Lyra was already at the corner table when Seb arrived, two drinks on the table, her hands wrapped around hers like she had been there long enough for it to cool slightly.
She looked up when he sat down and her expression had none of the usual warmth in it, not cold, just serious in the way of someone carrying something they had been waiting to put down.
"Tell me," Seb said.
She looked at him for a moment. "I want you to hear the full thing before you react."
"That's not a reassuring opening."
"I know." She turned her cup in her hands. "The informant has been feeding Victor information for about eight months. Specific things, your family background, your bloodline, your arrival date, your timetable once you got here." She paused. "The kind of information that only comes from someone who knew about you before you arrived and has been close to you since."
Seb held her gaze. "Who?"
Lyra looked at him steadily.
"Ezra," she said.
The cafe kept going around them, people talking and cups being set down and the ordinary noise of a Monday afternoon, completely indifferent to the word that had just landed between them.
Seb didn't say anything for a moment.
He thought about the tell. Both hands deep in the pockets. The guilty weight in his brother's eyes on the first night. The careful answers and the please and the four years of something that had been held too tightly for too long.
"Tell me the full thing," he said. His voice came out even.
"Victor approached him about a year ago," Lyra said. "He offered Ezra something he had been looking for a long time. The full history of your family. Mara's story, her name, what happened to her, the council records." She held his gaze. "Ezra had been searching for that for years and someone was holding it out to him."
"So he said yes," Seb said.
"He said yes." She paused. "In the beginning he thought he was just confirming things Victor already knew. General information about your bloodline. Nothing that felt like a weapon." A pause. "But six months ago when Victor started asking specific questions about you, about your ability, about when you would arrive, Ezra understood what he had walked into."
"And he kept going," Seb said.
"He kept going but he started pulling back. Giving Victor minimum information, just enough to keep the arrangement alive while he tried to figure out how to get out of it without making things worse." She looked at him carefully. "The reason he pushed for your scholarship, the reason he worked so hard to get you here specifically, was because he knew Caspian and Damon were at Crestwood and he thought if he could get you close to people who could protect you he could contain the damage he had helped create."
"While still feeding Victor information," Seb said.
"Yes."
The word sat between them.
Seb looked at the table for a moment and then at the window where the afternoon was grey and ordinary outside and then back at Lyra. "How did you find out?"
"I have contacts in certain information networks that track Victor's communications," she said. "Your brother's name appeared three days ago in a trail I had been following for two months." She held his gaze. "I'm sorry Seb. I know what he is to you."
"He's my brother," Seb said.
"I know."
"He's been my brother for nineteen years."
"I know that too."
Seb was quiet for a moment, feeling the full weight of it, not pushing it away or compacting it but actually letting it sit in him the way Marcus had told him to let things sit. The love of it and the betrayal of it and the complicated truth that both were completely real and neither cancelled the other.
"Does Damon know?" he said.
"Not yet."
"He needs to know."
"Yes," Lyra said. "He does."
"Tonight," Seb said. "I'll tell him tonight." He looked at her. "And Caspian."
Lyra nodded.
"Together," Seb said. "Both of them at the same time. Same room. I'm not carrying this between them separately."
She looked at him with something real in her expression. "You're sure?"
"I'm sure." He picked up his drink and held it without drinking it. "One more thing. Victor's plan. The full version. What is he actually trying to do with me?"
Lyra was quiet for a moment. "You know about the two directions of Prime ability."
"Calm and conflict."
"Victor doesn't want either of those," she said. "What Victor wants is control. A Prime who is directed by someone else becomes the most powerful political tool in the history of pack governance. Not a weapon exactly." She looked at him carefully. "More like a key. One that opens every door."
"And he needs me compliant," Seb said.
"Or he needs to find a way to separate the ability from the person carrying it." She held his gaze. "He's been researching that second option for two centuries. We don't know how close he is."
Seb sat with that.
A key. Two hundred years of planning and tracking a bloodline and arranging a scholarship and the goal was a key to every door in the pack world. He thought about Mara at forty three years old and the order that had described her like a resource and felt something move in him that was not quite anger but was in the same direction.
"Lyra," he said.
"Yes."
"His timeline. How long do we have before he decides he's certain enough to move?"
She looked at him honestly. "Not long. The courtyard incident pushed him close. If he sees your ability activate again in a significant way he'll have what he needs." She paused. "Which means Wednesday's training needs to happen somewhere completely private."
"It will," Seb said.
He finished his drink and stood up and picked up his jacket. Looked at her one more time. "Thank you. For finding out and for telling me."
"Always," she said simply.
He walked out of the cafe into the grey Monday afternoon and stood on the path for a moment with his hands in his pockets and thought about his brother sitting across from him at dinner in the first week looking at his food and saying hm in a very specific way and the four years of weight that had been living in his pockets alongside his hands.
Then he pulled out his phone.
He opened Damon's contact first.
I need you and Caspian in the same room tonight. Lyra's building, room 214, nine o'clock. It's important.
Damon's reply came in thirty seconds.
I'll be there.
He opened Caspian next and sent the same message.
Caspian's reply took under a minute.
Understood.
He put the phone away.
He had five hours before nine o'clock and he was going to spend them sitting with what he knew and feeling the full weight of it properly before he walked into that room and changed several things that couldn't be unchanged after.
He walked back toward Greystone Hall through the grey afternoon and let himself feel all of it, the anger and the grief and the love underneath both of them that was still completely real regardless of what sat on top of it.
All of it.
Every piece.
The way Marcus had told him to.