward him like a flower toward the sun. “I spoke to Edgar last night after you retired about the incident with your parents.”

Kierse stilled. “What did he say?”

“He showed me the memory where he discovered the scene. There were three bodies, including a young girl.”

“What?” she asked. “But that doesn’t make any sense.”

“I’m aware.”

“And you believe him? He couldn’t have altered his memory? Maybe someone else did?”

“There weren’t any indicators of tampering, and I trust him with my life.”

“So…they killed the wrong girl?”

“Or a body was planted on the scene. Or it was an illusion.”

Kierse furrowed her brow. “I don’t know what to make of any of that.”

“We need more information,” he agreed. “We’ll figure it out, okay?”

She nodded. Her mind was swimming with the information.

“Was there a reason that you came to find me?”

Kierse pulled herself out of her thoughts and met his gaze. “Checking to see if you’re actually going to include me in your business.”

He spread his arms wide. “I’m a man of my word.”

She choked on a laugh. “We’ll see.”

“And speaking of that,” he said, picking up his bourbon and swirling it, “I reached out to the Covenant to see Dr. Mafi.”

Kierse’s eyes widened. “I thought we were going to do memory work together here?”

“We are,” he said smoothly. “But I want to exhaust every avenue.”

“Are you saying your knowledge is limited?”

He smirked. “No. We assume that because the spell broke, it triggered your memories. That it is simply a magical problem.”

“You don’t think it is?”

“That’s what I want to find out,” he said, taking a sip. “Memory isn’t just magic. Yes, the spell likely damaged something. But then I started thinking about that damage and how it could also be physical or mental.” His tone softened as he added, “You were very young and encountered a lot of trauma.”

“Oh,” she said as she realized what he meant. “You think that there’s something wrong with my brain.”

His gaze was unguarded when he said, “I think we don’t know if your brain was injured. After all, you told me yourself that you were thrown off of a building to ‘cure’ your fear of heights.”

Kierse winced at the memory of Jason. “Yes, but…”

“So wouldn’t it be better to know? It might be some form of traumatic brain injury, or repression, or just good old fashioned Monster War PTSD. The fact of the matter is that we don’t know, and I don’t like not knowing things.”

“Okay,” she said slowly.

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